← Introduction to Ethnic Studies outline

Week 1 · Chapter

Chapter 1 — What Ethnic Studies Is

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Free sample edition

The module's primary reading · ~45–55 minutes · Objective 1 · Read it first this week, before the lecture and the slide deck.

In plain language

This week is about a field of study and the habits it asks you to build. Ethnic studies looks at how ideas about race and ethnicity were made, how people have lived with them, and how people have pushed back. It began with student strikes in 1968 and 1969, when students demanded to study their own communities' histories. Its method is to ask the four questions of any rule or record: who made it, whom it served, whom it affected, and how the people affected answered. You will also meet positionality — the way your own background shapes what you notice — and a small archive — a collection of first-person accounts this course returns to all term.

Why you already care about this

Think about the last form that asked you to "check all that apply." Someone decided what the boxes would say. Someone decided how many there would be, and what would happen to your answer after you clicked. You filled it in, but you did not write it. That small moment holds a big question: who gets to name a group, and what follows from the name?

Or think about a story your family tells about moving, maybe from one town to another, or one country to another. Your aunt tells it one way. Your grandfather tells it another way. A cousin who was a baby at the time tells it the way she heard it. None of them is lying. Each one noticed different things, and each one is speaking from a different place in the family.

Ethnic studies takes those two everyday experiences, the form someone else designed and the story everyone tells differently, and makes them into a way of studying the United States. In 1968, students at San Francisco State walked out of class to demand that kind of study. This chapter explains what they won, what the field asks, and how you will practice it.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to: define ethnic studies and tell it apart from a history survey, a sociology course, the study of one group, and a course about blame; place the field's origins in the 1968–1969 student strikes; name the four core fields; ask the four questions of a rule or record and walk a reading to one plain sentence; name your own positionality without treating it as a disqualifying bias; and describe the course's oral-history archive by its excerpts, its intake rules, and its consent script.

Hook to keep: every record was made by someone, for someone, about someone.

Where we are

This week: what ethnic studies is, where it came from, the four core fields, the questions and methods the field uses, positionality, and the archive you will read all term.
How they connect: this chapter is the foundation; every later week uses the four questions, the reading walk, and the archive introduced here.
Where we're going next: Week 2, Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization, defines the course's core terms, so this week names them without defining them.

Week 1 has no earlier weeks behind it. If you have never taken a course like this, you are in the right place. Nothing here assumes background knowledge. It does assume you are willing to notice how a rule was made and who it touched, and you have been doing that since your first school dress code.

1. Define ethnic studies: how race and ethnicity are made, lived, and contested

Start with a school cafeteria. Every table is a small community, and every school has rules about who sits where, written or unwritten. A historian would ask when those rules began. A lawyer would ask whether any of them were written into policy. A sociologist would ask what patterns show up across many schools. A novelist would ask what it felt like to sit at one table and not another. And the students themselves would have their own account. Put all five together and you are close to how ethnic studies works.

Here is the definition this course uses:

Ethnic studies is the interdisciplinary study of how race and ethnicity have been made, lived, and contested in the United States. It draws on history, law, sociology, literature, and the accounts of communities themselves.

Three words in that definition do a lot of work. Interdisciplinary means drawing on several fields at once rather than on one field's methods alone. Made means that the categories people use, and the laws built on them, were created by people at particular times. Contested means that the people affected did not stay silent; they argued, organized, sued, wrote, and remembered.

This course is also comparative. You will study several groups and the connections among them, not one group at a time in isolation. That makes it different from courses you may have taken:

It is not a history survey. A survey moves through the past in order. This course reads history, law, and community voices together, and it compares.
It is not a sociology course. Sociology contributes evidence here, but so do court decisions, poems, and interviews.
It is not the study of one group. The course has four core fields and keeps them in conversation.
It is not a course about blame. It studies how categories and inequalities were made and how people answered them. The aim is understanding, not a verdict on anyone sitting in the room.

Worked example — which fields would you need? Take one everyday case: a neighborhood's main street was renamed decades ago, and longtime residents still use the old name. Sort the evidence by field.

