Coinciding with President Barack Obama's historic candidacy and election, some individuals have called for an end to ethnic studies, among other things, contending that U.S. society has become post-racial, implying that the need for ethnic studies no longer exists. Such proponents say the field isolates ethnicities by ghettoizing knowledge.
Monteiro disputes the notion of post-racialism, saying individuals who subscribe to the term “never finished defining race anyway. They're just jumping over it.”
But, he emphasizes, “we're allowing exactly this kind of debate at this week's conference.”
Monteiro notes that one of the catch phrases of the late 1960s was “Justice, or Just Us?” when referring to the marginalization of ethnic minorities. He describes present-day attacks on the validity of ethnic studies as “an attack of the entire coalition of the '60s.”
“It is a strange, exciting struggle we now find ourselves in, but we are now part of a larger, normative fabric,” he adds.
