Christine Hong on Securitizing California’s Ethnic Studies

Transcript

Christine Hong on Securitizing California’s Ethnic Studies

Welcome to Battling the IHRA definition, a new podcast by the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. I’m Yulia Gilich, your host and a member of the founding collective of the institute.
“The IHRA definition” refers to the push by Zionist institutions and policymakers to equate criticizing Israel with antisemitism and equate Zionism with Jewishness. IHRA is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which initially drafted that definition of antisemitism as a quote unquote “working document.”
In today’s episode, we’ll hear from Christine Hong, speaking at our October 2023 conference titled Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism. Christine Hong is a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her talk is titled Securitizing California’s Ethnic Studies.

On our website, criticalzionismstudies.org, you can access the transcript and a video recording of this talk, as well as many more conference videos, transcripts, and papers, with new materials being regularly added. You can also find more resources about the IHRA definition and how to resist. Check out the episode notes for more details.

I wanted to go ahead and offer some comments. These are more descriptive than they are analytical. But I’m going to be speaking about California’s Ethnic Studies, and this is really sort of organizing notes more than anything else. So this is a moment of broad statewide institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in response to AB 101, and this is a law that Gavin Newsom signed in October 2021. And I wanted to speak about what’s been mentioned repeatedly since he signed that into law and which had been mobilized beforehand, which is this rhetorical language of guardrails and this language of guardrails, it’s an architectural metaphor that forces us to think about the field of Ethnic Studies as an enclosure whose bounds are ideologically policed. 

And today’s conference represents the long trajectory of work that precedes what we are doing here today, by people who insisted that Zionism could be scrutinized, it could be studied, by those who are targeted by it, and in this contemporary moment that also includes Ethnic Studies practitioners. And it’s interesting because when this conference was announced, there was pushback from people, including locally within Jewish Studies, about whether or not we had a right to do what we’re doing. But what’s also interesting in this moment is that non-Ethnic Studies practitioners have no problems trying to determine the Ethnic Studies curriculum. 

And so I wanted to just show you, I want to say something which is, I’m calling this “The Securitizing of Ethnic Studies,” which was conceived of as a liberatory field. And I borrow here from the North Korea scholar Hazel Smith, who in, I want to say that it was 2000, came up with this idea of the securitization paradigm. And she said that, with regard to North Korea, that everything is perceived through basically, it’s perceived through a kind of imperial war lens. And she says it’s heavily colored by security perspective, and this is predicated upon the use of imperial military force. And she says, of course, this applies to areas of foreign policy, she said, but extends far beyond. She said, it just colors everything. 

And I think that in our moment too, we can see that against the possibility of Ethnic Studies being liberatory, we have these forces that are arguing for the imperial securitization of the field. And this sort of language of security links to what Sean Malloy has called the safe space of Ethnic Studies, and the way that Zionist organizations have tried to render Ethnic Studies into a securitized safe space. And I would just link the safe space discourse to the asymmetrical warfare conception of neutralization. 

So I wanted to say something about this too, because if you look at the guardrails, this is an AB 101, it states outright that when local educational agencies, when schools and when districts are developing Ethnic Studies, if you read to the very end, basically they are instructed not to use the portion of the first draft model curriculum that were not adopted by the IQC [Instructional Quality Commission] of the California Department of the Education, due to concerns related to bias, bigotry and discrimination. They don’t outright say, Palestine. Okay, they don’t outright say what was purged from the first model curriculum. So they don’t say that, pal, you cannot mention Palestine, but they say bias, bigotry and discrimination. And this, in many ways, is an attempt to reduce Palestine and Palestinians to an impermissible viewpoint, or in the phrase of a local here, who has Tammy Rossman Benjamin, she has, I’m going to keep it local, who says, “Antisemitism is how they think about the world.” So it’s not just that there’s a conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, but that conflation at its core is also an identitarian definition of Palestinians with antisemitism. So that is the kind of default reduction. 

And so what happened between the first model curriculum that mentioned BDS, that mentioned the occupation of Palestine, was the purging of Palestine from the state-endorsed version of the model curriculum and the inclusion of several lesson plans on antisemitism. This is hardly what [Rabab] Abdulhadi has referred to as the indivisibility of justice. There has been a deliberate exclusion of Palestine in this securitized enclosure of Ethnic Studies and the ground truth of Palestine, to borrow a phrase from Eyal Weizman must ceaselessly be denied in every single arena imaginable, including education. 