History asks when the street was renamed and what the old name honored.
Law asks what city ordinance made the change and who voted on it.
Sociology asks which residents use the old name and which use the new one.
Literature asks how a local poem or memoir describes the street.
Community voices ask the residents themselves what each name means to them.

Five kinds of evidence, one street. A course that used only the first would tell you when; a course that used all five tells you what the change meant and to whom. That is what interdisciplinary means in practice.

Misconception check. Students often think ethnic studies is the study of one group, or a course whose job is to assign blame. Both are tempting, because a single group's history is what many people first picture, and because the field does not soften hard history. But the field is comparative by design: it studies four core fields and the connections among them. And it studies how categories and inequalities were made and answered, which is a question about history and law, not about the guilt of anyone alive.

Carry-line: the field compares groups; it does not convict people.

2. Place the origins: the 1968–1969 student strikes

Imagine your campus offered no class on your family's history, your neighborhood's history, or the history of anyone who looked like you. Now imagine you and your friends decided to change that, and the only way you could see to do it was to stop going to class until the school listened. That is roughly where the field begins.

Worked example — placing the strikes in time. Read the dated record in order, one step at a time.

In November 1968 a student strike began at San Francisco State. The Black Student Union led it, together with a coalition of student groups called the Third World Liberation Front.
The strikers demanded four departments within a College of Ethnic Studies: American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Black Studies, and La Raza Studies.
In 1969 the College of Ethnic Studies was established there. The university describes it as the country's first.
Also in 1969, a Third World Liberation Front strike at Berkeley, co-led by the Asian American Political Alliance, pressed for ethnic studies there.

Read in one plain sentence: the field did not appear by itself; students from several groups organized together, from November 1968 into the spring of 1969, and won a college built around four departments.

Notice one word in step 1: coalition. The Third World Liberation Front joined students from different groups into one effort. That cross-group shape is still the field's shape, and Section 3 picks it up.

A caveat on dates. University pages give the strike's length differently, so this course says it in words, from November 1968 into the spring of 1969, and never asks you to memorize a number of days or months. The years are firm: the strike began in 1968, and the College was established in 1969.

In practice (your tools). Open a notebook or any free timeline tool and draw one line. Mark 1968 at the left and 1969 at the right. Write "strike begins at San Francisco State (Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front)" under 1968. Write "College of Ethnic Studies established" and "Berkeley strike, co-led by the Asian American Political Alliance" under 1969. Leave room on both sides; every later week adds dates to this line.

Misconception check. Students often think ethnic studies is a recent invention with no history of its own. That is tempting, because many people first hear the name in current news. But the field has a dated origin in the student strikes of 1968 and 1969, and the College it produced has existed since 1969. The cure is the timeline: the field's dated record begins in 1968, and its first college dates from 1969.

3. Map the four core fields: compare and connect

Picture a library with four reading rooms off one main hall. Each room has its own shelves, and you could spend a whole visit in one. But the most useful moments happen in the hall, when you carry a book from one room into another and notice that the two tell parts of the same story.

The course has four rooms. These are its four core fields:

Native American and Indigenous studies
African American studies
Chicana/o and Latina/o studies
Asian American and Pacific Islander studies

Arab American and Middle Eastern and North African experiences come later, in Week 13, the week on immigration and citizenship across groups.

Worked example — matching the demands to the fields. The strikers' four departments line up with the course's four core fields, one to one.

American Indian Studies matches Native American and Indigenous studies.
Black Studies matches African American studies.
La Raza Studies matches Chicana/o and Latina/o studies.
Asian American Studies matches Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.

Four departments, four fields: the course's map still follows the strikers' outline, with names that have grown to include more communities.

Why put comparison at the center? Because one law or one movement often looks different, and teaches more, when you set two groups' experiences side by side. You saw a first case in Section 2: the strike was a coalition, and the Berkeley strike was co-led by a different group. A comparison is how you notice that a shared effort joined people with different histories.

A note on names. Groups in this course are named the way their members most commonly name themselves, and where people use different terms, the materials say who uses which. You will see that rule at work in later weeks. For now, notice that "Chicana/o and Latina/o" and "Native American and Indigenous" already carry more than one name.

