According to Ethnic Studies scholars, you should care about it because it gives you the chance to discover identities that are different from yours. Ethnic Studies, in other words, is relevant to all of us.īut you shouldn't just care about Ethnic Studies because it allows you to learn more about yourself and your own ethnic identity. Regardless of whether you're black or white, Latino/a or not, you belong to an ethnic group, or even several. Maybe you're Jewish American, or Irish American, or just white American. Maybe you're Native American, or African American, or Latino/a American, or Asian American. What is Ethnic Studies About and Why Should I Care? Why Should Readers Care? Ethnic Studies is all about studying and understanding the world from the perspective of groups that have historically been marginalized in the U.S., especially those four (African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latino/a American) that have experienced a long history of oppression and racism in the United States.
One of the goals of Ethnic Studies is to challenge the "Eurocentric" perspective of most academic disciplines in the United States. But Jewish Studies, Irish Studies, Welsh Studies, Amish Studies (the list can go on and on) can also fall under the umbrella of "Ethnic Studies." The four big subfields of Ethnic Studies are African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latino/a Studies. That's because "Ethnic Studies" is like a giant umbrella under which a whole bunch of different disciplines and ethnic perspectives find shelter. Now, it's hard to pin down exactly what Ethnic Studies is. After all, these groups had contributed a whole lot to U.S. They began asking schools and universities to take into account their perspectives and experiences, too. And, often, these fields were all about white people.īut as it turns out, white people's perspectives aren't the only perspectives, and ethnic groups started asking how their own histories, literatures, and cultures could be brought into the pictures. One thing the Civil Rights Movement made pretty clear was that ethnic minorities had been economically and politically oppressed for a really long time.īut by the late 1960s, ethnic minority groups started pointing out that the problem was even deeper than economics and politics: the problem was that people's whole system of knowledge-including academic fields like sociology, English, history, and so on-was framed from the perspective of white people (particularly WASPy white people).
The 1960s Civil Rights Movement shook things up big time in America. Let’s back up-to the 1960s, when Ethnic Studies started to become a thing.
0 kommentar(er)
