The Lower Frequencies
A podcast from the UC Ethnic Studies Council.
The Lower Frequencies
Episode 1: Policing Ethnic Studies: The Legislative Jewish Caucus and AB 1468
The Lower Frequencies, Episode 1
Policing Ethnic Studies: The Legislative Jewish Caucus and AB 1468
The inaugural episode of The Lower Frequencies features guest Marcy Winograd and members of the UC Ethnic Studies Council discussing AB 1468, a bill authored and introduced by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, without any consultation of ethnic studies experts, that would impose a massive and costly set of rules policing the ways in which ethnic studies can be taught by K-12 teachers in the state.
Relevant Links:
Nadia Rahman, “AB 1468: The California Jewish Legislative Caucus Introduces an Ethnic Studies Bill to Censor Public Education on Israel and Palestine,” February 24, 2025.
Marcy Winograd, “California Israel Lobby Aims to Police Ethnic Studies - Why?” LA Progressive, March 4, 2025.
Marianne Dhenin, “California Ethnic Studies Bill Aims to Censor Palestine-Related Education,” Truthout, April 2, 2025.
Welcome to the first episode of the Lower Frequencies, the uc Ethnic Studies Council Podcast. On March 27th, 2025, three months into Trump's war on the people, which includes the gutting of education, dismantling of DEI, targeting and disappearance of students who've spoken out against the US backed and funded genocide in Gaza and criminalization of criticism of Israel. The council launched our podcast not from the ivory tower or militarized fortress were knowledge is produced as a conquest circle. From the lower frequencies, the un assimilated underground of the university at a time of sustained top-down attack. When the university needs what we bear but cannot bear what we bring to borrow from Fred Moton and Stefano Harney's account of the under commons, we understand fully that ethnic studies, which was never meant to be confined to the classroom gets its mandate from the left and from below.
Sean:Our first guest was Marcy Winograd, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace and Code Pink, and a retired teacher and voting member of United Teachers of Los Angeles, the largest local of the California Teachers Association or CTA. Our topic was AB 1468. A bill designed to police ethnic studies and to censor the question of Palestine from K through 12 education. The bill was drafted by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus or the LJC without any input from ethnic studies practitioners, experts, or scholars, how is it that a bill, which according to its framers, is intended to counter quote unquote antisemitism, is being wielded to erase Palestine from ethnic studies? A field that emerged from the anti-imperialist third world student struggle. Why was one of the authors on public record stating that Palestine never existed?
Christine:At the time of our conversation, the Council on American Islamic Relations was a month into its statewide campaign against the bill describing it as part of a broader right wing effort to suppress discussions on race. History and global justice. Jewish Voice for Peace Bay area also opposed the legislation which it described as using MAGA like tactics to prevent individual school districts from tailoring their ethnic studies curriculum to local needs. Pointing out that the LJ C'S real goal is to prevent open and honest discussion of Palestine. Since our conversation with Marcy, her union, the CTA, which represents over 300,000 teachers in the state of California, has come out in formal opposition to AB 1468. Thus far no ethnic caucus has endorsed the LJ C's most recent effort to censor ideologically police and criminalize the content of ethnic studies
Sean:In this moment of tyranny and terror, will ethnic studies serve the people or will it be neutralized and coerced into drawing a conquest circle around the people of Palestine? Join us on the lower frequencies as we explore this question with our guest for today.
Christine:Welcome to the first ever uc Ethnic Studies Council podcast. We are so pleased to have Marcy Winow grad as our guest. And we'll begin with a round of introductions before we dive into an educational discussion around AB 1468. This is the legislative Jewish caucus's bill on ethnic studies. So let's go ahead and begin with a round if introductions. My name is Christine Hong. I'm part of the uc Ethnic Studies Council, and I was the inaugural chair of the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at uc Santa Cruz. I organized alongside Paro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice. I was one of 20 people appointed by the uc to create course criteria for ethnic studies and I served as part of a six person writing team that drafted those criteria. I also then served as the co-chair of the implementation work group for those criteria. I will pass things over to Sean.
Sean:I'm Sean Malloy. I'm faculty at the University of California Merced in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and a member of the uc Ethnic Studies Council.
Dylan:Hey there. My name's Dylan Rodriguez. I'm distinguished professor at University of California Riverside, where I'm in the Department of Black Study in the Department of Media Cultural Studies. I also hold a PhD in ethnic studies from uc, Berkeley and I was in the Department of Ethnic Studies at Riverside for 17 years and chaired for seven years. I worked with y'all, the ethnic as council in all kind of different other places, but I'm pleased to be here to talk about this.