Misconception check. Students often think the four fields are four separate subjects, so a question belongs to one field only. That is tempting, because the strikers asked for separate departments. But the departments were won by a coalition, and the course is built to move between rooms. The cure is to ask, for any topic, "what would a second group's experience add?"

4. Ask the four questions: methods and the reading walk

Think of the rules posted in a workplace break room: no phones on the floor, breaks at set times, a language rule, a dress code. You could read them as plain facts. Or you could ask who wrote them, whom they help, whom they burden, and what the workers said about them. The second way of reading is the habit this section builds.

The four questions the field asks of any category, law, or record are these:

Who made it?
Whom did it serve?
Whom did it affect?
How did the people affected answer?

The field uses three methods to answer them: reading the public record (laws, court decisions, government reports), listening to community accounts (interviews, memoirs, oral histories), and comparing across groups.

Every reading in this course then walks the same order. This course calls it the reading walk: what the record or account says, who made it, whom it affected, what it leaves out, and what a comparison with another group adds. A reading ends in one plain sentence. A reading without evidence is an opinion; evidence without a reading is unfinished.

Worked example — the four questions on an archive rule. The course archive (Section 6) has a rule: "Copies used in the course identify narrators by role and decade only." Walk it.

What it says: a narrator appears as a role and a decade, such as "a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s", never by name.
Who made it: the archive.
Whom it served: the narrators, whose identities it protects, and readers, who still learn each narrator's role and decade.
Whom it affected: narrators, students, and researchers.
How the people affected answered: through another rule, which lets each narrator choose topics and restrict or withdraw any part of an interview.
What it leaves out: a narrator's name, address, and any other identifying detail.

The reading in one plain sentence: the rule trades a reader's wish to know exactly who is speaking for the narrator's safety, so you read each excerpt by role, decade, and the documented law or event it belongs to.

Misconception check. Students often think "reading a record" means summarizing what it says. That is tempting, because summary is what most classes ask for. But a summary covers only the first step of the reading walk. The cure is to keep going: name who made it, whom it affected, and what it leaves out, and then say the reading in one sentence.

5. Name your positionality: everyone reads from somewhere

Two people watch the same high school basketball game. One played on the team ten years ago; one is a parent of the newest player. After the game, ask each what happened. The former player talks about a defensive switch in the third quarter. The parent talks about how little the new player got to play. Both are right, and neither saw everything.

Positionality is the way your own background shapes what you notice, ask, and miss when you read evidence. Background here means things like where you grew up, the languages you speak, and your family's history. Every reader has a position. Naming yours is part of reading fairly.

Worked example — two readers of one rule. Take the archive rule from Section 4 again: narrators appear by role and decade only.

Reader one's family has always kept its papers private. She notices first that the rule protects narrators.
Reader two traces family trees as a hobby. He notices first that the names are missing, and wonders how anyone could follow up.
Each reading is partial. Each reader's position explains what they noticed first.
Put the two readings together and you have a fuller one: the rule protects narrators, and it costs researchers a way to follow up.

Here is a fresh scenario to try the same move. A school building is named after a person. Who chose the name, and when? A student whose grandparents attended the school might read the name as a family memory. A student whose family arrived last year might read it as a stranger's name on a wall. Neither reading is wrong. Each one is incomplete without the other, and without the record of who chose the name.

Pause and reflect. Choose one of these two prompts, and give it about five minutes of thought or a few sentences in your notebook.

(a) Describe one thing your own background helps you notice quickly in a family story, a school rule, or a neighborhood's history.
(b) Describe one thing your own background might make you miss in a family story, a school rule, or a neighborhood's history, and who might notice it instead.

Misconception check. Students often think positionality is a bias that disqualifies a reader, so only someone "neutral" should read a record. That is tempting, because "bias" sounds like a flaw to remove. But no reader stands nowhere. Positionality is something every reader has and names, and naming it is how you check what your reading might be missing.

A limitation worth saying out loud: naming your position does not make a reading correct. It tells you where to look for what you missed. The record still has to be checked.

