Ethnic Studies Is American

In 1943, a woman was first allowed to enter a Harvard classroom. Twenty full years later, a woman was first awarded a Harvard diploma. In 1975, Harvard and Radcliffe admissions merged, establishing equal admissions standards for both male and female applicants. Today, Harvard women are able to enroll into a field of concentration created to focus on the theory and history of their position in culture and society. The creation of the women’s studies concentration was, according to the Handbook for Students, an impetus to bring together the “new scholarship on women and gender that has come to occupy an increasingly important place in a number of disciplines over the past two decades.”

In the same year that women gained admissions standards equal to their male counterparts, a similar course of action was underway for the Harvard’s “other woman.” Although it had been 80 years since the distinguished W.E.B. Dubois became the first black person to receive a doctorate degree from GSAS, it wasn’t until 1975 that the Harvard administration took its first step toward equalizing academic footing for ethnic minorities.

Today, Harvard’s curriculum offers a myriad of concentrations focusing on ethnic and regional studies, including Afro-American Studies, East Asian Studies, Sanskrit and Indian Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. These concentrations bring together the cultures and histories of various ethnic groups to define their position in culture and society. But problems arise both about whether the bounds of these concentrations are too specific, and about whether this specificity marginalizes and Orientalizes the study of ethnicity in Harvard academia.

Ethan Y. Yeh ’03 is currently spearheading an effort to establish an ethnic studies concentration under the direction of Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies Werner Sollors. The idea is to create a concentration for the study of the self-definition and boundaries of all ethnic groups.

Critics of the idea of an ethnic studies concentration say that the concentration will limit the study of ethnicity to the study of a handful of groups whose self-definition and boundaries change continuously with time. They argue the partiality to these ethnic groups over others that the concentration might harbor is unfair. Furthermore, critics say students wishing to undertake coursework or thesis projects on ethnic and regional studies may already do so under the requirements of existing concentrations.

But the problem of preference given to specific ethnic groups over others is only a logistical difficulty that can be overcome by the efforts and needs of a diverse faculty and student body. And the option presented to students undertaking ethnic and regional studies within already existing concentrations is ineffective. There is no single methodology for the study of race and ethnicity. Having ethnic studies students adjust their thesis projects to fit the methodological demands of an indirectly related concentration only temporarily curbs the problem caused by the emergence of new scholarship on ethnicity and race that, like that of women’s studies, is coming to occupy an increasingly important place in a number of disciplines.

These points are still secondary to the main argument in favor of an ethnic studies concentration. During a recent lecture, Sollors noted that what is American has become “an incorporation of both indigenousness and arrival, to formulate an all-inclusive story of our various arrivals [to America].” The story of the creation of the American nation is a story of arrivals. Almost all Americans arrived here at some point or another. To ignore the study of the self-definitions and boundaries of ethnicity is to deny the very characteristic that makes us American. What is American is constantly evolving. What is “ethnic”—what is “other”—can no longer be separated from what is American.

Therefore, the marginalizing, the Orientalizing, the “otherness,” of ethnic studies should no longer occur in Harvard academia. Long established domination of scholarship by the Western European and American tradition does not justify the academic objectification of ethnic studies. After all, the first woman arrived at Harvard 58 years ago. But W. E. B. Dubois arrived long, long before.

Julia Chuang ’03 is a social studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House.