Jmo:My name is Jennifer Mo. I am an assistant professor at the University of California Santa Cruz in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. And I too have my PhD in ethnic studies from uc, San Diego. I am also a member of the uc Ethnic Studies Council.
Trish:Hi, everyone. I am Dr. Trish Gallagher Geren. I teach in critical race and ethnic studies at uc, Santa Cruz, and also ethnic studies and in the education studies department at uc, San Diego. I started out as a public school teacher in bilingual education and, I'm pleased to be a part of this group as well working for ethnic studies and in K 12 as well as sustaining that work in the university.
Darlene:Hi Darlene Lee. I've been a teacher educator for 17 years and I currently am the faculty advisor in the UCLA Teacher Education Program for the ethnic studies pathway. And I'm the director of our uc LA ethnic studies certificate program for in-service teachers.
Christine:Thank you so much. And Marcy, we would love for you to introduce yourself.
Marcy:Sure. I'm Marcy Win grad, and I first wanna say how proud and honored I am to be with you all. I am an organizer with Code Pink. I co-produced Code Pink Radio, a podcast nationally broadcast on most Pacific stations. I'm also a retired English and government teacher from the Los Angeles Unified School District, where I did spend approximately 25 years, and three or four of those years were working as a standards and literacy coach, visiting schools all across the LA Unified School District. In addition to that, I'm on the state organizing committee for Jewish Voice for Peace.
Christine:Thank you so much for joining us. Let's just dive right in. There is legislation that has been introduced by the legislative Jewish caucus, and we're here to have an educational conversation around this bill. I just wanted to begin by asking the question what is AB 1468?
Trish:This is Trish. So AB 1468 says that it intends to create content standards for ethnic studies and on its face, that sounds like a good idea. It also, in addition to that, wants to create a curriculum framework. And it also creates several layers of policing including teachers having to post their materials 60 days before they teach those and community groups that will be able to vet that curriculum and decide what they think about that. Non-experts, non-educators and multiple layers of what they call compliance monitoring. So it pretends to create some sort of guideline for ethnic studies but then also polices it. It's easy to become skeptical as a long, longtime public school teacher of what is the real intent of this legislation. In response to this bill, being somehow helping to balance the curriculum, ethnic studies is meant to balance an already unbalanced curriculum. And I can tell you this from being a classroom teacher, that our curriculum is already overly focused on white supremacist concerns. It always has been. It's how all of us were educated in California, those of us who were educated in public schools. So ethnic studies is the balance that we're missing.
Christine:From a teacher educator perspective, is this bill sound policy? Marcy, I wonder if you could speak to that.
Marcy:Sure. I can take parts of the bill one by one and refute the contention that this is a bill that is desperately needed in California. This bill would. Really dumbed down the curriculum of ethnic studies. As a standards coach. One of my main focus areas was on Bloom's Taxonomy, which is a hierarchy of critical thinking. And at the bottom of that hierarchy, that ladder you have recall and comprehension, and towards the top are on the higher rungs are analysis and evaluation. So this bill in saying that teachers should focus only on domestic issues and not explore the causes of ethnic marginalization it stands in the way of promoting critical thinking amongst students. This is at the lower rungs of Bloom's Taxonomy. How do you teach about. Proposed reparations for slavery. Without talking about the brutality of the trans transatlantic slave trade, how do you talk about the challenges facing immigrants, the deportations the arduous road that they take to come here without talking about the trade policies that might have motivated that, that might have pushed them out of their home countries. So in many ways, this bill with its focus on domestic and saying, don't talk about the causes of ethnic marginalization, is dumbing down a curriculum. It's demeaning, some have called it racist. Why should we relegate our students of color to factual information without challenging the causes of their marginalization? We should not.
Christine:Trish.
Trish:Yeah. And I, they even say it they really do wanna dumb it down. I agree with you, Marcy. The bill says the goal should not be to understand abstract ideological theories, causes, or pedagogies. Since when have we asked students not to understand abstract ideological theories? That is absolutely those higher tiers of looms that you're talking about, abstract thinking. It's astounding to see that they put this in writing, that they want to have some level of thought control over our students. And it's disturbing that they're willing to put that down in writing.