6. Meet the archive: seven excerpts, five rules, one consent script

Most public libraries keep more than books. Some keep recordings of people from the neighborhood describing their own lives: work, school, moving, food, a protest they joined. This course has one of those collections, and you will read from it nearly every week.

The community oral-history archive is this course's running collection. It is illustrative: written for this course, held by an unnamed public library, and describing no real person, library, or place. No excerpt in it is a real person's words. It holds seven excerpts, E1 to E7, and each narrator is identified by role and decade, never by name.

The table lists the seven excerpts the way the archive catalogs them.

The archive's seven illustrative excerpts, by narrator's role and decade and by the decade each interview was recorded
Excerpt	Narrator's role and decade	Interviewed in
E1	a farmworker who came on a bracero contract in the 1950s	the 2000s
E2	a woman whose family moved north in the Great Migration in the 1940s	the 1990s
E3	a nurse who arrived in the early 1970s	the 2010s
E4	a man whose family moved to a city under the federal relocation program in the late 1950s	the 2000s
E5	a woman who resettled as a refugee in the early 1980s	the 2010s
E6	a student who joined a high-school walkout in the 1960s	the 2000s
E7	a retired teacher whose parents were incarcerated in the 1940s	the 1990s

Each excerpt is tied to a documented law or event that a later week teaches, and some roles already hint at that event. You will read the excerpts themselves, and the laws and events behind them, in those weeks.

Worked example — counting the catalog and the rules. Count the catalog first, then the rules.

Interviewed in the 1990s: E2 and E7, so 2 excerpts.
Interviewed in the 2000s: E1, E4, and E6, so 3 excerpts.
Interviewed in the 2010s: E3 and E5, so 2 excerpts.
Add them: 2 + 3 + 2 = 7 excerpts.

The archive has intake rules, the rules it applies before it accepts or shares an interview. There are five:

Every narrator is an adult who agreed to be interviewed.
Each narrator signs the archive's consent and release form before the recording begins.
The narrator chooses the topics and may restrict or withdraw any part of the interview at any time.
Copies used in the course identify narrators by role and decade only; no name, address, or other identifying detail is reproduced.
Nothing a narrator asked to keep private is shared, quoted, or summarized.

Rules 1 to 3 protect consent and choice, so 3 rules. Rules 4 and 5 protect privacy, so 2 rules. Add them: 3 + 2 = 5 rules.

Now the first look the archive asks of you. Before trusting an excerpt, you want the narrator's role, the decade they speak about, the decade they were interviewed, and the law or event the excerpt is tied to. And the archive must never tell you a name, an address, or anything a narrator asked to keep private.

The course also has a consent script, the fixed words you read before any optional live interview this term. It asks one consenting adult for about ten minutes on a non-sensitive topic of their choosing: work, food, language, a tradition, or a neighborhood. You write down no name, make no audio or video recording, and the person may skip any question or stop at any time. You never ask about immigration or documentation status, citizenship, legal matters, health, or painful events. The interview goes ahead only on a clear yes.

Misconception check. Students often think an excerpt without a name cannot be trusted, or that the archive's excerpts are real people's words. Both miss how the archive works. The excerpts are illustrative, written for this course to teach a reading. And a role, a decade, and a tie to a documented law or event are what you check an excerpt against; a name would add risk to the narrator without adding evidence you can check.

Honesty note: the archive is a teaching model. Real archives differ in their rules, and some identify narrators by name with their permission. This one chooses role and decade so that every week can practice the same careful reading.

