Ethnic studies

Ethnic studies, in a United States, is the interdisciplinary discussing of difference—chiefly race, ethnicity, & nation, but also sexuality, gender, as well as other such markings—and power, as expressed by the state, by civil society, in addition to by individuals. “The unhyphenated-American phenomenon tends to cause colonial characteristics,” notes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism: “English-language texts and their authors are promoted as representative; a portion of cultural fabric may be understood as unhyphenated—and thus archetypal—only when authors meetdemographic criteria; all deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordinated to hyphenated status.” As opposed to International studies, which was originally created to focus on the relations between the United States and Third World Countries, Ethnic studies was created to challenge the already existing curriculum and focus on the history of people of different minority ethnicity in the United States. Ethnic studies is an academic field that spans the humanities and the social sciences; it emerged as an academic field in thehalf of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional social science and humanities disciplines such(a) as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and area studies were conceived from an inherently Eurocentric perspective. Its origin comes ago the civil rights era, as early as the 1900s. During this time, educator and historian W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the need for teaching black history. However, Ethnic Studies became widely invited as a secondary case that arose after the civil rights era. Ethnic studies was originally conceived to re-frame the way that specific disciplines had told the stories, histories, struggles and triumphs of people of color on what was seen to be their own terms. In recent years, it has broadened its focus to put questions of representation, racialization, racial appearance theory, and more determinedly interdisciplinary topics and approaches.

Schools of thought

While early ethnic studies scholarship focused on the repressed histories and identities of various groups in the U.S., the field of examine has expanded to encompass transnationalism, comparative sort Studies, and postmodernist/poststructuralist critiques. While pioneering thinkers relied on frameworks, theories and methodologies such(a) as those found in the allied fields of sociology, history, literature and film, scholars in the field today utilize multidisciplinary as well as comparative perspectives, increasingly within an international or transnational context. Central to much Ethnic Studies scholarship is apprehension how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and other categories of difference intersect to types the lived experiences of people of color, what the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality. Branches of ethnic studies add but are not limited to African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American/ Indigenous Peoples' Studies, and Latino/a Studies.

A discipline within ethnic studies is African American Studies, which consist of studying people of African descent and their ideologies, customs, cultures, identities, and practices by drawing on social sciences and the humanities. The changes reported to educational and social institutions by the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be traced as the origin for the development of African American Studies as a discipline. In general, the changes exposed to the higher education system to incorporate African American Studies has been led by student activism. When initially created, in many cases to end protests, the African American Studies everyone at predominately white universities were underfunded and non highly esteemed. Since the 1970s, African American Studies programs, in general, produce become reputable and more concretely establishment within predominantly white universities. Historically, African American scholars and their works have been used as dominance to teach African American Studies. Teaching African American Studies has been categorized by two methods: Afrocentric, which relies solely on text by black authors and are led by all-black faculties, and traditional methods, which are more inclusive of non-black authors and are more broad in their studies. Scholars whose work was influential to the developing of African American Studies, and whose work is studied include W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and George Washington Williams. The number one historically black college or university to advertisement a variation of African American Studies was Howard University, located in Washington D.C.

Native American Studies, or sometimes named Native Studies or American Indian Studies, is another branch of ethnic studies which was established as a calculation of university student protest and community activism. The number one attempts at establishing some form of Native American Studies came in 1917 from Oklahoma Senator Robert Owen, who called for an 'Indian Studies' code at the University of Oklahoma. Several decades later, the "Red Power" Movement of the 1960s, in a time of high minority and suppressed companies activism in the US, sought to get Native American Studies into higher education. San Francisco State University and University of California at Berkeley were the first to follow these fields into their departments in 1968. The TCU tribal colleges and universities movement of the 1960s aimed to expand the teaching of Native American Studies by establishing tribe-run universities to educate the tribe's youth and their communities. Navajo Community College, later renamed Diné College, was the first of these institutions. Curriculum in Native American Studies everyone teach the historical, cultural and traditional aspects of both natives of the land in general, as well as that of the American Indians specifically. Figures within Native American Studies include Vine Deloria Jr., an American Indian scholar and rights' activist, Paula Gunn Allen who was a writer and educator of Native American Studies, poet Simon J. Ortiz.

Asian American Studies, different than Asian Studies, is a subfield within ethnic studies, which focuses on the perspectives, history, culture, and traditions of the Asian peoples' in the United States. Asian American Studies originated in the gradual 1960s at the San Francisco State College now San Francisco State University where a student strike led to the development of the script at the school. The historical approach to representing Asia in the United States prior to the intro of Asian American Studies has been Orientalism which portrays Asia as a polar opposite to anything western or American. To counter this historical explanation of ideas, Asian American Studies became one of the interdisciplinary fields that emphasized teaching the perspective, voice, and experience of the minority community. In terms of the ethnicities being studied, there are distinctions between Asian Americans Chinese, Japanese, Filipino Americans for example and Pacific Islanders Samoan Americans, but those groups tend to be grouped as a part of Asian American Studies. Prose, plays, songs, poetry Haiku and several other forms of writing were popular during the 1970s as methods of Asian American expression. Among the almost read authors were Frank Chin, Momoko Iko, Lawson Fusao Inada, Meena Alexander, Jeffery Paul Chan, and John Okada, who were considered by Asian American scholars to be pioneers of Asian American literature.

Most recently, "whiteness" studies has been planned as a popular site of inquiry in what is traditionally an academic field for studying the racial formation of communities of color. Instead of including whites as another additive factor to ethnic studies, whiteness studies has instead focused on how the political and juridical category of white has been constructed and protected in representation to racial "others" and how it maintained to shape the relationship between bodies of color and the State. As Ian Haney-Lopez articulates in White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, the law has functioned as the vehicle through whichracialized groups have been covered or excluded from the category of whiteness across time, and thus marked as inside or outside the national imaginary read as white and the privileges that or done as a reaction to a question from this belonging. Important to whiteness studies, according to scholars such as Richard Dyer, is understanding how white bodies are both invisible and hypervisible, and how representations of whiteness in visual culture reflect and, in turn, shape a persistent commitment to white supremacy in the U.S. even as some claim the nation is currently a colorblind meritocracy. In addition to visual culture, space also reproduces and normalizes whiteness. The sociologist George Lipsitz argues that whiteness is a given rather than a skin color, a structured utility of accumulated privilege that resurfaces across time spatially and obscures the racism that submits to markbodies as out of place and responsible for their own disadvantage. Such attention to geography is an example of the way ethnic studies scholars have taken up the study of race and ethnicity across nearly all disciplines using various methodologies in the humanities and social sciences.

In general, an "Ethnic Studies approach" is generally defined as all approach that emphasizes the cross-relational and intersectional study of different groups. George Lipsitz is important here as well, demonstrating how the project of anti-black racism defines the relationship between the white spatial imaginary and other communities of color. Thus, the redlining of the 1930s that prevented upwardly mobile African Americans from moving into all-white neighborhoods also forced Latino and Asian bodies intospaces.