Christine:I wonder if we could stick to the issue of standards and the fact that this particular bill actually attempts to make impossible critical analysis and we need to just be point blank about this, that ethnic studies exception that we are seeing is based on the Palestine exception. Many of the bills co-author state every single field and subject area has standards. What we're trying to do is regularize ethnic studies so that it too is subjected to standards. What do you have to say to that, Marcy?
Marcy:As a former standards coach, I can attest to the fact that we have existing standards that could well be applied along with the guiding principles the state adopted in the ethnic studies model, curriculum, and student led research into their own communities, the issues that they are facing in their local areas. So in many ways, this is duplicative in an effort to censor public debate about what's happening in Palestine, the genocide that's funded by Israel. And when we talk about standards, first lemme just back up and explain that ethnic studies the way it is, codified in AB 1 0 1, the bill that launched ethnic studies is that it can be taught as a one semester standalone course on ethnic studies involving African Americans, Latinx, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. It could be broken out into separate courses on those ethnic groups. It could also be taught in an English course, a science course, a history or math, any of these, A three A through G courses for the University of California. Now, these content areas, they have their own content standards. History at every level has its own content standards, science, math as well, and English is framed by the English Language Arts standards. It suggests to me that these educators have never read the California Frameworks for Education because if they had, they would see standards that already address. Ethnic studies in part along with the guiding principles. So for example, English language Arts, 11th grade, one of the standards says, recognize strategies used by the media to inform, persuade, entertain, and transmit culture. Looking at bias, this is something that could easily be a focus standard. In ethnic studies, you have history. Students analyze the development of federal civil rights and voting rights. Why are we investing all of this state money? Establishing a bureaucratic process to come up with new standards when we already have them, along with the guiding principles. These are the guiding principles the state adopted when the state adopted the ethnic studies model curriculum. So for example, number four here's the one that I think is really a problem for those who wanna censor, debate, critique, empire building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression. Number five, challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, and imperialist colonial beliefs and practices on multiple levels. They don't like these guiding principles because they're afraid that there might be some discussion about an ongoing genocide as a product of settler colonialism in Palestine. So they want to relegate this curriculum to the bottom level of Bloom's taxonomy and shortchange our students, many of them students of color. For example, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I think it's al almost 77%. So I understand why people are calling this a racist bill.
Christine:To that latter point, the state of California has been majority minority for a full quarter century, since the year 2000. And in the state of California, in terms of the K through 12 population, 80% come from communities of color. Yet the legislative. Jewish caucus proposes to introduce this bill that would set standards and ideological policing of ethnic studies that no other subject area is subjected to. Darlene, we would love for you to weigh in
Darlene:I 100% agree with Marcy about the the complicated nature of standards in this particular bill where it asks for a single set of standards for ethnic studies course, but ethnic studies is. An interdisciplinary field. And so we can think about ethnic studies being taught in a variety of different disciplines. So for example, I work with a teacher who teaches Chicano art, and he's an art teacher. He has an art credential, and his expertise in training is in art. But he also has a background in Chicano studies. And so he teaches Chicano art. And I have other teachers who teach, for example, African American literature, who have a teaching credential in English and a background in African American studies. And those two classes, just as an example, could never have the same set of content standards as if it was a single course, because those are two incredibly different courses with different content as well as different methodologies and pedagogies. And so the concept of a single set of standards has been used and weaponized against ethnic studies, but it is not even aligned with what ethnic studies actually is. And it really is a sign that the people who created this bill don't know what ethnic studies is.
Sean:Yeah, that's a great segue. This is Sean and I wanna maybe move this conversation a little from the text of this bill to how it was that such a flawed, and I will say it frankly, racist bill. Has gotten to the point that it has. This is a bill that was introduced, co-authored and sponsored by members of the Legislative Jewish Caucus. And while you will not find it in the text of the bill, in their copious public statements members of this caucus have stated that their principle concern with the introduction of AB 1468 is to oppose what they describe as anti-Semitic material in ethnic studies. That it is worth noting that no other ethnic or affinity caucus has endorsed this legislation. Christine, I know you've been following this pretty closely. Can you tell us a little bit about how we got here? Why is this going on?