And so this framing really invites educators to participate in collusion, in the deterritorialization of Palestine within the space of our classrooms. So I wanted to just show you, so Tony Thurmond, who is the current Superintendent of Education, of public education, stated, and you can see here that “the California Department of Education (CDE) will intervene whenever we learn about an antisemitic act or other forms of hate at a California public school.” And I so I wanted to just dwell on this for a moment, because he launched an entire Education to End Hate series that was inaugurated by an antisemitism webinar that he collaboratively developed with the California Jewish Legislative Caucus, and he says that he’s beginning with antisemitism, because basically, he’s arguing that it’s a foundational form of racist hate. 

And so I just want to see how there was a shift from the support for Ethnic Studies, it becomes contaminated by Palestine. It becomes a third rail that has, well, I’m mixing my metaphors here. But there’s this shift then to what Amira was talking about before, which is to combating hate. And so what happens is Ethnic Studies get funded by $50 million for implementation. In response to Zionist lobbying of the California Department of Education, it launches a new anti-hate initiative. I hope you can see in the top right hand corner, dedicating $90 million to fighting hate. And I want to talk at the end, I just want a few minutes to do this about what would an anti-hate curriculum look like, and what materials should be included in it. 

So I just want to just point out something too, this is a link to something that was mentioned before. Early on in terms of the development of the statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, there was a diverse coalition, and I’m calling it a brutal solidarity of organizations that came out in support of the Zionist critique of Ethnic Studies. And you can see here that this included many different groups. It included the, you know, BJP, Hindutva, sort of diaspora. It included Korean evangelicals. It included Venezuelan escapees, you know, and it was basically this sort of coalition of repressive ethno-nationalisms that were coming forward that were understanding that Ethnic Studies is ethnicity studies, when, in fact, it’s never been ethnicity studies. 

And so there’s a failure, this is worse than multicultural education, okay? I mean, I want you just to get a sense of that. This misunderstands the nature of the Third World Liberation Front strike, which took the university as an object of study. It was basically critical university studies, critiquing the university’s function and reproducing the social status quo. So in this sense, understanding the university is not a neutral arena, but it’s a site of struggle, organizing, contestation, and understanding that it’s fundamentally in collusion, it’s central to the military industrial complex. It’s central to the national security state. It’s central to the US imperial war machine. And so you could see here that from some of the writings around TWL, that there’s this critique that, okay, we’re sort of hoodwinked into believing that the mass education system is about democracy. You know, Frantz Fanon said it’s not about democracy. It’s about bewilderment, right? And but instead, what does it do? It fulfills the needs of the war-oriented capitalist economy. You could see in this archival photo that it’s “We demand the AROTC off campus.” This is at SF State, right? It’s a fundamental understanding that students who are in the belly of the beast play a role, an inside role. There’s an inside, outside critique embedded in the idea of the Third World and an attempt on the part of a core of anti-imperialist student protesters who are organizing for these Third World colleges not to align themselves with the US war machine during a time of genocidal US interventionist war in Vietnam, but to remap these received dominant geopolitics by asserting their membership as part of a global decolonizing majority. They refuse the logic of being a national minority, right? 

And so I wanted to just say that in terms of doing work at the UC level, I was part of a 20 person work group that was assembled from across the UC system to pull together course criteria for Ethnic Studies. Immediately, the crosshairs of this Zionist War Machine moved from the state to all of us who were participating in this process. Six of us were writers of the course criteria, and this was supposed to be four to five meetings per year as a service assignment. It sounds doable, right? It included people who were lectures. It also included students. And instead, it turned into 30 hours per week of organizing because of the intensity of the repression, the harassing that we were facing. This included lecturers not getting their contracts renewed. It included people losing funding. It included classes getting infiltrated. It included hate mail. It included threats. And all of this was when we were appointed by the UC to do this work. Okay, so I wanted just for you to have a sense of this. But even while we were oftentimes blocked from being at the table to talk about Ethnic Studies and to develop it, even though we actually revised these course criteria five times, Zionist screeds against Ethnic Studies, perversely, were considered by the system-wide committee that was deliberating on this new area H in Ethnic Studies. So our course criteria had terms like indigeneity. These were, in a paranoid fashion, read as an encrypted reference to Palestinian. The argument was made that we had to include the term Jewish in course criteria that don’t even break down the subfields of Ethnic Studies, but that that would be necessary to securitize Ethnic Studies. 

