California has introduced a new “ethnic studies” curriculum that is being promoted by a man who believes that one way to rectify colonialism is to support a “counter-genocide” of “white Christians.”
According to City Journal, California released a 48-page “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” that calls on students to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs and practices on multiple levels.”
The curriculum specifically calls for a stronger connection to social justice movements.
The curriculum aims to “connect [students] to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice and an equitable and democratic society; and conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society that promotes collective transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.”
Curriculum change advocates want history, in the traditional sense of the study, to be erased in favor of “counter-narratives.” According to ethnic studies advocates the curriculum should, “offer oppositional stories and counter-narratives that name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition.”
“Ethnic Studies and this liberatory scale signify an inward gaze and for many, the transition from being lost to become woke as a living part of hxrstory [sic],” one of the co-chairs of the curriculum wrote. “This scale signifies working to help ourselves, our communities, and our world transform.”
A curriculum advocacy group’s webpage recommends students to acknowledge that the land they are learning on is stolen. The proposal reads, “[i]n studying various ethnic groups, the Indigenous peoples of any area under academic investigation and of any land where a course is taking place … are respectfully acknowledged as the original peoples of the community.”
R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, one of the original co-chairs of the curriculum, advocated for a “counter-genocide” aimed at white Christians as a possible reparation for American colonialism. He took specific aim at white Christians.
Cuauhtin’s work has described the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, heteropatriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” He also wrote that white people subjected minorities to “domestication” and “zombification.”
In his other writings, Cuauhtin has claimed that whites were “hatching hierarchies” and “developing for [whiteness]” when they came to America. This allegedly created an “excess wealth” that became the American capitalist economy.
In one handout titled “The Matrix of Social Identity & Intersectional Power,” Cuauhtin said that he believes white Christians committed “theocide” against the indigenous people by killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. He calls this a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide.”
The curriculum also has a chant that worships the Aztec gods Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, the god of war.
Part of the chant reads:
In order to be warriors of love, of love, for our gente representin’ justice, justice, local to global, global to local, ecological and social, social, justice, justice.
Not just thinkin’ and talkin’ but makin’ things happen, with agency resiliency, and a revolutionary spirit
Transformation, liberation, education, emancipation, imagination, revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education emancipation.
The State Board of Education will vote on the curriculum next week. If it passes, it will put the ethnic studies curriculum in 10,000 public schools which services six million children.
Editor’s Note: This article, as well as the title, have been altered after publication for the purposes of clarity.