Christine:If you just look at who introduced this bill, if you look at its principle co-authors, you realize that this is completely. A creation of the legislative Jewish caucus. And it's part and parcel of a series of extraordinarily repressive bills that the legislative Jewish caucus has introduced. So it was introduced by Rick Zeer, Don Addis its principal co-authors include Jesse Gabriel, Scott Wiener, and Josh Becker. You'll note that there is no one from any other ethnic caucus that was involved in the creation of this. And it's not just that these authors were also central to a very flawed prior legislation. AB 2 9 1 8. A bill that died in committee. It was opposed by a number of different organizations, including the California Teachers Association. It came out swinging against the prior legislation that prior bill and this bill. Both of them were created without any kind of input or collaboration with ethnic studies, educators, practitioners, and experts. So you do not bake in the expertise after the fact. This is a fatally flawed piece of legislation by a caucus that has shown itself to be single issue in terms of its interests Marcy. Her research has pointed out that up until several years ago, the banner image for the legislative Jewish caucus was the Israeli national flat.
Marcy:As a footnote to that I wanna point out that from now on, I vow to call this the Legislative Israel caucus. They can brand themselves as the Jewish caucus, but I don't agree with that. I'm Jewish. They don't represent me in any way, shape or form. In fact, calling themselves the legislative Jewish caucus is a betrayal of the Jews in this country who have marched by the thousands to protest US backed Israel genocide and Gaza. So let's call it what it is. It is the Legislative Israel caucus. Their website, their 18 members, and their website has. Pictures of them visiting Israel and congratulating themselves and jumping up in the air and excitement. Their past bills have included an effort to silence the voices of protest of Israel. They introduced a bill, an extreme bill, which was to prohibit boycott, divestment and sanctions in California by taxing or imposing a huge fine on anyone, on any corporation that boycotted Israel. They even wanted to create an enemies list. They wanted the attorney general to create an enemies list of companies and it could be a single person that's incorporated who refused to work or contract with Israel on anything. This, we were able to defeat through a year long lobbying effort. We weren't able to defeat the bill, but it's largely duplicative now of existing legislation barring discrimination based on. Nationality, origin, and so forth. In addition, we saw that last year, one of the bills that they pushed through the Legislative Israel caucus was a bill to establish holocaust and genocide education. Why are we even talking about holocaust and genocide education? It's all genocide education, right? So the attempt here is to put the holocaust at the top of the hierarchy of genocides Somehow. It is exceptional. It was horrific. We can agree on that, right? 11 million people murdered. Is it different than the murder of 56 million Native Americans throughout a hundred years of US History of Turtle Island history. So this bill that they also push through would establish. Professional development on Holocaust and Genocide education. Yes, it includes other genocides in it, but primarily it is an attempt to push on the students of California through their teachers. The curriculum developed by the Anti-Defamation League, the Shoa Foundation and Yad, which has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which says, if you criticize Israel as a state that privileges one ethnicity over another as a racist state, you are antisemitic and we know where this leads, right? This leads to censorship and education, to teacher firings, to harassment, to students being vilified. So we have to be really skeptical of this legislative Israel caucus.
Christine:I so appreciate that point. this was part of a quartet of repressive bills that the legislative Israel caucus proposed last year. And this was signed into law by Newsom and locally in Santa Cruz. One of the bill's co-authors is Gail Rin, and some of us actually had a chance to meet with her to speak to her about her support for 1277. This Holocaust and Genocide education Bill, which Marcy, you rightly stated, represents a collaboration with the Anti-Defamation League. I. It patrols what can be taught as genocide in California classrooms. And like AB 1468, the bill that we're discussing today, it also proposes top down ideological control over the substance of California's education with regard to the topic of genocide. And when we spoke with Gail Rin, I asked her outright, I said, do you believe that there's a genocide happening in Palestine? And her response was, I do not believe that a genocide is happening in Palestine. I believe that there's a horrendous war, but there are atrocities on both sides. That is what she stated, Dylan.
Dylan:Yeah, I think it's important to not make any mistake as to what's happening. Around beneath and after this particular attempt at imposing legislation to control ethnic studies, which is that what we're seeing is immobilization by the forces of pro-Israel and Zionist colonialism and one directional war, genocidal war, to essentially define campuses as a particular theater of conquest. These forces, pro Israel Zionist forces intend to dominate those of us that would pose informed, rigorously studied and research critiques and analysis. Of Israeli occupation and genocide against Palestinian peoples, across the diaspora, across historical periods. They want to crowd us out. They not only wanna crowd us out, they want to actively criminalize our capacity to utter those statements, those words, those analyses, whether in the classroom or outside the classroom. So we need to take that seriously. It's warfare as both actual material, ideological war legislation and otherwise, and as a significant metaphor that extracts casualties.
