Why Some Knowledge Is Marginalized: The Evolution of Ethnic Studies

November, 1968. San Francisco.

A group of students walks off campus at San Francisco State College... and they do not walk back for five months.

They call themselves the Third World Liberation Front. Black students. Chicano students. Asian American students. Indigenous students, standing together. And they are demanding something that, at the time, sounds almost unthinkable.

They are demanding that their histories be taught.

Not as footnotes. Not as electives. Not as optional units during Heritage Month.

Taught.

They stayed out for one hundred and thirty-four days, the longest student-led strike in U.S. history. Classes were cancelled. Police were called in. Students were arrested and expelled. Faculty got hurt. A university president resigned.

Their list of demands was not abstract. It was specific. Hire faculty of color. Admit more students of color. Fund a school that would teach the histories of the Black, Chicano, Asian American, and Indigenous communities who had been in this country for generations, and who, in 1968, still could not find themselves in a single required course.

And when it finally ended... San Francisco State did something no U.S. university had ever done before.

It opened the first School of Ethnic Studies in the country, what today is known as the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

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That is where this episode begins. But it is not where it ends.

Because the story of ethnic studies is not really a story about curriculum.

It is a story about which human beings a country decides to recognize.

In the last episode, we looked at how institutions decide what counts as legitimate knowledge. The universities. The journals. The review panels. The citation chains. We said that knowledge is not just what is true, it is what institutions certify as true.

Today's episode is the natural next question.

If institutions decide what counts... what happens to the knowledge they do not count?

It does not disappear. It does not stop being real. But it has to fight, sometimes for decades, sometimes for generations, to be treated as knowledge at all.

Ethnic studies is one of the clearest cases of that fight we have.

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Before we go further, I want to say what ethnic studies actually is. Because the phrase has been pulled in so many directions that people now use it to mean whatever they are already afraid of.

Ethnic studies is the academic study of the histories, cultures, literatures, and social movements of communities that have been excluded or marginalized in dominant U.S. narratives. Its original four fields were African American studies, Chicano and Latino studies, Asian American studies, and Native American studies. Today the field includes more, Arab American studies, Pacific Islander studies, ethnic studies focused on migration, on labor, on gender.

What unites these fields is not a political slogan. It is a method.

Ethnic studies asks: whose perspective is this history being told from? Who is centered, and who is in the margins? What does this moment look like if we move the lens?

Here is a small example of what that means in practice.

Most of us were taught the California Gold Rush as a story of westward ambition, prospectors, pioneers, a new state being born. Almost none of us were taught that during those same years, California passed a law that permitted the indenture of Indigenous children... or that Chinese miners were taxed into poverty by a statute designed to force them out... or that the Californios who had lived on the land for generations lost it through courts that refused to recognize their titles.

Same event. Same years. Completely different story when the lens moves.

That is the work.

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Pause here.

Think about your own education.

Before college, how much of the history you learned centered the experiences of people from your own community?

And how much of it placed you, if it placed you at all, as a background character in someone else's story?

Hold that. We are going to come back to it.

After San Francisco State, the movement spread fast.

Within five years, dozens of universities opened ethnic studies programs. Departments were formed. Journals were founded. Scholars who had been told their research was not rigorous enough, because it centered Black communities, or Chicano communities, or tribal histories, suddenly had a home for that work.

But something else happened too.

As the field grew, a quieter pattern began.

Budgets stayed small. Tenure lines stayed rare. Programs were often housed inside other departments rather than as departments of their own. Scholars doing the foundational work were told, decade after decade, that their scholarship was too narrow... too political... or too close to the community to be taken seriously.

The field got in the door. It got access. However, it did not get a seat at the table. That sense of belonging,

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Through the 1980s and 1990s, ethnic studies survived in the spaces it could, small departments, ethnic studies requirements at a handful of universities, a generation of scholars who trained the next generation largely on their own time.

