Lecture: What Ethnic Studies Is
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 1
Opening
Let's start with a form. Maybe it was a job application, a clinic intake sheet, or a scholarship page. Somewhere on it, a box asked you to check all that apply. You checked a box, and then you moved on. But somebody wrote those boxes. Somebody decided how many there would be and what they would be called. You filled in the form, and you did not design it.
Now think about a story your family tells about moving. Your grandmother tells it one way. Your uncle tells it another. A cousin who was a baby at the time tells the version she heard. Nobody is lying. Each person stood in a different place, so each person noticed different things.
This course turns those two experiences into a way of studying the United States. A nursing student filling in an intake form, a business major whose team serves customers from many backgrounds, and a future teacher listening to a family's moving story at a school event all meet the same questions. Who made this record? Whom did it touch? And what does my own position let me see?
This is Week 1, so nothing comes before it. In this lecture I'll walk you through six ideas, in order. First, what ethnic studies is. Second, where it came from. Third, its four core fields. Fourth, the questions and methods it uses. Fifth, positionality. And sixth, the archive you will read from all term. Next week the course gives its core terms careful definitions, and this week builds the habits those definitions will need.
1. What ethnic studies is
Picture a school cafeteria. Every table is its own small community, and every school has rules about who sits where. Some rules are written down. Some are not. A historian would ask when those rules started. A lawyer would ask whether any of them became official policy. A sociologist would look for patterns across many schools. A novelist would ask what it felt like to sit at one table and not another. And the students would have their own account.
Put those five voices together, and you are close to the field. 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.
Two words in there matter a lot. Interdisciplinary means drawing on several fields at once rather than on one field's methods alone. And contested means people did not stay quiet. They argued, organized, wrote, and remembered.
This course is also comparative. You'll study several groups and the connections among them. So it helps to say what the course is not. It is not a history survey that marches through dates. It is not a sociology course, though sociology gives us evidence. It is not the study of one group. And it is not a course about blame. It studies how categories and inequalities were made and how people answered them.
Pause and try this. A friend says ethnic studies means studying one group's history so you can blame another group. Which two parts of that claim does the definition correct?
Take a moment and find both parts before you go on.
Here's the answer. The first part, "one group", misses that the field is comparative and studies several groups and the connections among them. The second part, "blame", misses that the field studies how categories and inequalities were made and answered, which is a question about history and law, not about the guilt of anyone alive.
Hold on to that: the field compares groups; it does not convict people.
2. Where the field came from
Imagine your campus offered no class on your family's history or your neighborhood's history. 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 close to how this field began.
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. A coalition is an alliance. Students from several groups joined into one effort.
The strikers demanded four departments within a new college: American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Black Studies, and La Raza Studies. And they won. In 1969, the College of Ethnic Studies was established there, and the university describes it as the country's first. That same year, 1969, a Third World Liberation Front strike at Berkeley, co-led by the Asian American Political Alliance, pressed for ethnic studies there too.
One honest caveat. University pages describe the strike's length in different ways, so in this course we say it in words. The strike ran from November 1968 into the spring of 1969. You will never be asked to memorize a number of days or months. The years are firm, though. The strike began in 1968, and the college was established in 1969.
Here's a small story about why that caveat matters. In one video on the readings page, a person who was there remembers the strike starting in October. The dated record says November 1968. That is not a lie. Memory moves things around. It is a first lesson in checking a remembered date against the record, and you'll practice it all term.
Pause and try this. A classmate says ethnic studies is a recent invention, something from the last few years. What date would you point to, and what did it produce?
Think of the year and the result before you go on.
Here's the answer. Point to the strike that began in November 1968 at San Francisco State, led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front. It produced the College of Ethnic Studies, established there in 1969, so the field has a dated origin that is decades old.
3. The four core fields
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 best moments often 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.
This course has four rooms. They are the four core fields: Native American and Indigenous studies, African American studies, Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino studies, and 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.
Here's a neat fit. The four departments the strikers demanded line up with these four fields, one to one. American Indian Studies matches Native American and Indigenous studies. Black Studies matches African American studies. La Raza Studies matches Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino studies. And Asian American Studies matches Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Four departments, four fields. The names have grown to include more communities, but the map follows the strikers' outline.
So 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 have already met a first case. The San Francisco State strike was a coalition, and the Berkeley strike was co-led by the Asian American Political Alliance. A comparison is how you notice that a shared effort joined people with different histories.
One more thing about names. This course names groups the way their members most commonly name themselves, and where people use different terms, the materials say who uses which. You'll see that rule at work in later weeks.
Pause and try this. The strikers demanded a department of La Raza Studies. Which of the course's four core fields does it match?
Match the name to its field in your head first.