Marcy:I'd just like to piggyback on what Dylan said. Right now many of us have heard of project 2025, right? That's from the Heritage Foundation. It's to basically defund the government to afford bigger tax cuts to billionaires and to privatize everything. The Heritage Foundation has also produced Project Esther, which is a lot of what Dylan was talking about. It's a war on students. It's a war on education to control the narrative about Israel. And although the Legislative Israel caucus in California, many of them perceive themselves as progressive on housing or water, or artificial intelligence, whistle blowing. At the end of the day, they are backing Project Esther in California. They are doing Trump's work here in censoring ethnic studies.
Christine:And this is not by any stretch of the imagination work that began after October 7th, 2023. It has long been in the works as every single one of us can attest here. We have been targeted by Zionist organizations for now going on many years. Some of us have been subjected to hate mail to death threats. People have been doxed, people have lost work. And we could see from the kind of, tactics that were deployed that ethnic studies became a kind of arena for the kind of warfare that Dylan is describing. In no small part because of the Zionist fear that ethnic studies is a place in which Israeli settler colonialism could be studied. Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people, its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people could be studied, and that Palestinian perspectives on Israeli genocide, settler colonialism, and apartheid could be centered. And in fact. Newsom in signing AB 1 0 1 caved to the Zionist lobby by ensuring that there were ideological guardrails around ethnic studies. What were those guardrails? There were guardrails that attempted to understand any mention of Palestine or Palestinian right to life as a form of bias, bigotry, and discrimination. So what we're seeing here is a kind of war strategy in which Palestine must be expunged from the order of knowledge. Not only is there a genocide happening against the Palestinian people, but Palestine cannot even enter into the order of knowledge. Jennifer, I wonder if you could address the fact that one of the bill's, co-authors and introducers Josh Becker, has stated, point blank in public comments about AB 1468, that there was no Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and he and others in the legislative Jewish caucus have professed that one of their key concerns about ethnic studies is its lack of historical accuracy. The person who has said that he's concerned about ethnic studies being historically inaccurate has stated that there was no Palestine.
Jmo:Yes. Thank you Christine. I wanted to just start by saying this is why we can't trust legislators who have no historical knowledge or access to education to be doing the work of policing or setting standards, quote unquote for disciplines that they have no expertise in. And this question requires a longer historical understanding of the question of European colonialism in the region and the colonial nature of the way in which nation states are formed. And so I think this point that they're trying to make, that's historically inaccurate points to the fact that they are. Privileging a specific sort of nation state, European nation state order of the accounting of history and the landscape of the region in which Palestine is a part. But I also wanted to say that just as a counter to this argument, maybe many people have seen that visit Palestine poster that. Is heavily circulated. That poster was circulated actually by Zionists trying to push for Jewish migration to Palestine prior to the state of Israel being formed. And you look at even the Belfor Declar declaration in 1917, right prior to the British even taking official mandatory control over Palestine and militarizing Palestine, that they state that they promise basically a Jewish homeland in Palestine to the leaders of the Zionist movement. And the Zionists themselves know that there was something and is something called Palestine in those historic lands. I wanted to go back a little bit to the IRA definition of antisemitism and how this weaponizing is deeply racialized. I think this bill promotes anti Palestinian racism because it works to erase our existence. It also works to target, and it has historically in California, for the past five plus years, worked to target Arab American Studies as a whole, as a subfield of Asian American studies and, you really cannot study Arab-American studies without centering the question of Palestine. It's always been a central question. For Arabs and for the history of Arab-Americans in the United States. Palestine has always been a central issue. And the last point that I would like to make, turning back to the IRA definition, is that weaponizing a critique of a foreign nation state. The Israeli genocidal state as antisemitic is deeply offensive and also dangerous for Jews in the United States. Who may experience actual forms of antisemitic violence because it flattens the definition of antisemitism and it applies it to different frameworks for understanding what a foreign nation state is doing. And so it waters down the ways in which Jewish communities here might actually being attacked for racist or xenophobic reasons.
Marcy:This is Marcia. I absolutely agree and I think that this kind of definition, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and examples that conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are anti-Semitic at the core. I was raised as a Jewish person and raised to believe in one God monotheism is a bedrock of the Jewish religion and tradition, and yet. Even though we were taught to reject idolatry, this worship of a nation state is a form of idolatry. Not only that, not only the fact that it runs counter to the teachings of Judaism, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition paints all Jews as a monolith, that we all support the state of Israel, that we all view criticism of the state of Israel's founding principles as anti-Semitic. We don't, that's not true. And so I would just turn this question on its head and say, why would anyone support this definition and examples when it promotes antisemitism?
