Update: This open letter was originally written and submitted as a public comment in response to the initial draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, a document which was written by a group of ethnic studies scholars and K-12 practitioners familiar with the field and submitted to the California Department of Education. That draft included lesson plans on a range of topics within Arab American studies, and located them in the Asian American studies section. Subsequent drafts of the curriculum have significantly altered the original framing and watered it down. All initial signatories to this letter reference the first draft of the ESMC, which upheld the anti-racist,decolonial, and liberatory tenets of Ethnic Studies. We now have gathered additional signatures, all of whom continue to urge the CDDE to retain Arab American Studies as an exemplary dimension of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, along with all other critical components of the
draft.
July 2020
The cascading crisis laid bare by Covid-19 reveals vulnerabilities among and between
communities that are deeply entangled, differentially distributed, and stretched across
geographical borders. These vulnerabilities have been produced and sustained by deep social inequalities sedimented over many decades. As the Arab American Studies Association has recently underscored, this moment reveals how the insidious effects of racialization based on militarized engagement with countries of origin, fears of the ‘enemy within,’ and logics of contagion continue to manifest in ways that can lead to intensified racial animus, as witnessed in the overt anti-Asian racism surrounding the pandemic.
In the face of this crisis, we are grateful to the California Department of Education (CDE) for its strong Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum draft, and its ongoing commitment to offer
coursework in Ethnic Studies for California’s students. In doing so, the CDE recognizes the enduring significance of race in American life, the ethical grounds of multi-directional
approaches to history, the necessity of offering curricula relevant to communities of color, and the critical importance of studying the ways ordinary people work towards equity, dignity, and justice. In expanding access to the critical frameworks Ethnic Studies offers in this time of great uncertainty, the CDE holds space for students to engage in pedagogies oriented towards building more just worlds and better possible futures.
However, we are troubled by efforts to exclude Arab American studies from the final Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. The interdisciplinary field of Arab American Studies is a vibrant and long-standing dimension of Ethnic Studies, with deep and lasting connections to Asian American Studies. In drafting a rich and rigorous model for Arab American Studies in California’s high schools, the CDE’s curriculum writers have powerfully recognized this reality. They build on decades of research and teaching that place Arab American lives, cultures, and histories at the center of inquiries into the racialized operations of gender, sexuality, nationalism, immigration, war, political economy, etc. The Association of Asian American Studies and the Arab American Studies Association have both applauded this vital work, and see it as a crucial dimension of any Asian American Studies curriculum. We concur.
From the ferment of 1960s social movements against warfare, U.S. imperialism, and racism and towards a substantive multiracial democracy–what the late Black Studies scholar Manning Marable called the “second reconstruction”–scholars affiliated with the Association of Arab American University Graduates situated knowledges about the variety of Arab American life in relation to histories of immigration, labor, and war in Asia. As the 1970s and 1980s saw the widespread normalization of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racisms in popular media and political culture scholars, including Jack Shaheen and Edward Said, documented orientalism’s arcs of power and authority that gave such baleful discourse traction. In the 1990s, Arab American feminist scholars challenged the imperial narratives of rescue and reform marshaled to legitimate the first Gulf War and the decimating sanctions regime imposed on Iraq, while connecting to domestic struggles against expansive forms of policing, incarceration, and the thinning of social programs. Since September 11, 2001, scholars in the field have reckoned with the expansive targeting of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) Americans — i.e.,
those often labeled as Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern Americans — as a pretext for wider regimes of surveillance, and the shrinkage of democratic governance disproportionately affecting all communities of color. In recent years, the logics of exclusion and surveillance that buttressed the earliest immigration restrictions (from China and Japan, and then the whole “Asiatic Barred Zone,”) have again been given life through the national security rationale of the Trump administration’s policy banning entry from Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Libya.
The racialization of Arab, Muslim, and SWANA-affiliated Americans in the US thus follows a linked trajectory with the field of Asian American studies, particularly in terms of the role of US military action on the Asian continent, as well as the role that orientalism has played in exclusionary policies toward Asian Americans and SWANA Americans. These links between Arab American and Asian American studies are institutionally reflected in a number of ways including, but not limited to, the West Asian section of the Association for Asian American Studies, the fact that the director of the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC holds an appointment in the Global Asian Studies Program, and that a recent special issue of the Amerasia journal focused specifically on Arab American studies.
The above summary shorthands the dense texture within which Arab American studies is
woven. It refutes the specious claim that the study of Arab American histories, communities, forms of expressive culture, and the particular conjunctions of power and difference that shape them are somehow external or ancillary to Ethnic Studies. Arab American studies offers students critical insight into the long arcs of U.S. immigration, nationalism, religious belonging, and refugeehood, and the communities of care, sustenance, and political engagement that emerge from these conditions.
Finally, we fear the possible exclusion of Arab American studies from the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is due to its consideration of Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian Americans as topics worthy of high school study. No genealogy of the field is complete without recognizing the importance of Palestine to its formation. Palestine crystallizes for students questions of territory, memory, nationalism, settler colonialism, and dispossession; questions of race, class, gender, and sexuality; questions of solidarity, agency, interconnection, and transnationalism; questions of equity, dignity, and justice. Were the CDE to adopt the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum by affirmatively excluding Arab American studies on these grounds, it would reproduce and exacerbate precisely the social problems the curriculum purportedly sets out to address.
