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Session Length
~17 min
Adaptive Checks
15 questions
Transfer Probes
8
Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the histories, cultures, and political experiences of racially and ethnically marginalized groups. Emerging from the civil rights movements and campus protests of the late 1960s, the discipline was formally established in 1968 when the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State College led a student strike demanding curricula that reflected the experiences of communities of color. The field encompasses four foundational pillars: African American studies, Asian American studies, Chicano/Latino studies, and Native American/Indigenous studies, though it has since expanded to include comparative and transnational approaches.
At its core, ethnic studies investigates how race and ethnicity intersect with other social categories such as class, gender, sexuality, and immigration status to shape lived experience. The field draws on methodologies from history, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, political science, and philosophy to analyze systemic inequalities, cultural production, resistance movements, and community formation. Key theoretical frameworks include critical race theory, settler colonialism, diaspora studies, internal colonialism, and intersectionality, each offering distinct lenses for understanding how power operates across racial and ethnic lines.
Today, ethnic studies is practiced in universities worldwide and has entered K-12 education in several U.S. states. Research consistently shows that ethnic studies curricula improve academic engagement and critical thinking for students of all backgrounds. The field continues to evolve by addressing contemporary issues such as mass incarceration, immigration policy, environmental racism, Indigenous sovereignty, and the global dimensions of racial capitalism, making it an essential area of study for understanding both historical and present-day social structures.
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A theoretical framework originating in legal scholarship that examines how laws, institutions, and social structures perpetuate racial inequality. It holds that racism is not merely individual prejudice but is embedded in systemic policies and practices.
Example: Analyzing how historically race-neutral housing policies such as redlining systematically excluded Black families from homeownership and wealth accumulation for decades.
A concept developed by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw describing how overlapping social identities such as race, gender, class, and sexuality interact to create unique experiences of discrimination and privilege that cannot be understood by examining any single category alone.
Example: Black women may face employment discrimination that is distinct from what Black men or white women experience, because racial and gender biases compound in ways specific to their intersecting identities.
A form of colonialism in which outsiders come to a land inhabited by Indigenous peoples and establish permanent settlements, claiming territorial sovereignty and displacing or eliminating the original population. Unlike extractive colonialism, the colonizers intend to stay permanently.
Example: The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are analyzed as settler colonial states where Indigenous land dispossession, forced assimilation programs, and treaty violations continue to shape Indigenous life.
A theoretical model arguing that racial and ethnic minorities within a nation-state can be subjected to colonial-like exploitation and political domination, including economic extraction, cultural suppression, and restricted self-governance.
Example: Robert Blauner applied internal colonialism to describe how African Americans in the United States experienced forced entry through enslavement, cultural destruction, and governance by outsiders in ways structurally parallel to colonized peoples abroad.
The dispersion of a people from their original homeland to multiple regions, and the cultural, political, and social connections that persist across these scattered communities. Diaspora studies examines how displaced communities maintain collective identity while adapting to new environments.
Example: The African diaspora encompasses the dispersal of African peoples through the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent migrations, producing interconnected cultural expressions such as jazz, samba, reggae, and hip-hop across the Americas.
A concept developed by Michael Omi and Howard Winant describing the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. Race is understood not as a fixed biological fact but as an unstable social construction shaped by political struggle.
Example: The racial classification of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants shifted from non-white to white over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States, demonstrating that racial categories change over time.
The development of solidarity and collective identity among distinct ethnic groups that share broad racial or cultural categorization. Pan-ethnic identities emerge through shared political interests and experiences of racialization.
Example: The term Asian American was coined in 1968 by activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee to unite Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and other Asian-descent communities into a shared political identity for collective advocacy.
The disproportionate siting of environmentally hazardous facilities and exposure to pollution in communities of color, along with the systematic exclusion of these communities from environmental policy decision-making.
Example: The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where a predominantly Black city was exposed to lead-contaminated water, and the siting of petrochemical plants along Cancer Alley in Louisiana, a corridor of predominantly Black communities.
More terms are available in the glossary.
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