Ethnic studies classrooms as contradictory spaces: Implications for ethnic studies teacher preparation

Ethnic studies in the United States represents a contradictory space within which two hegemonic discourses (identitarian multiculturalism and disciplinary colonization) and a counter-hegemonic one (decolonial epistemologies) condense and enter into debate and struggle. In contrast to other parts of the world, ethnic studies in the United States emerged as a part of the civil rights movement for racialized minorities. In the late 60s and early 70s, a number of student strikes and university occupations were organized by these racialized minorities, leading to the creation of Afro-American, Puerto Rican, Chicano, Asian, and Indigenous studies programs all over the country. This epistemic insurgency was key to the opening of spaces for professors from ethnic/racial groups suffering discrimination and with non-Western epistemologies in areas which were up to that point monopolized by white professors and students and Eurocentric epistemologies which privileged the “ego-politics of knowledge”. But, I am now questioning the appropriateness of creating ethnic studies departments/programs if these will merely be reduced to studying the sociology of race, the anthropology of ethno/racial identities, the history “of” (not “from” or “with”) blacks, the economics of the insertion of indigenous labor, etc. To colonize ethnic studies through the Western disciplines does not constitute an innovation in the field of knowledge. It was already possible to do so through the respective academic disciplines, and it requires neither ethnic studies departments nor programs. It would be a different story if ethnic studies departments or programs proposed to open themselves up to transmodernity, that is, to the epistemic diversality of the world, and redefine themselves as “transmodern decolonial studies,” offering to think “from” and “with” those “others” subalternized and inferiorized by Eurocentered modernity, offering to define their questions, their problems, and their intellectual dilemmas “from” and “with” those same racialized groups. This would give rise to a decolonial methodology very different from the methodology of the social sciences and the humanities (Smith 1999). It would also imply a transmodern dialogue between diverse ethical-epistemic projects and a thematic internal organization within ethnic studies departments/programs, one based on problems (racism, sexism, xenophobia, Christian-centrism, “other” epistemologies, Eurocentrism, etc.) rather than either ethnic/racial identities (Blacks, Indigenous, Asians, etc.) or Western colonial disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history, political science, economics, etc.). Ethnic studies, once redefined as “transmodern decolonial studies,” would make an extremely important contribution not only to academic knowledge, but also to liberation as the project of the (epistemic, social, political, economic, and spiritual) decolonization of those groups oppressed and exploited but the Western, capitalist/patriarchal racism of the modern/colonial world-system