Powerful interests don’t want students to “interrogate the systems of power and privilege that are at stake” in today’s struggles, said Dr Gilda Ochoa, a professor of Chicano/Latino Studies at Pomona College and supporter of legislation requiring all students in California’s public university system to pass an ethnic studies course before graduation. The bill was put on hold in the face of fierce opposition. Seventy-five percent of the state’s K1-12 students are non-whites, but few students or teachers “have learned this crucial history,” said Ochoa.
(For Ferguson, Baltimore, Million Workers March, Arab Spring, Standing Rock, Occupy, Jackson Rising, Fight for Fifteen, Extinction Rebellion, #Me Too…)
When the dust settles, as in all U.S. disasters, there will be a tale to tell of who mattered and who was sacrificed.
Colonized people, with a horrific historical connection to both science and medicine in this country, must examine science in service of the state.
The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came.
The necessary political demand is not that we make better, more humane prisons and jails, but that we abolish prisons and jails altogether.
