Why Some Knowledge Is Marginalized: The Evolution of Ethnic Studies

Listen to The Cultural Context of Knowledge on one of your favorite podcast players.

Selected passages from the recording.

1. 00:00

   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. And they are demanding that their histories be taught. Not as footnotes. Not as electives. Not as optional units during Heritage Month. Taught.

2. 02:30

   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. 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 camera?

3. 04:20

   Within five years of San Francisco State, dozens of universities opened ethnic studies programs. Departments were formed. Journals were founded. The field got in the door. It got access. However, it did not get a seat at the table.

4. 06:00

   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.

5. 07:00

   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.

6. 09:10

   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.

7. 11:00

   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?

Full transcripts are coming. For now, these are the excerpts the host has approved for publication.