Ethnic studies—a field that covers the historical, social, economic and political perspectives of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latino Americans—is a “discipline that comes from examining shared community strife,” says Melina Abdullah, Professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.
In California, the current spotlight on racial justice helped revitalize calls for the incorporation of ethnic studies into statewide curricula, and Abdullah says the field is particularly significant in today’s political climate because it “belongs to the struggle for liberation, the struggle for decolonization, and the struggle to make Black Lives Matter.” Even so, the field itself predates the Black Lives Matter movement by decades—and the recent milestones for ethnic studies in the CSU system, which is the birthplace of ethnic studies itself, are the culmination of an ongoing battle that can be traced back to over 50 years ago.
The origins of the Third World Liberation Front
The foundations of ethnic studies were laid by members of SF State’s Black Student Union (BSU) in the mid-1960s. At the time, minority students made up just 4% of the student body, and the university had been resisting appeals for the creation of a Black studies department. Lacking political power, the BSU started to demand admissions spots for Black students and courses that would accurately reflect their history.
At the time, Laureen Chew, who is now a Professor Emerita with the College of Ethnic Studies in the Asian American Studies Department at SF State, was a student member of an organization that tutored young immigrants in the local Chinatown community. Her activism was sparked when she and her Chinese American friends started realizing that their families’ experiences dealing with prejudiced treatment were not unique. “My friend and I attended a meeting with African Americans, Chicanos and Native Americans. We were all talking about the same issues, and our student groups were doing similar work in our respective communities,” Chew says from her home in San Francisco, where she has lived her entire life.
Realizing that the BSU students and other students of color were organizing around common causes, the groups on campus decided to join forces, calling themselves the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). The concept of the Third World “didn’t flatten differences, but allowed different communities to come together and see themselves in one another,” says Jason Ferreira, an Associate Professor in the Department of Race & Resistance Studies, located within the College of Ethnic Studies at SF State. “The fight against racism, the fight for a relevant and meaningful education, the necessity of meeting the needs of their communities—regardless of whether you were Black, Brown, Asian or Native—those principles are what held people together, and gave them the resolve to work through differences in their alliance. What developed at SF State was revolutionary.”