Christine:Ironically, one of the definitions of antisemitism in the IRA definition is the conflation of Jewish people with a state of Israel. Yet this is what the legislative Jewish caucus itself does. And by expanding the definition of antisemitism to include any critique of the state of Israel, the caucus itself is violating the IRA definition. This is not an endorsement of the IRA definition, but to point out that the fatal flaw in this expanded notion of antisemitism and its application to ethnic studies is that these kinds of legislators who don't even dane. To consult with ethnic studies experts before arrogantly attempting to legislate on ethnic studies. They do not understand that ethnic studies is not ethnicity studies and ethnic studies, sure as hell is not the propagandistic imperialist whitewashing of repressive ethno nationalisms Dylan. You are the sole distinguished professor in the uc system who received a degree in ethnic studies from the uc. So we are ethnic studies practitioners, we're scholars, we're experts, and I'd really like to invite you to weigh in on AB 1468. In particular two provisions of this bill. One of the provisions basically states that ethnic studies has to focus strictly on the domestic experience of marginalized peoples in the United States. And that it has to, as Marcy was discussing before, studiously not go into the realm of ideological theories, causes, or pedagogies that inform a specific group's experiences. And so that's one provision of the bill. Another one is that ethnic studies cannot fall into the arena of advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partnership that it has to abide by. Accepted standards of professional responsibility and that it must be fair and balanced. Could you please speak to this and could you weigh in on any aspect of this bill as an ethnic studies expert?
Dylan:I appreciate this question and I'll just say that I'm not sure that I'm the only distinguished professor with a PhD in ethnic studies from the uc system, but I can guarantee I'm one of very few if there are others. And which is meaningful only in the sense here that none of us distinguished professor or otherwise, none of us who actually hold a PhD in the field of ethnic studies was ever remotely contacted, much less consulted by anybody who had anything to do with writing this legislation. Alright, so that leads to two points I wanna make in response to your question. One is, we need to treat this legislation and it's writers for what they are. These are clown ass politicians. They're the opportunistic foot soldiers of a larger community of political, propagandists of an academic community that supports Zionism in Israel and wants to normalize it and naturalize it as the only position that one can take in the university setting. These are groups of politically and ideologically driven people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who intentionally and persistently treat the scholarship of ethnic studies and affiliated fields through logics of what can only be called academic apartheid, curricular colonialism, and good old fashioned racist and anti-black double standards. What do I mean by that? Those are heavy words, heavy accusations. Every damn word of it. Okay? Imagine a group of ideologically driven elected state officials. Telling any field, for example, in stem, all right, any field in the business schools that the government should control the content of their curriculum while simultaneously not consulting with a single scholar who is actually based in those fields. That shit would never happen. Y'all it would never ever happen, right? It would never happen there. There'd be no credibility. So it's warfare on multiple fronts, but at the level of curricular ideological warfare, that's what's ironic in some ways and hypocritical, but I think entirely intentional about the way the bill is written, is that there's an implicit accusation that people who teach ethnic studies are somehow ideologically driven when the entire bill is an ideological declaration of war, right? There's not even a remote understanding of what ethnic studies is as a scholarly field and how much rigor has gone into compiling archives and concepts and curricula, like all the work. Okay? So that's the first point. The second point is a shorter one that I just wanna make to just tie some threads together to just convey how insidious and how dangerous the forces behind this bill actually are. The bill itself is dangerous, but I'm talk about the forces behind the bill. Everything about this bill echoes what has come to be known as white supremacist replacement theory. Okay? In the case of this bill, the term multiculturalism intends to displace and replace ethnic studies and the multiculturalism concept that got thrown out with the trash, literally decades ago, right? So the notion of multiculturalism that's being put forward in this build, this is a kind of rhetorical cover for the anxieties of white supremacists and multiculturalist replacement propagandists, right? Who are concerned. Somehow that that their version of knowledge, their version of teaching and curriculum, is somehow going to be wholly destroyed and replaced by ethnic studies, which of course is not the case. Maybe it should be, but it's not the case. So this is really no different than white supremacist replacement theory in the academic setting. So those are two points I'd make about this.
Christine:This is something that Marcy was mentioning before, this attempt to dumb down the criticality of a field that originated in a third worlds student movement. Anyone wanna speak about the kind of dumbing down to the domestic experience and what kind of violence that re inscribes.
