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Eric
Avila History Professor Eric Avila is an academic contradiction. On balance, his History of Los Angeles class is excellent: good teaching to match strong material. Inevitably, the course features a good amount of the trendier academic tripe available at UCLA, characterized by its preoccupation with race and class. For all its faults, however, it’s also one of a distressingly small number of UCLA courses that focus on the actual city in which the university is located. Avila’s course, complete with a stellar in-class screening of Chinatown, provides a useful wake-up for the many undergraduates who perceive Westwood as a hermetically sealed entity floating above the city. Unfortunately, Avila’s admirable contribution to the History department stands in stark contrast to his day job, so to speak, in the Chicano Studies department. Despite tough competition from the department’s broad panoply of barely legitimate scholarship and teaching, the sheer intellectual vapidity of Avila’s Chicano Studies 182 course, Understanding Whiteness in American History and Culture, marks the course as one of the worst overall offerings. As Avila notes in the syllabus: “To study whiteness is not simply to locate the historical evolution of a ‘white’ racial identity, but rather to survey a whole range of material and cultural practices that gave shape to racist cultures and to ways of thinking and acting racially. Is whiteness simply a fiction that depends upon the presence of a racialized ‘other,’ or is it a material privilege that structures access to opportunities, resources and privilege? Throughout the quarter, we will strive to answer this crucial question, meeting along the way a curious assortment of historical actors: pioneer frontiersman “playing Indian”; Irish immigrants “blackening up” in the Minstrel Show; “off white” Mexican Americans becoming ‘Hispanic’; and “Wiggers” adopting hip-hop music and culture.” Whew. Minstrels and wiggers are all well and good, but compare poorly to the intellectual fare served to students in more traditional majors. The assigned reading of the Whiteness course does nothing to bridge this gap, given the assignment of Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White. Ignatiev has long been a darling of the academic left, due in large part to his “academic” journal Race Traitor (motto: “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity”). Avila also assigns George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. It's an ironic charge. While Lipsitz is no doubt deadly serious in his thesis, it defies credulity. Some people have indeed been profiting from identity politics for many decades, but that group was composed entirely of racial minority leaders like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the like, not whites. Setting
aside the
Whiteness Studies course, we find radicalism in Avila’s personal
scholarship,
in particular, his co-authorship of The
Chicano Studies Reader: An
Anthology of Aztlán, 1970-2000. Aztlan, of
course, is the mythical Aztec
state that, had it ever existed, would have stretched from Tierra Del
Fuego to
the Sierras. Aztlan, as conceived by
latter-day
reconquistas like the student members of MEChA, would be a Chicano-only
apartheid state. Some defenders of the
Aztlan concept retort that Aztlan is actually a state of mind or a
metaphor for
self-improvement. But even if it is
merely a state of mind or a hope for improvement, it is one predicated
on founding
documents that issue a Nazi-like call to blood and speak of a
specific
enemy: the “brutal gringo invaders.” Most students in MEChA are
also Chicano Studies majors, and are steeped in an academic
witches-brew that
combines readings about Aztlan with study of sub-academic rubbish like
the
Whiteness Studies course. The more
Chicano Studies courses a Chicano takes, the angrier he gets, and the
more he
wants to learn more about how a foreign race of gringo invaders is
holding him
down. In the business world, they call
that kind of a closed loop ‘synergy.’ I’m
interlocking my fingers right now over the joy
of it all. Avila’s public radicalism has been little better than his scholarly exploits. The Daily Bruin did note his presence as a panelist at a Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2000, “Queer Life on Campus” workshop, held as part of the Undergraduate Students Association Council Welcome Week. Avila declared, “To me, being gay is an advantage. To me, being of color is an advantage. It allows me to see things others don’t.” But other than that one outburst of identity-group solidarity, Avila has mostly kept himself out of the news. That doesn’t mean he’s kept his nose clean; quite the opposite. During the March 5, 2003 anti-war walkout, a student in Avila’s class reported in a private communication with the author, “Doctor Avila dismissed [our] Chicano Studies 101 class telling everyone that he expected to see everyone there. My TA [teaching assistant] cancelled his other discussion for that (but not the Thursday discussion) and wrote on the board, “support and march [at] the rally.”” This kind of ethnic studies extremism raises an almost Confucian imponderable: if a radical professor bashes the war to a group of radical students, will anyone ever know about it? It’s highly unlikely. In ethnic studies courses, the very course titles and their underlying academic philosophies serve as a nearly impenetrable wall against non-believers. In sum, the verdict on Professor Avila must be decidedly mixed. For an excellent history course, seek out his History of Los Angeles class. But for any self-respecting student not eager to have his intelligence and (depending on ethnic affiliation) race insulted, students would do well to avoid Avila’s Whiteness Studies course. That is, until the time that the Chicano Studies Department is dissolved, or at least brought into some semblance of order. |
