By Jody Sokolower
“The new red herring is the fear of being called antisemitic, and it’s so easy these days. Anyone who has eyes and ears knows there’s forced starvation in Gaza, but if you utter one word of criticism towards the government of Israel or mention Palestine you will be called antisemitic,” says Linn Lee, former Ethnic Studies curriculum specialist for Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) in southern California. “It’s the blackballing and false accusations that high school teachers and curriculum writers like myself fear. In essence, it is the silencing of free speech and academic freedom, and the threat to our jobs.”
Throughout the country, the ADL uses their power over national, state and local politicians; lawsuits; and doxxing in their efforts to prevent all teaching about Palestine in K-12 schools. In California, a primary focus has been Ethnic Studies, and the attack on Santa Ana is a clear example.
The student population of SAUSD is 96 percent Latinx and includes the largest concentration of Arab Americans outside of Dearborn, MI, so when statewide organizing for K-12 Ethnic Studies picked up steam, teachers and students were excited to join in. Linn came on board as SAUSD’s History Social Science curriculum specialist in 2013. Working with teachers who were already teaching Mexican American Studies in the district, she created high school and 8th-grade Ethnic Studies electives, which were offered at three schools in the district.
There was resistance from more conservative members of the district, but 150 parents, students and teachers showed up at a school board meeting to demand Ethnic Studies. By 2016, four high schools in the district were teaching Ethnic Studies.
“It was empowering for the students,” one of the teachers explained. “They saw their own histories and cultures coming into their classrooms. A big piece of the program we built was action research projects. Students were researching their communities from a lens of race, class, and gender. We incorporated an Ethnic Studies community conference, where students presented their findings to the community.
“One of the classes was A People’s History of Orange County. A couple of years ago, the students in that class got interested in Fremont Elementary School, which was named after John Fremont, a US military officer with major responsibility for genocides against Indigenous Californians in the 19th century. So the students wanted to change the name of the school. They spoke at school board meetings, talked with board members, and went out into the community. This year, their efforts met with success; the school has been renamed for Virginia and William Guzman, trailblazing Mexican American civil rights activists. So that’s the essence of what Ethnic Studies is—turning students into people who understand they can have an impact on our society through civic action and speaking truth to power.”
We need to push our unions and our
professional associations to step up to
defend Ethnic Studies educators.
After the Santa Ana School Board passed the Ethnic Studies graduation requirement in 2020, a year and a half before the state of California legislature passed a graduation requirement for all high schools, the district assembled a team to develop curriculum. “Our plan was to create core courses so that students could take, for example, an Ethnic Studies English class in 10th grade that would meet both requirements,” Linn explains.“We were busy creating core courses and electives in all departments, and trainings that would ground our teachers in the theoretical framework as well as the content. I call it our Golden Age. We brought in the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing (XITO) to help with training. They were a great choice for us because they have such a deep understanding of Ethnic Studies at the K-12 level, and you really need that.”
But a statewide battle over the content of Ethnic Studies was already in high gear. The committee of Ethnic Studies educators who created the draft model Ethnic Studies curriculum included lessons on Arab American studies and Palestine. The ADL and other Zionist organizations joined forces with other rightwing forces to eliminate not only Palestine but any discussion of settler colonialism and other core concepts from the curriculum. As part of their strategy to intimidate school districts into falling in line, they started looking for districts to sue. One of the districts they picked was Santa Ana.
The original complaint was that the SAUSD Ethnic Studies curriculum didn’t include Jewish American history. Educators tried to explain that Jewish and Jewish American history are well-represented in California history standards, but that made no difference. The district was flooded with public record act requests and demands that curriculum be changed. The pressure mounted.
In 2024, the ADL, the Brandeis Center and the American Jewish Committee sued SAUSD for, according to the ADL, “introducing ethnic studies courses that were developed in secret and infected with antisemitism.” At the same time, they leaked personal correspondence to local conservative media that resulted in doxxing attacks on Linn, other Ethnic Studies teachers, and the two school board members who had championed Ethnic Studies.
We were busy creating core courses and electives
in all departments, and trainings that would
ground our teachers in the theoretical framework as well as the content. I call it our Golden Age.
Teachers, students, pro-Palestinian organizations, and parents spoke in defense of Ethnic Studies at school board meetings. But many people were afraid.
“It was a rough year,” one teacher explained. “There was the lawsuit, and close to 300 teachers got pink slipped [laid off]. The union never came out in support of Ethnic Studies. Some members of the union said we need to stand up. But others used the lawsuit as a scapegoat for the pink slips.”
The district decided to settle the lawsuit instead of fighting. They agreed to stop teaching Ethnic Studies World Geography, Ethnic Studies World Histories and Ethnic Studies: Perspectives, Identities and Social Justice until the courses were completely rewritten. The Ethnic Studies steering team was disbanded, and XITO’s contract was canceled. Linn was pushed out of her job, and then decided to retire early. She felt she was used as the “fall guy.”
“All training stopped,” Linn says. “At the end of the year, we had educators who wanted to train so they could teach Ethnic Studies. But we had educators who were scared of taking the training and scared of teaching it because of the lawsuit—they didn’t want to be targeted. So what did the district do? They ignored the program altogether, to the point where this year we have high school students who are in Ethnic Studies classes where the teachers have not been trained in Ethnic Studies.”
“Ethnic Studies is liberation studies …
That goes against all of our institutional structures, which are based on colonization and oppression.
So we shouldn’t be surprised, and
we need to be ready for these attacks.”
For educators, students and the Santa Ana community, the fight for Ethnic Studies isn’t over. They have learned important lessons from the bitter experience of the past few years. “One thing is that we need to push our unions and our professional associations to step up to defend Ethnic Studies educators,” says one teachers’ union leader. “Especially now, with the growing threat of authoritarianism in our country, the unions need to stand up for our membership. We need to stand together in opposition to these attacks on our academic freedom. And we need to create more of those organic connections with families and community. Those connections make our schools stronger when we can mobilize together and parents, students and teachers have each other’s backs. That’s what Ethnic Studies is about. Ethnic studies came from the ground up, that’s our roots, in San Francisco State in 1969 and the East LA Walkouts.”
“We have to understand that Ethnic Studies is liberation studies,” adds Linn. “That goes against all of our institutional structures, which are based on colonization and oppression. So we shouldn’t be surprised, and we need to be ready for these attacks.
“When I was first attacked, it was personally devastating, because it is traumatic to be called an antisemite when you’re not. However, the inclusion of Ethnic Studies within high school graduation requirements remains the most important priority. And that’s something I am proud to have been part of, because learning only partial history is not true knowledge.”
