In Defense of Ethnic Studies: Student Resistance, Generational Legacies, and Womanism at Mills College

• In Event: (Re)Engaging Ethnic Studies in American Studies: The Possibilities of Creation, Solidarity, and Student Organizing

Abstract

When Northeastern University acquired Mills College in June 2021, we lost the longest-running Ethnic Studies program at an independent college. In 1968, students from Mills College, a small historically women’s liberal arts college in East Oakland, joined students from San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley in internationalist struggles to demand the creation of Ethnic Studies departments. Each school eventually conceded to establish its own degree-granting programs that began in the Fall of 1969. As alumnae of the Ethnic Studies program at Mills College, we are often in situations — even amongst colleagues within the discipline — where we need to explain Mills students’ participation in this critical student-led movement. We recognize that this often unheard history is a culmination of various factors — a significantly smaller student population, the gendered dynamics of visibility of the Black women at the forefront of this movement, the predominantly Black surrounding neighborhood, and the hardships of preserving the institutional memory of student movements. We begin this paper by grounding the origins of Ethnic Studies at Mills in student organizing. Drawing from autoethnographic reflections and interviews with alumnae who participated in the creation of the Ethnic Studies department, we continue to trace the capacity of Ethnic Studies to respond to student needs in evolving higher education settings in the following decades through The Womanist, a student-run literary magazine founded in 1992 named after Alice Walker’s “womanism.” We then chart our efforts to revive The Womanist in 2018 in part as a response to the unjust firing of Vivian Chin, the tenured chair of the Ethnic Studies department, and in an explicitly trans-inclusive manner. In the contemporary moment as we are surrounded by federal assaults on subaltern epistemologies, student movements, and bodily autonomy, this paper further demonstrates how Ethnic Studies students have always been in a protective mode to fight for the longevity and survival of the discipline. We look to histories of student organizing within Ethnic Studies in the specific context of Mills College as important sites of cultural memory that offer useful insights on broader strategies of resistance for academic freedom and critical curriculum with which we can arm ourselves as we continue toward a liberated future.

Authors

• Samantha M Barnett, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

• Katherine Funes, University of California, Irvine