Key terms

Ethnic studies — the interdisciplinary study of how race and ethnicity have been made, lived, and contested in the United States, drawing on history, law, sociology, literature, and the accounts of communities themselves. (first used: 1. Define ethnic studies: how race and ethnicity are made, lived, and contested)
Interdisciplinary — drawing on the questions and evidence of several fields at once rather than on one field's methods alone. (first used: 1. Define ethnic studies: how race and ethnicity are made, lived, and contested)
Third World Liberation Front — the coalition of student groups that, with the Black Student Union, led the San Francisco State strike that began in November 1968; a coalition with the same name led the 1969 Berkeley strike together with the Asian American Political Alliance. (first used: 2. Place the origins: the 1968–1969 student strikes)
College of Ethnic Studies — the academic unit established at San Francisco State in 1969 after the strike, which the university describes as the country's first. (first used: 2. Place the origins: the 1968–1969 student strikes)
Four core fields — Native American and Indigenous studies, African American studies, Chicana/o and Latina/o studies, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, studied side by side. (first used: 3. Map the four core fields: compare and connect)
The four questions — who made a category, law, or record, whom it served, whom it affected, and how the people affected answered. (first used: 4. Ask the four questions: methods and the reading walk)
The reading walk — the fixed order for reading a record or account: what it says, who made it, whom it affected, what it leaves out, and what a comparison adds, ending in one plain sentence. (first used: 4. Ask the four questions: methods and the reading walk)
Positionality — the way your own background shapes what you notice, ask, and miss when you read evidence; every reader has one, and naming it is part of reading fairly. (first used: 5. Name your positionality: everyone reads from somewhere)
Community oral-history archive — this course's illustrative collection, held by an unnamed public library, of seven excerpts identified by the narrator's role and decade. (first used: 6. Meet the archive: seven excerpts, five rules, one consent script)
Illustrative — written for this course to teach a point, describing no real person, library, lender, or place. (first used: 6. Meet the archive: seven excerpts, five rules, one consent script)
Intake rules — the five rules the archive applies before it accepts or shares an interview. (first used: 6. Meet the archive: seven excerpts, five rules, one consent script)
Consent script — the fixed words read before any optional live interview: one consenting adult, a non-sensitive topic of their choosing, no names, no recording, and the right to skip or stop. (first used: 6. Meet the archive: seven excerpts, five rules, one consent script)

Summary

Ethnic studies is interdisciplinary and comparative; it is not a history survey, a sociology course, the study of one group, or a course about blame.
The field began in the strikes that started in November 1968 at San Francisco State and won the College of Ethnic Studies in 1969.
The four core fields match the four departments the strikers demanded.
Ask the four questions, then walk every reading to one plain sentence.
Positionality is something every reader has and names; it is not a disqualifying bias.
The archive holds 7 illustrative excerpts under 5 intake rules, read by role and decade.

Check your understanding

Work these before looking at the answers — they are ungraded, and the answers (with reasoning) are at the bottom of the page.

An illustrative neighborhood history project holds 11 interviews: 4 recorded at a senior center, 5 at a public library branch, and the rest at a community garden. How many were recorded at the garden, and what would you still want to know about a narrator before trusting one interview?
A town's swimming pool posted a rule decades ago: "Season passes are sold only to residents of the town's east side." Ask the four questions of this rule.
A classmate says, "I grew up speaking two languages at home, so I'm too biased to read an interview with a bilingual narrator." Explain what positionality means for this classmate.
A friend says ethnic studies started a few years ago as a way to blame people. Correct both parts of that claim in two sentences.

Answers (worked reasoning — read after attempting)

Subtract the known locations from the total: 11 − 4 − 5 = 2 interviews at the garden. Before trusting one interview you would want the narrator's role, the decade they speak about, when they were interviewed, and the event the account belongs to. You would not need a name; a name adds risk without adding evidence you can check.
Who made it: the town or the pool's managers. Whom it served: residents of the east side, who could buy passes. Whom it affected: everyone else in town, who could not. How the people affected answered: the rule alone does not say, so you would look for records of complaints, petitions, or a change in the rule. One plain sentence: the rule sorted access by neighborhood, and the record of how people answered is the next thing to find.
Positionality is something every reader has and names, not a bias that disqualifies a reader. Growing up bilingual may help this classmate notice a narrator's language choices quickly, and it may lead the classmate to assume things a monolingual reader would question. Naming the position helps the classmate check the reading; it does not remove the classmate from the conversation.
The field has a dated origin in the student strikes that began in November 1968, and the College of Ethnic Studies has existed since 1969, so it is not new. It studies how categories and inequalities were made and how people answered them, which is a question about history and law, not about blaming anyone.

Next up in this module: the Readings & Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz — and next week Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization gives the course its core terms, including the rule that separates prejudice from discrimination.

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