What is the Future of Ethnic Studies?

When we come upon a fork in the road—two roads diverging in a yellow wood—it might be said that the decision of which way to go is a matter of impulse, rather than intention. At least, that is what critic William Pritchard suggests the speaker is admitting in Robert Frost’s ubiquitous poem, “The Road Not Taken.” The poem, however, rests on a binary dilemma—two roads, two choices—which is not reflective of reality.

If there are two roads in front of us, there are likely four or six or eight others we’ve yet to consider or are otherwise ignorant of. The choices we’re required to make are not binary because reality is not binary. It’s a crossroads, with countless possibilities intersecting all at once. The journey—of life, of making choices—is and should be muddy and complicated.

In his new book, Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads, Black studies scholar George Lipsitz contextualizes the state of ethnic studies as existing at a similar juncture of collision and divergence. Talking about the idea of the crossroads, he writes that it’s “often necessary to look in more than one direction, to make choices about which paths to follow, to exercise discernment, judgment, and agency.” We ought to look at the two roads and decide, instead, to find another way forward, one that’ll get us closer to the horizon we’re striving toward. Lipsitz writes:

Negotiating crossroads requires seeing beyond surface appearances and recognizing deeper truths. At the crossroads the right thing can look like the wrong thing and the wrong thing can look like the right thing. Its challenges require active engagement, not passive contemplation.

Western thought tells us that the journey needn’t be muddy. The road should be, instead, clear and orderly. Detours or bumps paved over, and the straight road made even more narrow, “mapped out by the market, the church, the school, the state, and the disciplines and favored by political ideologies, self-help advisers, and the conventions of scholarship [that] promise safety and reward.”

This road attempts to rewrite reality and claims to iron out contradictions. But as Lipsitz puts it, citing traditional textile artists in Senegambia, “only evil travels in straight lines.” The normative path might offer an illusion that it resolves contradictions—but it’s only that, an illusion. Even more, resisting linear patterns “encourages people to…enjoy their ability to invent and improvise,” Lipsitz writes.

Nonetheless, the crossroads are a dangerous place to exist, a breeding ground for pile-ups, as it were. But they’re also fertile ground for exploration, experimentation, and the complexities of all that it means to be human (which is what ethnic studies is all about). The crossroads, Lipitiz writes, swap “either/or” binaries for a “both/and” spectrum of being:

Some binaries, of course, are useful and necessary. Intellectual and political responsibilities make it necessary to distinguish labor from capital, settler coloniality from Indigenous survivance, democracy from dictatorship, and domination from resistance. Yet polarities and binary oppositions that divide the world into good and bad can obscure more than they reveal. Solutions can become problems and problems can become solutions. Things that enact harm can also be used to help heal; things that can kill can also be used to cure.

It’s within this metaphor that Lipsitz contextualizes the field of ethnic studies, a project currently facing “circumstances as horrifying as our worst fears might conjure,” as Lipsitz puts it. Which is to say that ethnic studies aren’t at a crossroads as much as the project is a crossroads itself, one at risk of being paved over by the straight and narrow path (read: the alt-right, anti-DEI path that continues to gut ethnic and gender studies programs across the country).

My alma mater, UT-Austin, is a prime example, announcing earlier this year that it’d consolidate its race, ethnic, and gender studies programs into just two departments by this fall. In talking with those affected, it’s clear to me that while the future is uncertain—largely because the university operates under a veil of vagueness, abruptly moving the consolidation timeline up from 2027 to fall 2026—students and faculty aren’t unprepared. “It’s not a sense of hopelessness or resignation,” Alfonso Ayala III, a second-year Ph.D. student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, shared with me earlier this year. Throughout the last academic year, there have been countless campaigns, letters from the community, emails, protests, marches, and demonstrations, and these actions will only continue for as long as the university continues to not listen.

Despite their righteous cause, though, much of these campaigns turn out ineffective, largely due to many universities’ reliance on government funding (and overcompliance to get it), a fact aggressively exploited by the state and federal government. In mid-May, UT students and faculty staged a mock funeral on campus mourning the loss of academic freedom. “The University of Texas is dead,” one graduate student said. While no protest, demonstration, or amount of organizing can resurrect the dead, perhaps such actions can chart a new course.

Lena Mose-Vargas, another Ph.D student in the same department, shared that to preserve the future of ethnic studies requires looking, thinking, and operating outside of the institution (looking at the two roads ahead and building another). “A big part of this is joy,” Mose-Vargas told me. “In this mourning of our department in one way or another, at least for Latino Studies, it has caused graduate students to come together and be in community with each other,” both on and off campus.

Ethnic studies’ utility outside of institutional walls is a core focus of Lipsitz’s third chapter, wherein he discusses the need to push the field into what he calls “autonomous learning circles.” He begins this chapter by citing artist and activist Nobuko Miyamoto, who recalls the experience of dancing in a circle during FandangObon, an intercultural celebration that she helped establish in Los Angeles. In her memoir Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution, Miyamoto writes that “in this circle, we are enacting the world we want to live in.” Lipsitz goes on to explain how Miyamoto’s dance circle offers a vital model for ethnic studies:

Social justice cannot simply be proclaimed; it must be performed in real-life situations that help people enact the morally and socially just futures they envision. Operating both on and off campuses, these circles become crossroads where academics, artists, and activists convene and cocreate. They expand the possibilities of study and struggle through the cultures of opposition they draw on, create, and sustain. Connections to arts-based community-making collectives propel ethnic studies participants to develop new pedagogies and politics.