So I’m just going to close, but I want to say something, because how often do we have an opportunity to talk about the kinds of impediments that we have faced locally, and indeed that we faced in the run up to this? And so in closing, I want to say that I have spent the last almost 14 years of my life organizing for Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and part of the story of our struggle for Ethnic Studies at Santa Cruz has been having to deal with organizations like AMCHA and figures like Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, it’s not just that there’s anti-Ethnic Studies, Ethnic Studies that are out and about. This moment of Ethnic Studies expansion is a moment of danger, and this is an organization that’s funded by Harlan Crow, who also funded Clarence Thomas to go on vacation, and it’s also Barry Weiss is involved, the Manhattan Institute, Chris Rufo was involved. And they basically say that the Ethnic Studies classroom is where you learn racial hatred. And therefore they’re going to offer a pro-human colorblind, anti-race, RACE-ist curriculum that is an alternative Ethnic Studies curriculum. 

But I want to just show this too. So here’s our friend who has been attacking the anti-Zionism of Critical Ethnic Studies based on the argument that Critical Ethnic Studies is particularly threatening to Jewish students. Time and again, time and again, we have heard this argument. It’s been the basis of legal cases that have failed, and indeed, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin launched a federal investigation of antisemitism at Santa Cruz saying that rhetoric, and you can see the IHRA definition here, “rhetoric which demonizes Israel crosses the line into antisemitism.” That’s how this conference was described. Okay, you know? And she filed a title VI complaint purporting to represent the students. And then what she’s also said in her complaint was that there were events that were held at UC Santa Cruz, including one called Understanding Gaza in 2009 and she says that, you know, “Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jewish Voice for Peace, they don’t represent Jewish people. They’re an extreme and disreputable fringe of American Jewry, not at all representative.” 

But then what happened was Shani Chabansky, who was the editor in chief of the Jewish student journal Leviathan at this time, she wrote an oped, and she wrote it in this journal. And she said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s eyes… I studied with her. She was my Hebrew lecturer. She said “her eyes are closed to the many Jewish students, myself included, who don’t feel like we are the victims of antisemitism. However, we are the victims of discrimination from sources within the Jewish community itself, because we challenge opinions about Israel.” 

And then I just want to this is part, this slide is not mine. It’s from Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s PowerPoint presentation. But I feature in there. But anyhow, like, but this is the other thing too, like, when, she’s also someone who described students from Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine, which was called CJP at UC Santa Cruz, she said they have ties to terrorist organizations. They’re terrorists. She terrorist-tagged them. And then when there was a petition that was written about her saying she’s making things unsafe for these students, that she’s terrorist-tagging, what happened was she said, I’ve been defamed. I’ve been defamed.  

So Tammi Rossman-Benjamin also said that I was an antisemite. She wrote with 78 organizations to the Jewish Legislative Caucus, claiming that I was and that the UC Ethnic Studies course criteria needed to be tanked. She also wrote to the UC regents with 99 organizations. And then, you know these Zionist media quick to pick up on her accusations, found a picture of a Christine Hong on social media, who happens to be a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Beverly Hills, but never mind, okay. But that should be subjected to analysis. 

And then I just wanted to read this, because I think that it gets to what we’re dealing with here today, and an implicit mobilization of the IHRA definition. I received this, “Christine, Zionism is the Jewish people’s indigenous movement for justice escape from anti semitism and self determination. It’s the world’s most successful liberation movement. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism by definition. Antisemites like you and other Jew-haters that you surround yourself with hate that you and your type don’t get to tell Jews what Zionism is. More critically, work on your inherent antisemitism. Hate is a mental illness. As an Asian, you should know this, most Asian Americans are decent people who aren’t antisemites. Unclear what happened to you.”