In K-12 classrooms, it was almost entirely absent. A Black history unit in February. A Hispanic heritage week in September. A slide about residential schools that lasted exactly one class period.

That was the curriculum.

And then, in the 2010s, something started to shift.

Research began to show, in large datasets and in controlled studies, that when students took an ethnic studies course, their attendance improved, their GPAs improved, and their graduation rates improved. In one well-known study out of San Francisco Unified, students who took a year of ethnic studies in ninth grade saw attendance rise... GPA rise by more than a full grade point in the subject areas covered... and credit completion rise by more than twenty percent.

That is not a small effect. In education research, that is a very large effect.

So the story looked like it was turning.

And then the backlash arrived.

Starting in the late 2010s and accelerating through the 2020s, a wave of state legislation moved to restrict what teachers could say about race, about history, about the very communities ethnic studies had been built to study.

We will take this up in more detail in a later episode. I raise it here only to make one point.

The research had shown the field worked. The backlash arrived not in spite of that, but because of it.

Marginalized knowledge is rarely attacked when it is ignored. It gets attacked when it starts to move.

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Let me pull back and ask the deeper question, because this is the one this show exists to ask.

Why is it, in 2026, that we are still arguing about whether the histories of tens of millions of people in the United States belong in a classroom?

There is a construct I keep returning to from my own work, the difference between a grand narrative and a mini-narrative.

A grand narrative is the story a dominant group tells about itself and calls history. A mini-narrative is every other story that has been happening at the same time, in the same country, often in the same neighborhood.

For most of the twentieth century, U.S. education ran on a single grand narrative. Pilgrims. Founding fathers. Westward expansion. Two world wars. A civil rights era framed as a completed chapter. And every other community, Black, Indigenous, Chicano, Asian, immigrant, poor, queer, disabled, was either folded into that narrative as a supporting character... or left out entirely.

Ethnic studies is what happens when the supporting characters ask the lens to turn.

And here is the part that keeps surprising people. When the lens turns, students learn more. Not less. More.

Because for students whose communities have been erased from the curriculum, seeing themselves in what they are being taught is not a political preference. It is cognitive. It is the difference between doing the work of learning... and doing the work of learning plus the work of translating yourself into someone else's story.

In my chapter, I call that second thing the misrecognition tax, the extra cognitive labor marginalized students pay, every day, to do school as someone they are not.

Ethnic studies is one of the only interventions in U.S. education that directly refunds that tax.

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And here is the quieter finding that often gets lost. When ethnic studies is well-taught, students from dominant groups benefit too. Their reading of history becomes more accurate. Their ability to reason across perspectives improves. They graduate with a better map of the country they are about to live in.

No one is being subtracted. The picture is being completed.

Let me say this carefully, because the conversation gets distorted here.

Ethnic studies is not a claim that one history is right and another is wrong. It is a claim that any history told from only one angle is incomplete.

It is not a claim that students from dominant groups should be decentered. It is a claim that students from non-dominant groups should be included.

When a course improves attendance, GPA, and graduation all at once, across student groups, that is not ideology. That is evidence.

One thing to try before our next conversation.

Pick any subject you already care about. A field of study. A historical period. A policy debate. Anything.

Now ask yourself: whose mini-narrative is missing from the way I usually think about this?

Not as an exercise in guilt. As an exercise in completeness.

Which brings us to our next episode.

We have talked about what knowledge counts. We have talked about which knowledge is kept out, and which knowledge is finally let in.

But there is one piece of the story we have not touched yet.

Who is standing in front of the class when that knowledge is taught?

In 1968, the students at San Francisco State did not only ask for new subjects. They asked for new teachers.

Next time, on The Cultural Context of Knowledge, integration happened to the students. It did not happen to the teaching profession. And the shadow of that decision is still shaping every classroom in the country.

Until then... thank you for listening.

This transcript comes from the production script. Wording may differ slightly from the episode as aired.