Here's the answer. La Raza Studies matches Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino studies. The other three pairs follow the same pattern: American Indian Studies with Native American and Indigenous studies, Black Studies with African American studies, and Asian American Studies with Asian American and Pacific Islander studies.
4. The four questions and the reading walk
Think of the rules posted in a workplace break room. No phones on the floor. Breaks at set times. 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. That second way of reading is the habit this part of the lecture builds.
The field asks the four questions of any category, law, or record. Who made it? Whom did it serve? Whom did it affect? And how did the people affected answer? To answer them, the field uses three methods: reading the public record, listening to community accounts, and comparing across groups.
Then every reading walks the same order. I'll call it the reading walk. What does the record say? Who made it? Whom did it affect? What does it leave out? And what does a comparison with another group add? Then you finish with one plain sentence. A reading without evidence is an opinion. Evidence without a reading is unfinished.
Let's walk one. The course archive has a rule: copies used in the course identify narrators by role and decade only. What it says: a narrator appears as something like "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: another rule lets each narrator choose topics and restrict or withdraw any part of an interview. What it leaves out: a name, an address, any identifying detail.
And the 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.
Pause and try this. Someone reads that archive rule and writes only, "The rule says narrators are named by role and decade." Which steps of the reading walk are missing?
Count the missing steps before you go on.
Here's the answer. That reader stopped after the first step, what the record says. Missing are who made it, whom it affected, what it leaves out, and what a comparison adds, plus the one plain sentence that finishes every reading.
5. Positionality
Two people watch the same high school basketball game. One played on that team ten years earlier. The other is a parent of the newest player. After the game, ask each one 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. Neither saw everything.
That's the idea behind positionality: the way your own background shapes what you notice, ask, and miss when you read evidence. Background 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.
Let's try it on the archive rule again. Reader one comes from a family that 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 he wonders how anyone could follow up. Each reading is partial. Each reader's position explains what they noticed first. Put them together, and you get a fuller reading: the rule protects narrators, and it costs researchers a way to follow up.
Here's the trap students fall into. They hear the word position and think it means bias, the kind of flaw that should keep a person from reading a record at all. But nobody reads from nowhere. Positionality isn't a reason to step back. It's a tool for checking what your own reading might be missing.
Pause and try this. A classmate says, "My family moved here from another state, so I'm too biased to read a moving story." What would you tell them about positionality?
Decide what you would say before you go on.
Here's the answer. Positionality is something every reader has and names, not a bias that disqualifies a reader. That classmate's background may help them notice things in a moving story quickly, and it may lead them to assume things another reader would question. Naming it helps them check the reading; it does not remove them from the conversation.
6. The archive you'll read all term
Most public libraries keep more than books. Some keep recordings of neighbors describing their own lives: work, school, moving, food, a protest they joined. This course has one of those collections.
The community oral-history archive is illustrative. That means it was written for this course, it is held by an unnamed public library, and it describes no real person, library, or place. No excerpt in it is a real person's words. It holds seven excerpts, E1 through E7. Each narrator is identified by role and decade, never by name.
Let's count the catalog. Two excerpts, E2 and E7, were recorded in the 1990s. Three, E1, E4, and E6, were recorded in the 2000s. And two, E3 and E5, were recorded in the 2010s. That gives you all seven.
The archive also has five intake rules. Rules one through three protect consent and choice: every narrator is an adult who agreed, signs a consent and release form before recording, and chooses the topics, with the power to restrict or withdraw. Rules four and five protect privacy: role and decade only, and nothing a narrator asked to keep private is ever shared. That's three rules for consent and two for privacy.
The course also has a consent script, for any optional live interview you do this term. You ask one consenting adult for about ten minutes on a topic they choose, like work, food, language, a tradition, or a neighborhood. You write down no name, you make no recording, and they can skip a question or stop at any time. You never ask about immigration status, citizenship, legal matters, health, or painful events.
Pause and try this. Before you trust an excerpt from the archive, what would you want to know about its narrator, and what must the archive never tell you?
Make your two short lists before you go on.
Here's the answer. 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. The archive must never tell you a name, an address, or anything a narrator asked to keep private, because those details add risk to the narrator without adding evidence you can check.
Closing
Let me pull the six ideas together. Ethnic studies is the interdisciplinary, comparative study of how race and ethnicity have been made, lived, and contested in the United States, and it is not a course about blame. It began with a strike in November 1968 that won the College of Ethnic Studies in 1969. Its four core fields match the four departments the strikers demanded. It asks four questions of every record and walks every reading to one plain sentence. Every reader has a positionality, and naming it is part of reading fairly. And the archive gives you seven illustrative excerpts and five intake rules to practice on all term.
Next, open the slide deck, then the Readings & Resources page, then the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then come the discussion and the assignment. Next week, Core Concepts: Race, Ethnicity, and Racialization, gives the course its core terms, and the four questions you practiced here are how you will test each one.
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