We urge the California Department of Education to retain Arab American Studies as an
exemplary dimension of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, along with all other critical components of the draft.
Signed by,
Keith P. Feldman
Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Secretary, Arab American Studies Association
Amira Jarmakani
Professor, San Diego State University
President, Arab American Studies Association
Sally Howell
Director, Center for Arab American Studies
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Angela Y. Davis
Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness
University of California, Santa Cruz
Roderick A. Ferguson
Professor
Yale University
Robin D. G. Kelley
Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History
University of California, Los Angeles
Tiffany Lethabo King
Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies
Georgia State University
Alex Lubin
Professor, African American Studies
The Pennsylvania State University
Fred Moten
Professor
New York University
Nadine Naber
Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and Global Asian Studies
University of Illinois, Chicago
Evelyn Alsultany
Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California
Sarah Gualtieri
Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity; History and Middle East Studies
University of Southern California
Carol W.N. Fadda
Associate Professor of English
Syracuse University
Nitasha Sharma
Associate Professor, African American Studies, Asian American Studies
Northwestern University
Rabab Abdulhadi
Professor, Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas
San Francisco State University
Christine Hong
Associate Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz
Matthew Frye Jacobson
William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History
Yale University
Scott Kurashige
Author/Scholar of Race and Ethnicity
Melani McAlister
Professor, American Studies and International Affairs
The George Washington University
Jodi Melamed
Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies
Marquette University
David Palumbo-Liu
Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor
Stanford University
Dylan Rodríguez
Professor, Media and Cultural Studies
University of California, Riverside
Layla Azmi Goushey
Professor of English
Saint Louis Community College
Mejdulene Shomali
Assistant Professor
University of Maryland – Baltimore County
Matthew Stiffler
Research and Content Manager
Arab American National Museum
Ghassan Abou-Zeineddine
Assistant Professor of English
Department of Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Sophia Armen
Ethnic Studies, PhD Candidate
University of California, San Diego
Louise Cainkar
Associate Professor
Marquette University
Emily Regan Wills
Associate Professor, School of Political Studies
University of Ottawa
Edward E. Curtis IV
Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts & Professor of Religious Studies
Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI
Danielle Haque
Associate Professor of English
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Dr. Jacob Rama Berman
Associate Professor of English
Louisiana State University
Charlotte Karem Albrecht
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan — Ann Arbor
Pauline Homsi Vinson
Adjunct Faculty in English
Diablo Valley College
Nadia N. Abuelezam, ScD
Assistant Professor, Connell School of Nursing
Boston College
Sunaina Maira
Professor, Asian American Studies
UC Davis
Dr. Stanley Thangaraj
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and International Studies
City College of New York
Suad Joseph
Distinguished Research Professor
University of California, Davis
Waleed F. Mahdi
Assistant Professor, US-Arab Cultural Politics
University of Oklahoma
Sharon Luk
Associate Professor
University of Oregon
Nadia Y. Kim
Professor, Sociology
Loyola Marymount University
Lucy El-Sherif
PhD candidate, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
Roberto D. Hernandez
Chair-Elect of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS)
Robert Warrior (he, him)
Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture
University of Kansas
Department of American Studies
Department of English
The following are signatures added in response to the November draft of the ESMC:
Hatem N. Akil
Campus President
Broward Center of Turkey
Sondra Hale
Professor Emerita, Anthropology and Gender Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Stacy D Fahrenthold
Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Davis
Therí Alyce Pickens
Professor, English; Chair, Africana
Bates College
Kenneth Habib
Professor, Ethnomusicology
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Jess Bier
Assistant Professor of Urban Sociology
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Justin Leroy
Assistant Professor of History
University of California, Davis
Joshua Donovan
Core Preceptor and PhD candidate
Columbia University
Maya Mikdashi
Assistant Professor
Rutgers University
Benjamin Schreier
Professor of English and Jewish Studies
Pennsylvania State University
Joel Berkowitz
Professor of Foreign Languages & Literature
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Rosina Hassoun
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Dept. of Sociology
Saginaw Valley State University
Doris Bittar
Adjunct Professor, School of Fine Arts
California State University, San Marcos
Robin Reich
PhD Candidate
Columbia University
William Lafi Youmans
Associate Professor, School of Media and Public Affairs
George Washington University
Richard M. Breaux
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic & Racial Studies
University of Wisconsin – La Crosse; Midwest Mahjar
Brianna Nofil
Assistant Professor of History
College of William & Mary
Karam Dana
Associate Professor
University of Washington Bothell
Helen Hatab Samhan
Former Director
Arab American Institute Foundation
Alex Jreisat
PhD Student, Anthropology and History
University of Michigan
Jennifer Mogannam
Visiting Fellow
University of California, Davis
Sirene Harb
Senior Lecturer
American University of Beirut
Asad AbuKhalil
Professor, Politics
California State University, Stanislaus
Ali Saleh
Professor, Telecommunications
De Maisonneuve College
Aziz Shaibani
President
Arab American Educational Foundation
Nate George
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University
Leena Ali
Grad student
San Diego State University
Umayyah Cable
Assistant Professor of American Culture and Film, Television, & Media
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Lisa Ang
Assistant Professor
Diablo Valley College
