Intro to Ethnic Studies

WE ACKNOWLEDGE

the land and the native peoples to whom this land belongs as its original caretakers. This is the land of the Esselen nations, and they are still here.

WE STAND

in solidarity with all Indigenous people and their right to self-determination and justice.

WE COMMIT

to working toward the healing of the generational trauma, theft and dispossession native peoples’ have faced and continue to face.

1. We humanize, with healing compassion, belongingness, dignity, life, love, unity, reciprocity, interdependence, collectivism, solidarity, mutual respect.

2. We are holistic: physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, relational beings.

3. We are terrestrial/spatial/cosmic (related to land, cosmos, and spacetime).

4. We are intergenerational/herstorical/temporal (related to timespace).

5. We are intersectional and related to power, as such, our full holisticness considers our race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, and more.

6. We are multidimensional, multidiscursive, complex, creative and dynamic.

7. We are ecological (interrelated to the ecology/environment/nature).

8. We are cultural, on both surface levels and deepers levels, and we have community cultural wealth.

9. We each, all, have identities and names.

10. We each, all, have important narratives, stories, voices to share.

Criticality: Critical Consciousness

As critically conscious holistic human beings, how do we understand ourselves and our world in relation to the four macroscales and help to bring about transformational change for the better?

1. We bear witness to, and stand against, negativity, oppression, and dehumanization.

2. We identify the sources, epistemologies, explicit and implicit biases, insider and outsider perspectives, historiographies and historicities of narratives, contextualizing and corroborating them as necessary.

3. We critique the “master narrative,” claims of neutrality and complete objectivity, essentialism, reductionism, “color-blindness,” and “meritocracy,” and we highlight narratives emerging from historically marginalized and invisibilized standpoints, epistemologies, perspectives, and worldviews.

4. We address xdisciplinary, cultural-herstorical, sociopolitical, economic, and moral levels of analysis.

5. We name and confront systems and problems of power, privilege, and oppression at multiple intersections of social identity.

6. We interrogate ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels of privilege and oppression.

7. We deepen geo-hxrstorical literacies and an understanding of causality.

8. We engage in reflection, cycles of critical praxis, and transformational resistance, and we are action oriented in working toward solutions to the problems we name.

9. We cultivate critical hope, creation, and self-determination.

10. We nurture critical solidarities for past, present, and future generations.