Hat Tip to Ken Mosesian of the American Fertility Organization for finding this shocking story:

Its just beyond comprehension: Arizona has moved to eliminate ethnic studies courses and to purge schools of teachers with accents.

… Arizona’s new immigration law is just about crime, its supporters say, but given that the state’s new education policy equates ethnic studies programs with high treason, they may not be using the commonly accepted definition of “crime.”

Under the ban, sent to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer by the state legislature Thursday, schools will lose state funding if they offer any courses that “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

As ThinkProgress notes, the Tucson Unified School District’s popular Mexican-American studies department is the target here. The state superintendent charges that the program exhibits “ethnic chauvinism.” …

It is particularly sickening, that an education policy regime now based on white “nativist” racial hatred would accuse a Mexican-American studies department of “ethnic chauvinism”.

From the second article:

… As the academic year winds down, Creighton School Principal Rosemary Agneessens faces a wrenching decision: what to do with veteran teachers whom the state education department says don’t speak English well enough.

The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English …

Certainly, officially, the purge is limited to English classes, but obviously a school that removes an English teacher for not being acceptable to racist white “nativist” xenophobes under the new “policy” will try to purge teachers who don’t speak English as a first language or whom have an accent foreign to Arizonan ears from any class or program. One is left to wonder if a white male Christian fundamentalist teacher from New York City who happened to have a thick accent would be deemed “ungrammatical” or “heavily accented”.

This new “education policy” in Arizona is right out of the history of Fascist Europe. Immigrants – in particular a specific category, Hispanics – are being scapegoated for the State’s problems, demonized, and purged.

I can do nothing to change what the people and government of Arizona have done, but I will never forget what I am seeing, and I will never forgive Arizona for it. They have taken in my perception the dubious Blue Ribbon County Fair Prize for being the most irredeemably racist, xenophobic people in the country gathered together in the most un-American state in the Union.

There are just no words strong enough to condemn these people or what they are doing.