If the crossroads of ethnic studies are at risk of being completely paved over within the institution, then for the scholarship to continue to exist requires the construction of new crossroads—of which Lipsitz argues should operate under the practice of “accompaniment.” Recalling his earlier book with Barbara Tomilson, Insubordinate Spaces, Lipsitz explains:

We described accompaniment as “a disposition, a sensibility and a pattern of behavior” and as “a commitment based on a cultivated capacity for making connections with others, identifying with them, and helping them.” Accompaniment assigns first priority to those in greatest need and those most likely to be left out of dignified and decent treatment. It requires constant presence of mind and awareness of other people’s circumstances as guidelines for working with them.

It’s worth noting that without being backed by the institution, ethnic studies can, in some cases, be harder to access. To seek out a community might require more effort than it takes to stumble upon a class. Though, to stumble upon a class at an institution is less about stumbling than it is about access to the resources and time required to even get into the door. The effort to join or build an entire community to learn from and within is surely higher—or, at the very least, a different kind of effort—but the outcome is much less transactional. Even more, whereas the barrier to entry to take a class remains largely exclusive, the opposite is true when ethnic studies becomes a shared, open-source syllabus, so to speak.

In his book, Lipsitz highlights groups like Alliance for California Traditional Arts in East Los Angeles, Students at the Center and Free-Dem Foundations in New Orleans, and Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in Oakland who have done such work, turning ethnic studies into a practice of accompaniment wherein researchers and students are a part of the communities they study, derive their questions directly from grassroots concerns, and produce knowledge that protects and supports rather than exploits.

Teachers, students, and community members within the Students at the Center (SAC), for instance, created autonomous learning circles through a “story circle pedagogy” inspired by the 1960s Free Southern Theater. Students would write responses to challenging literature—from Michelle Alexander to Mark Twain—connecting the works to their own lives and broader social issues, and then work together to critique each other’s writing. They’d then engage their work in the real world. Lipsitz writes of one assignment in which students became pen pals with incarcerated neighbors, which led two students to connect with Jerome Morgan, a wrongfully convicted man incarcerated in the Angola Penitentiary. Learning about Morgan’s unjust incarceration through their correspondence with him, the students would play a key role in the campaign that successfully freed him from prison. The SAC, with its autonomous learning circle model and practice of accompaniment, was a vehicle through which students could make substantive change:

The story circle pedagogy made it possible for students to correspond with Jerome Morgan and to work with him as coauthors of the book Go to Jail, about the impact of mass incarceration on Black people in New Orleans. It introduced Morgan to allies who helped free him from prison and to a pedagogy that he made a centerpiece of the mentoring program for young people that he established with Jones and Rideau after release. The pedagogy also helped provoke direct political action. The students joined with Morgan in campaigns to repeal the Louisiana law that stipulated that juries do not need to render unanimous verdicts, and they joined in campaigns to help elect prosecutors and city council members sensitive to community needs. They helped educate elders about the damage done to education by privatization of the public school system and participated in campaigns against closing neighborhood schools.

In Oakland and San Jose, the Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) operates as an autonomous learning circle for low-wage workers in the garment and electronics industries. Through their Community Transformational Organizing Strategy (CTOS), AIWA facilitates spaces where limited-English-speaking immigrant women analyze their workplace conditions to identify root causes of systemic problems. A key example of this model in action is the “Ergonomic Chair Campaign” in the early 2000s, where workers developed leadership and analytical skills by collaborating with medical experts to design safer workstations, successfully pressuring the city to provide resources for their physical well-being and effectively connecting ethnic studies to the material reality of labor rights.

These circles and centers are essential because they provide a “willful reorganization of society from the bottom up,” thus connecting “the work of ethnic studies to what musician and cultural theorist Wiliam Parker described as life’s ‘many classrooms,’” Lipsitz writes.

Prior to our conversation earlier this year, Ayala and Mose-Vargas had both attended a symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, a foundational text on class and race in the Southwest. Mose-Vargas remembers a moment during the symposium when Dr. Jonathan Cortez, an assistant history professor whose work focuses on the borderlands and immigration encampments, said to the crowd, “We weren’t meant to be here.” Mose-Vargas went on to describe the profound energy that filled the room, “Having all of these Latinx studies scholars together across generations, thinking about what it means to rectify racial violence, but also what it means to imagine freedom, to speculate wildly what freedom looks like.”

Freedom, Mose-Vargas recounted, could mean the ability to turn on the radio without hearing of police brutality, or the room to dance with your loved ones. “That’s why they want to take it all away from us,” they told me. “Because if we have the space to understand the logics that create violence, then people will want to do something about it.”

This fear of collective consciousness is that which drives the straight path and its state and federal architects to do everything in their power to pave over the work and sanctity of ethnic studies. However, the true spirit of such scholarship, as Lipsitz’s text reminds us, should never belong exclusively to the bureaucracy of higher education. When the state attempts to narrow the path into a sterile, compliant line, ethnic studies ought to move; it ought to diverge onto a different course, reinventing and improvising as it goes. It ought to get muddy and complicated. It ought to spill out of the university gates, flooding living rooms, community centers, protest lines, and dance circles as it rushes toward a new horizon.