Ethnic Studies For All
In the final line of his poem, “I, Too,” the poet Langston Hughes writes “I, too, am America.” This verse and the poem operate as declarative statements. Hughes’s poem reminds us that the United States is not a homogenous nation but one that is wondrously heterogenous. There are many kinds of people who inhabit her land and a variety of cultural practices that help make up the tapestry of life in the United States. We invite students to join an intellectual community where they can learn and talk about the tapestries that help to make the United States a diverse nation. In short, we will work together to get to know the hidden and the well-known as well as the difficult and the contested. In so doing, the hope is that students who earn a minor in Ethnic Studies will go out into the world as knowledgeable, faithful, and engaged citizens with justice at the center of their vocation and daily practice.
What is Ethnic Studies?
The Ethnic Studies minor is the interdisciplinary study of racial and ethnic difference—including how these constructs intersect with other social identity categories including class, gender, sexual orientation, ability—and power as it manifests interpersonally, institutionally, and structurally. The discipline of US Ethnic Studies includes several racial and ethnic groups as a focus of inquiry.
Ethnic Studies Within the Broader US Context
Ethnic Studies includes the study of various racial and ethnic histories, cultures, vernaculars, and epistemologies as sites of inquiry including but not limited to Black studies, Native American studies, Indigenous studies, Chicano/a studies, Latino/a studies, Puerto Rican studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies.