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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2022
A key component of Middle East Studies methodology is to identify and deconstruct the relationship between knowledge about the region and the power structures that give knowledge meaning. Typically, that methodology is applied to Middle East Studies at the post-secondary level. This paper applies that methodology to public schools in Washington, D.C. Through structural analysis, I will tease out the “epistemological commitments” (Abu El Haj 2001) of what the government of Washington, D.C. calls “social studies learning standards” -- short sentences which “detail the knowledge students are expected to acquire at a particular grade level.” Based on my experience teaching the Middle East in a Washington, D.C. public high school, I also raise questions about the relationship between the content standards and teachers’ work conditions, and whether such conditions support or inhibit the development of a praxis (Freire 2016) which could deconstruct US colonialism inside American public schools. One goal of this paper is to bring Middle East Studies into conversation with American Studies, broadly defined, and in particular ethnographic studies of DC that consider the colonial relationship between the US Government and Washingtonians. I conclude by calling for a deeper engagement with the American public school system by Middle East Studies scholars at both a theoretical and practical level
1 Haj, Nadia Abu El, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Abu-Lughod, Lila, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Armbrust, Walter “A History of New Media in the Middle East,” Journal for Cultural Research 16.2–3 (2012): 155–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirschkind, Charles, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Lockman, Zachary, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lockman, Zachary, Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978)Google Scholar; Shohat, Ella, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siamdoust, Nahid, Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Stein, Rebecca L. and Swedenburg, Ted, eds., Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
2 Price, Tanya, “White Public Spaces In Black Places: The Social Reconstruction Of Whiteness In Washington, D.C.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 27.3/4 (Fall-Winter, 1998): 301–344Google Scholar; Williams, Brett, Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Abu El Haj, Facts, 8–19.
4 Said, Orientalism, 24.
5 Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), “Social Studies Standards,” 3, https://osse.dc.gov/publication/social-studies-standards .
6 OSSE, “Social Studies Standards,” 3.
7 OSSE, “Social Studies Standards,” 3.
8 See, for example, Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
9 #VisionForBlackLives 2016 Policy Demands (Accessed through the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20170611115106/https://policy.m4bl.org/downloads/).
10 Dirks in Abu El Haj, Facts, 5.
11 Dumas, Michael, “Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Discourse,” Theory into Practice, 55.1 (2016) 11–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frank B. Wilderson, Red White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
12 One might ask if the standards related to other regions also represent it as inferior to the United States. My regional expertise on the Middle East precludes me from arriving at an assessment on that question, though other researchers may arrive at a similar, or different, conclusion.
13 Said, Orientalism, 5.
14 Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 51.
15 Price, “White public spaces,” 303.
16 Ibid., 304.
17 Ibid., 305.
18 Ibid.
19 I follow Michael Dumas' (2016) rationale for capitalizing Black and not white. Dumas explains: “Black is understood as a self-determined name of a racialized social group that shares a specific set of histories, cultural processes, and imagined and performed kinship. . . White is not capitalized in my work because it is nothing but a social construct, and does not describe a group with a sense of common experiences or kinship outside of acts of colonization and terror. Thus, white is employed almost solely as a negation of others – it is, as David Roediger (1994) insisted, nothing but false and oppressive. Thus, although European or French are rightly capitalized, I see no reason to capitalize white.”
20 Thomas Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948–2012 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
21 Henceforth DC History.
22 One vestige of the Nacostins in D.C. today is the name of the neighborhood “Anacostia,” an underserved predominately working class and poor Black neighborhood. The mascot of Anacostia High School is “The Indians.”
23 Price, “White public spaces,” 318; Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).
24 Price, “White public spaces,” 320.
25 CQ Researcher, “Should Washington citizens have a vote in Congress?” by Colin Soloway, https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2008041100.
26 Marion Barry stands out as a local leader who confronted and challenged racialized colonial rule in Washington – yet Barry is often held out by white Washingtonians as an emblematic example of the “problems” related to Home Rule, i.e., that left to self-govern, Washington would be racked by corruption or public misconduct. See Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race Power and the Decline (revival?) of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014) as well as the film The Nine Lives of Marion Barry (2009) for depictions of Barry's political life and the relationships he maintained with white systems of power in and outside of DC.
27 Brett Williams, Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988).
28 For readers who find my partial conflation of white and Jewish intriguing, unsettling or worthy of further unpacking, see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) and Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998). My point – minor in the scope of this paper – is not to gloss over variegated experiences with race and whiteness among Jews in Washington, D.C., where Jews were often written into housing covenants barring them from living in certain neighborhoods. DC has also historically been home to a population of Jewish people of color, namely from Syria and Lebanon – not to mention Black Jews. Rather, I am reflecting the general, if not somewhat fluid, social construction of white-passing Jews as having access to whiteness, white spaces, and white privilege within, specifically, Black places in DC An altogether different subject beyond the scope of this paper: the Black Hebrew Israelites maintain a steady public presence in Washington, D.C., and some of them would not even recognize the Jewish communities Brodkin writes about and I refer to as even being Jewish.
29 DC Office of Planning, “District of Columbia State Data Center Quarterly Report: Blacks in the Nation's Capital,” https://planning.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/op/publication/attachments/DCOP_SDC_Winter%252006%2520Quarterly%2520Report.pdf; DC Office of Planning, “Tables for the District of Columbia 2015 Population Estimates,” https://planning.dc.gov/node/1176686.
30 Maurice Jackson, “An Analysis: African American Employment, Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.,” https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/769rvofp6ow18vqi7hbvh83778g8z9xd
31 Woodrow Wilson High School Profile, http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Woodrow+Wilson+High+School
32 DC Office of Planning, “Population by Race and Hispanic or Latino Origin, for All Ages and for 18 Years and Over, and Housing Units, for the District of Columbia - Ward 3: 2000 and 2010,” https://planning.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/op/publication/attachments/Census%25202010%2520Population%2520by%2520Race%2520and%2520Ethnicity%2520-%2520Ward%25203.pdf.
33 It is worth pointing out that the demographic shifts caused by gentrification occurred after 9/11 and the expansion of the United States’ national security state. I have not read any studies directly linking these two trends, though one can feasibly perceive a correlation – if not a causation – by reading the 2010 four-part Washington Post investigation Top Secret America, which explores the economics of the post-9/11 boom: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/top-secret-america/2010/07/19/hidden-world-growing-beyond-control-2/.
34 See Lockman (2009) and Lockman (2016).
35 Price, who conducted research while working for the Congressional Black Caucus, provides rich detail on Black Washingtonians’ position as workers vis-à-vis institutions of American empire.
36 One might also speak of a third group consisting of migrants – such as Arabic speakers from the Sudan and Amharic and Tigrinya speakers from Ethiopia and Eritrea – who arrived in the United States via a Middle Eastern route. Such individuals may not identify as Black Washingtonians – or as Middle Easterners – and can live in immigrant enclaves where ties to the region persist strongly. Still, within America's colonial racialization, such individuals might be seen from the outside as both Middle Easterners and as indistinguishable from the historical community of Black Washingtonians.
37 My students were not blank slates. Black communities in America have maintained ties to the region dating back to slavery through the present day. See Ronald A.T. Judy, (Dis)forming the American Cannon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), which critiques the role of literacy and reason in the legibility of Black Americans through an exegesis of African-Arabic slave narratives. See also Melani McAlister's chapter “The Middle East in African American Cultural Politics, 1955–1972,” in Epic Encounters: Culture, Media & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 84–124. McAlister explores how religion, anticolonialism, and nationalism contributed to fostering complex relationships with the Middle East among Black Americans. See also the #VisionforBlackLives 2016 Policy Demands for a contemporary articulation of a relationship some Black Americans maintain with the region and a critique of U.S. empire there. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) faced criticism from some Jewish groups for referring to genocide in Palestine, which M4BL argued the United States is complicit in. See, e.g., the Washington Post, “Jewish groups decry Black Lives Matter platform's view on Israel,” by Julie Zauzmer, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/08/05/jewish-groups-decry-black-lives-matter-platforms-view-on-israel/; the Atlantic, “Why Do Black Activists Care About Palestine,” by Emma Green, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/why-did-black-american-activists-start-caring-about-palestine/496088/; Tablet Magazine, “From Left to Right, Jewish Groups Condemn ‘Repellent’ Black Lives Matter Claim of Israeli ‘Genocide,” by Yair Rosenberg, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/from-left-to-right-jewish-groups-condemn-repellent-black-lives-matter-claim-of-israeli-genocide. See also +972 Magazine, “PHOTOS: Tear gas not the only thing connecting Ferguson and Palestine,” by Activestills, https://www.972mag.com/photos-same-tear-gas-used-in-ferguson-and-west-bank/; and Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016). As M4BL came under attack, The Center for Constitutional Rights offered a defense of the use of the term genocide to describe Israeli policies toward Palestinians, grounding their analysis in the historical definition of genocide coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin and international law as well as human rights scholarship: https://ccrjustice.org/genocide-palestinian-people-international-law-and-human-rights-perspective. In 2020, M4BL removed references to Israel in their political platform. https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/.
38 National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Double Victory: The African American Military Experience,” https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/double-victory.
39 Abu El Haj, Facts, 15.
40 OSSE, 2.
41 Ibid.
42 See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
43 OSSE, 3.
44 Abu El Haj, Facts, 15–16.
45 Abu El Haj, Facts, 10.
46 This legislation and the reforms it initiated are controversial – specifically, to name just a few reasons, in terms of the proliferation of standardized testing, the nature of teachers’ evaluations, the establishment of school choice, and the growth of charter schools. It is beyond the scope of this paper to address this legislation at length. In the meantime, readers can learn more about the reforms by reading Rachel M. Cohen's 2017 article “How D.C. Became the Darling of Education Reform,” https://prospect.org/education/d.c.-became-darling-education-reform/ and the National Research Council's 2011 study A Plan for Evaluating the District of Columbia's Public Schools: From Impressions to Evidence (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press) https://doi.org/10.17226/13114.
47 StandardsWork, “About Us,” https://standardswork.org/about-us/ .
48 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt.
49 Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010) 302–4; Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 138; and Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017), 42–48.
50 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991); Ami Ayalon, Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy 1900–1948 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004); Ayalon, Ami, “Private Publishing in the Nahda.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40.4 (2008): 561–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51 Rogan, The Arabs, 158.
52 OSSE, 3.
53 Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu, “The Costs of Employment Segregation: Evidence from the Federal Government under Wilson,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 27798 (September 2020), https://www.nber.org/papers/w27798.
54 See Abowd (2014); Rashid Khalidi Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Salim Tamari, Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and their Fate in the War (Ramallah, Palestine: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2002); Helga Tawil-Souri, “My Aunt's Mamilla,” in The Jerusalem Quarterly, Issue 58 (2014), https://oldwebsite.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/jq-articles/My%20Aunt%27s%20Mamilla%20%20JQ-58-5.pdf.
55 OSSE, 3.
56 OSSE, 65.
57 Abu El Haj, Facts, 15–16.
58 Bill Bigelow, co-director of the Zinn Education project wrote a lesson/activity called “Whose ‘Terrorism’” that allows students and educators to back into this point by anonymizing events such as Monsanto's poisoning people in India, and asymmetric conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in a refugee camp. When I used this activity, students tended to identify the more powerful actor as the terrorist, and there is an answer key which reveals who the actors are. But this activity only illustrates the point I'm making, which is that owing to the discourses surrounding terrorism in the West, events have to be anonymized for American classrooms to critically engage these discourses. https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/whose-terrorism/.
59 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962). For critiques of Habermas see also, Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Joan B. Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (Oxford: OUP, 1998); Saba Mahmoud, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
60 For example, in FY2017 89% of reported uses of force by Metro PD were on Black people, most commonly by white officers. See Police Complaints Board Office of Police Complaints, “Report on Use of Force by the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Fiscal Year 2017,” https://policecomplaints.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/office%20of%20police%20complaints/publication/attachments/UOF%2017%20Final.pdf .
61 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A Cloward, “Rulemaking, Rulebreaking, and Power,” in The Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies, and Globalization, ed Thomas Janoski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 33–53.
62 Freire, Pedagogy, 51.
63 The Social Studies Standards Advisory Committee, “Social Studies Standards Guiding Principles,” https://sboe.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/sboe/page_content/attachments/2020-12-16-FINAL-SSSAC-Guiding-Principles.pdf.
64 Graham Vyse, “D.C. educators target white racial bias in social studies standards as State Board launches rewrite,” The DC Line, December 3, 2019,
66 Gabi Kirk, “Authors of California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Decry Cuts to Arab Studies,” Jewish Currents, February 3, 2021, https://jewishcurrents.org/authors-of-california-ethnic-studies-curriculum-decry-cuts-to-arab-studies/ .
67 Gabi Kirk, “Attacks from Pro-Israel Groups Threaten California's Ethnic Studies Curriculum,” Jewish Currents, May 7, 2020, https://jewishcurrents.org/attacks-from-pro-israel-groups-threaten-californias-ethnic-studies-curriculum/ .
68 California Department of Education, “ESMC Third Field Review,” https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/esmcthirdfieldreview.asp; Gabe Stutman, “Ethnic studies curriculum passes 11-0 after one final day of sparring,” J Weekly, March 18, 2021, https://www.jweekly.com/2021/03/18/ethnic-studies-curriculum-passes-11-0-after-one-final-day-of-sparring/.
69 In addition to the Jewish Currents articles previously cited see, e.g., Ari Y. Kelman, Devin E. Naar, and Jessica Marglin, “Jewish Studies profs: Ethnic studies curriculum substitutes political concerns for historical accuracy,” J Weekly, March 16, 2021, https://www.jweekly.com/2021/03/16/jewish-studies-profs-ethnic-studies-curriculum-substitutes-political-concerns-for-historical-accuracy/.
70 Shahar Zaken, a graduate student in sociology at UC Davis and a Mizrahi organizer told Jewish Currents, “Every Jewish Mizrahi that lives in America that looks Arab . . . has had an experience of Islamophobia.”
71 See, e.g., Smadar Lavie, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014) and Shohat, Israeli Cinema.
72 Save Arab American Studies, “Remove Names from Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” https://savearabamericanstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Letter-to-CDE-2.3.2021.pdf .
73 And the links contained in the two above-cited Jewish Currents articles illustrate some of those efforts.
74 Matthew S. Schwartz, “Trump Tells Agencies to End Trainings on ‘White Privilege’ and ‘Critical Race Theory,” National Public Radio, September 5, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/910053496/trump-tells-agencies-to-end-trainings-on-white-privilege-and-critical-race-theory.
75 See, e.g., Brossat, Alain and Klingberg, Sylvia, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (London: Verso Books, 2016)Google Scholar.
76 See, e.g., the film Forget Baghdad (2002) and the recently published speech given by U.S. diplomat Robert Malley at Oxford in 2009, https://jewishcurrents.org/an-anti-imperialist-father-and-his-american-diplomat-son/.
77 Moshe Krakowski, “Think All Orthodox Jews are Zionists? Think Again,” The Forward, October 11, 2018, https://forward.com/opinion/411615/think-all-orthodox-jews-are-zionists-think-again/.
78 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Israel's Ultra Orthodox,” in Middle East Research and Information Project, Issue 179 (1992) https://merip.org/1992/11/israels-ultra-orthodox/.
79 Joshua Leifer, “The New Heimish Populism,” Jewish Currents, October 15, 2020, https://jewishcurrents.org/the-new-heimish-populism/.