Arizona’s anti-Latino movement

When Arizona passed a law requiring immigrants to keep their papers with them at all times or risk arrest, we believed the state’s hysteria was the unfortunate byproduct of the dysfunctional federal immigration policy. After all, who isn’t fed up with illegal immigration? People may disagree about the solution to the problem, but no one denies that what the United States is doing now isn’t working.

But it is now clear that Arizona’s problem isn’t only immigration — legal or otherwise. Its problem is Latinos.

What else are we to conclude from Arizona’s decision last week to ban ethnic studies from its schools? The new law prohibits schools from teaching classes that promote “resentment” toward a race or class of people, that are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, that promote the overthrow of the government or that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” But by most accounts, the courses in question aren’t really teaching such things, and they’re open to all students — black, white and Latino.

Certainly, Arizona is getting darker and darker these days. According to a Brookings Institution report, Arizona’s Latino population has shot up 180% in the last 20 years, with the white population dropping from 72% to 58%. Latinos account for about one-third of the state’s 6.6 million people, and 90% of Latinos under age 18 were born in the U.S. Even if all immigration from Mexico were halted tomorrow, the high birthrate of this young population would continue Arizona’s population boom and its demographic shift.

At the rate things are going, whites may soon be a minority in Arizona. Will SB 2281 then be used against them? Will that be the end of British literature classes? Dickens, after all, seethes with class resentment. And he didn’t exactly write for Native Americans, Latinos and blacks.

But rest assured, if the day ever comes when the new brown majority doesn’t see any purpose in teaching the literature, history and culture of Arizona’s white minority, we won’t uphold a double standard. We’ll defend the value of teaching ethnic studies then, just as we do now.