Sean:I'll just say that, one of the most threatening things of those student movements of the 1960s and seventies that resulted in ethnic studies is that they were not simply organizing for ethnic studies. They were not simply organizing for an institutionalized formation that included their voices and the voices of their communities. They were organizing an international solidarity against genocide and imperialism projects that their own universities and government were engaged in. And that has always been threatening Even the more limited formation of ethnic studies that arose out of those protests, which in no ways met the full vision of those students, even that more limited vision remains threatening because it does. It does not simply critique power, but shows how that power operates across international borders and offers students tools for thinking about ways to resist that in a way that is not confined to the borders of the US nation state. And there are always people, not just Republicans, not just conservatives, but many Democrats and liberals who find that idea terrifying,
Christine:Thank you, Sean. Some of you have described this bill as racist both during this conversation and elsewhere. And I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by that and further, how does this particular bill fit into the current political landscape? One in which, as Dylan was saying, we have seen massive repression of students, faculty, staff. How does it relate to the Trump agenda? The members of the legislative Jewish caucus are by and large members of the Democratic party, and they're part of that, bipartisan war party apparatus. But can you situate this bill in our current moment and can you also elaborate on what you mean when you say this is racist? This bill is brought forward by this caucus that claims that it's trying to thwart and guard against antisemitism. What is racist about this bill?
Marcy:This is Marcy. I think what Dylan laid out speaks to this, and that is the bill. Ideological warfare. It says that students should not be looking at the connection between what's happening here and what happened over there. Forget about international relations, US foreign policy, colonialism across the board. Focus only on what, I don't know, focus on festivals, is that what they're asking? It says, don't look at the causes of marginalization. So we're not supposed to look at white supremacy and how that impacts students of color in our country. As Dylan pointed out, none of the people that worked on this bill, the co-authors actually consulted ethnic studies scholars. That's presumptuous to say the least. at the end of the day, the bill also doesn't make economic sense. We have a big debt in California. We wanna fund ethnic studies. That should be the principle demand at this point. It is unfunded, even though it has been codified into state law. And instead, we have a legislative Israel caucus focusing on policing the discipline.
Sean:Yeah. This is Sean and I want to just underline a pointment that's been made by Marcy and by Dylan. We are all very rightly focused on the current assault on education and our basic civil liberties from the current. Administration of Washington as we should be. I know people who are on this podcast are particularly concerned about assaults on our students. From that administration, students literally being disappeared into unmarked vans. As we fight that, we also need to acknowledge the way in which Democrats, liberals, and folks in deep blue states like California have been complicit in that agenda. And actually long before Project 2025 of the current administration have been involved in efforts to systematically censor. Repress efforts to learn about issues around race, about Palestine. This is not simply a Trump problem or a Republican problem, or a project, 2025 problem. This racist bill is being put forward by Democrats in a deep blue state with a two third super majority. We have problems here. We need to confront that go beyond the current administration, and even as we fight the censorship and repression and violence unleashed by the Trump administration, we need to have our eyes on the folks in Sacramento and elsewhere. I believe Dylan called them clown ass politicians. I hope I quoted you correctly, Dylan. Those folks are mostly Democrats. And while we here in California may not have the ability to instantly change policy in Washington we have power in our local elections. We have power to put pressure on those who represent us in Sacramento and locally to walk away from this racist bill, and also to more broadly act in favor of liberation rather than repression. And that is something that cannot be said of the vast majority of our representatives in Sacramento right now.
Jmo:This is Jennifer. I wanted to bring the conversation back to how this bill is anti Palestinian, anti-Arab and discriminates is anti-Muslim and xenophobic to just say that the authors and supporters of this bill are at best genocide, deniers, and at most genocide supporters. And so when we're talking about teaching and educating our students in a framework that. Largely fits outside of what we're traditionally taught. It's really important that those who have studied from a different perspective through ethnic studies and related fields are central determinants of this curriculum. And I think just to add a last point is that we're seeing perhaps one of the largest student movements that we've seen since the inception of the field in 1968. The center of that is Palestine and the central threat. To establishment politics that are bipartisan is this question of Palestine. And we're seeing radical persecution of people who are exercising their First Amendment rights because of this central question. And if we allow ethnic studies to be censored and determined by people who are racist, who deny genocides happening. We're gonna allow not just the erasure of Palestinians from our curriculum, or Arabs and Arab Americans from our curriculum or critical perspective on Muslim studies. It is going to come to all of our communities that we center in ethnic studies. Palestine is the center right now, and it's using decades of built up propaganda that is anti Palestinian and anti-Arab from the Cold War, red Scare discourse to the war on terror policy changes. And now we're seeing that crystallizing against Palestinian communities and their supporters, especially students real material consequences are being wielded for speaking out against genocide.
