Raza Studies. Like the rest of you, I’ve been wondering how the lead organization lobbying on behalf of special privileges for Mexicans in the U.S.A. manages to get away with calling itself “National Council of La Raza.” Those last two words, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, mean “the race.” The idea, as I had it explained to me, is that by blending the European race with the Mesoamerican, Mexico has brought forth a new race, the mestizo or bronze race, which is claimed to be superior to both the contributing races, I suppose by dint of hybrid vigor. This bronze über-race is “La Raza.”
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This notion, if it was explained to me correctly, considerably misrepresents Mexico’s population, around 40 percent of which is unmixed (10-percent pure-European, 30-percent pure-Mesoamerican). Leaving that aside, how do they get away with it? The U.S.A. is currently in a condition of hyper-prudery about race. I get a regular trickle of e-mails telling me I am an evil, evil person for thinking that such a thing as race even exists. In this atmosphere, you would think that an outfit declaring itself, in its very name, to be promoting the interests of The Race, and whose published material shouts an ethic of racial triumphalism, would belong out on the kooky fringes of society along with Aryan Nation and Black Liberation Theology.
Yet La Raza is as respectable as it is possible to be. Its “corporate partners” program lists all the biggest names in U.S. business: Allstate, Ford, Wal-Mart, Xerox. . . . Its spokesmen regularly appear on TV talking-head programs. Presidential candidates line up to address it. On a respectability scale, “The Race” is up there with the Kiwanis, American Cancer Society, and the Episcopal Church.
And still they show not the faintest sign of being embarrassed about their name. “We are The Race,” they seem to be telling us cheerfully. “We’re promoting the interests of The Race. Why would anybody object to that?”
In fact, they are spreading it around. There seems now to be a growing trend towards “Raza Studies” in schools and colleges. (The definite article is sometimes included, sometimes not. On general linguistic principles, this probably means it’s on its way out, like the slowly disappearing hyphen in words like “email.”) Most of us first found out about this from the May 21 column in Tucson Citizen by high-school teacher John A. Ward. Ward’s column has been bouncing around the web for the last few days, generating a lot of comment. Ward, who describes himself as Hispanic, was assigned to teach “a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective” under the aegis of “the Raza/Chicano Studies department.” (And this was five years ago, please note.) When he found out what the course material consisted of, he balked.
The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites.
In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.
This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that . . . the Southwestern United States was taken from Mexicans because of the insatiable greed of the Yankee who acquired his values from the corrupted ethos of Western civilization.
It was taught that the Southwest is "Atzlan," the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, and still rightfully belongs to their descendants — to all people of indigenous Mexican heritage.
When Ward protested about this material he was called a “racist” — by the administrators of the Raza Studies program! He was reassigned to other classes.
Raza Studies is metastasizing. A Google on the phrase got 14,200 hits even with the Tucson story subtracted out (“raza studies” –tucson –tusd). San Francisco State University offers a B.A. in Raza Studies. It seems to be the only college offering this particular degree, but I doubt that will be the case for long. Watch out for Raza Studies at a high school or college near you. But don’t dare let on you believe there is such a thing as race!
Russian noses. My comments in last month’s diary about Vladimir Putin’s odd nasal obsession included a passing mention of the 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. The writer’s name sat there among my neurons for a while, then stirred and fired off a cascade of mental processes, most of them no doubt unconscious, that ended with my logging on to Abebooks.com and purchasing a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1944 book Nikolai Gogol.
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