AROC: Arab Resource & Organizing Center

Thank you SF Chronicle for amplifying our stories and voices on the front page of today's news as the battle over California's Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum c...ontinues today at the State Board of Education. Read about it here. ------------------------------------------------- "Jorge Pacheco Jr., an ethnic studies teacher in the Bay Area and president of the Oak Grove School District board in San Jose, was part of that committee. He said the revisions water down the emphasis on people of color and allow for the 'complete erasure of Palestinians.'" Pacheco said he did not object to telling the stories of Sikhs, Armenians and Jews of color. But, he said, many other changes turned the course into a more generalized discussion of diversity that distracts from the emphasis on how people of color have been oppressed. 'They have undermined and whitewashed ethnic studies,' Lara Kiswani, executive director of the AROC: Arab Resource & Organizing Center in San Francisco said. 'It’s all about eradicating racism, challenging colonial conquest and enslavement. And instead, what we have today is another form of colonizing ethnic studies itself.'"