Marcy:Yes, this is Marcy and I appreciate everything that Jennifer said. And second that, and I thought now might be an opportune time to share the comments made by one of the co-authors, Josh Becker, who is representing, in quotes, Menlo Park, the Atherton area. If anyone had any doubt about the motivation for this bill, I think listening to Becker will answer you. So if it's all right with you, I'll play this clip from a webinar on the bill AB 1468, in which co-authors Don ATIs Rick Chavez and Josh Becker were interviewed and they talk about why they were so motivated to become a warrior. They used the term warrior for this bill. And note of what he says.
Clip from JPAC:All know the UN created Israel, um, and there was no Palestine before that, and Gaza was controlled by Egypt. And we all know the history.
Marcy:And think back to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. I'm not holding it up as an admirable document. Absolutely not. But even in the Balfour Declaration, it talks about establishing a Jewish homeland in quote Palestine.
Christine:I wanted to just mention that one of the ways in which the legislative Jewish caucus has sought to portray ethnic studies is that the field. Encourages students to divide people into two categories, a binary of oppressors versus oppressed, this is a cartoonish portrait. But this gets at the question of not ever looking at causes. It is not the case that ethnic studies resizes groups at all. Instead, ethnic studies enables us critically to examine structures and systems of violence, of which Zionism is one. And as Jennifer was saying, there is a genocide happening and the repression that is happening here, I. Is tied to that genocide. So we need to be able to have a cross border conversation about transnational systems and structures of violence. And critical thinking also is not comfortable. It challenges received preconceptions. I wanted to say something too. Gavin Newsom in a squirrely moment issued an open letter to California's Muslim, Palestinian American and Arab American communities last year. And he essentially stated, okay, I realize that many of you are alienated. You have seen the Democratic Party say exactly nothing about what is happening in Gaza. And he acknowledges that Arab Americans, Palestinian Americans, Muslim Americans, have been failed by the political establishment. And he says, we have to earn back your trust. And then he states something extraordinary. He said, but don't worry, there is a place for you. And one of those places is in ethnic studies. And so I want to close this conversation and maybe we can spool things back. So what can people do And. What kind of actions should they be taking? How can people get involved and in what ways?
Marcy:This is Marcy Winter grad. I am a proud member of United Teachers of Los Angeles, 35,000 teachers strong, and a voting member of their governing structure, the House of Representatives. And we recently voted to take a position as a union in opposition to AB 1468. The police ethnic studies bill and this motion that passed is significant because United Teachers of Los Angeles is the largest. Chapter local of the California Teachers Association that represents 300,000 teachers throughout the state of California. CTA defeated the last bill to police ethnic studies. They can do it again if they take a principled stand in opposition, and that's what we are urging them to do. So if you are involved with your union, please bring this to the union for a vote, for a motion to oppose and let CTA and the legislators know also. As a chair of a Central Coast Anti-War coalition, a chapter of Code Pink, I've been urging all of our supporters to call their representatives in the assembly and in the California Senate and say, vote no on AB 1468. It's a backdoor attempt to silence the voices for Palestinian rights. It would bloat our state bureaucracy to use SERP local school district authority over curriculum, over community responsive curriculum. So let's get on the phone, let's send those emails and let's take this issue to our unions.
Christine:Yes, and in closing, I want to state that this is a bill that serves a very narrow ideological purpose that has broad damaging results. And so in the interest of defending. Israel at any and all costs. The legislative Jewish caucus is proposing legislation like AB 1468 that actually harm the ability of the majority of California's population to have access to an ethnic studies education. This is the sole field that has been shown to have broad across the board benefit for historically marginalized communities of color. This is the sole field of study that increases life chances by increasing college going, and that increases attendance at the K through 12 level. And so this is part of the racist effect of legislation like this, and we need to have. Lawmakers that serve the interests of the majority people of California. And that includes Arab Americans, Palestinian Americans, and Muslim Americans. And there is no way no how that anyone in the field of ethnic studies would consent to the erasure of Palestinian people in ethnic studies legislation. Thank you so much, Marcy, for joining the uc Ethnic Studies Council in our first podcast. Thank you everyone for listening.
Marcy:Great to be with you. Thank you so much for inviting me.