More on the 40th

The 40th anniversary celebration of Ethnic Studies at Berkeley begins tomorrow with the Pilipino American Alliance dinner. Although the week of events celebrates the past 40 years of Ethnic Studies and the third world Liberation Front, there's a good deal of focus on three points in time: the original student strike of 1968, the subsequent strike of 1999, and the current campus climate.

It seems natural, doesn't it? To focus on epic moments in history and the present, since we are within it. But is the present an epic moment in history? I think a detour to the 1980's will help us find an answer

This is also the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the American Cultures requirement. The AC requirement began as an effort to expose every UC Berkeley undergraduate student to the Ethnic Studies philosophy-- a campus wide effort to escape Eurocentrism. But this accomplishment isn't the focus of the week's events. Why?

Is it because the AC requirement no longer seems revolutionary? Not all AC courses are taught from a decolonial perspective. The requirement for AC standing is to include three different American cultures, not to ask how and why they developed as they have, or try to create positive change.

Or is it because the methods of the movement seem less radical than the student strikes. In activism, must we hold public protests to be epic? It seems that the campus sees a different public protest on campus every week, carefully controlled between the hours of 12.00 and 1.00, when the campus allows amplified sound on the main plaza. These strikes rarely draw more than 50 people. Still, students and community members packed Sproul plaza to watch the innauguration of President Obama.

Is this a symptom of the movement or a symptom of the method? Should we activists be searching for a new method of raising awareness? Is the era of mass public protests gone? Or is this generation of college students less epic than those that have come before us? Are we waiting for a different cause? A bigger catalyst to spur more of us to action and cause seperate groups to join together?

Maybe I will find some of the answer this week.