This story starts as far back as 2010, when Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, got his knickers in a twist because Tucson Unified School District, which is about 60 percent Latino, was teaching courses that honored Mexican-American culture—history, literature, politics, art. It’s fair to say that it’s impossible to have a good grasp of Arizona history without knowing Latino history, since this place was Mexico until the mid-19th century.
Superintendent Horne originally claimed that the Tucson courses were teaching Hispanics to hate white people, so the Republican legislature, at his behest, passed a law that prohibited schools to offer classes that
"promote the overthrow of the United States government; promote resentment toward a race or class of people; are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."
I always wondered how you could teach Native American history here without “promot[ing] resentment,” considering what Europeans did to the original inhabitants, but that’s another diary.
When Horne was elected Attorney General in 2011, playing his “tough on immigrants” card, former legislator John Huppenthal became school superintendent, and continued to lash out against the popular program in Tucson. (Popular and successful: students who took the ethnic studies class performed better.)
Civil rights organizations and teachers filed suit, claiming the new law was designed for racial reasons only, and over the next five years the case traveled back and forth between different courts, with parts of the law being sustained and parts stricken. After the last appeal, which challenged the law’s fundamental racial basis, it was sent back to Judge A. Wallace Tashima at the U.S. District Court for Arizona, who issued his ruling this morning:
A U.S. District Court judge on Tuesday ruled that an Arizona law passed to stop Mexican-American studies classes in Tucson schools was enacted for racial and political reasons and is therefore unconstitutional.
Judge Tashima said part of the evidence for the racial motivation stems from Superintendent Huppenthal’s online sockpuppet blog posts, where he anonymously supported the ban and made dozens of outrageous statements, like comparing the Tucson teachers to Hitler. As we reported here at the time, when Blog for Arizona broke the story that it was Huppenthal behind the appallingly racist and historically inaccurate posts, he didn’t even win the GOP primary for his next election. Tom Horne also lost his primary in the AG race.
Huppenthal lost, Horne lost, Arpaio lost and the ethnic studies program is alive. Sweet!