Arizona

The Man Behind Arizona's Anti-Ethnic Studies Law

Justin Elliott | May 13, 2010, 4:09PM

Arizona state Superintendent Tom Horne

Arizona's new law restricting ethnic studies is the brainchild of the state's ambitious top education official, Tom Horne, who is locked in a Republican primary for Attorney General against a prominent ally of hardline Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Horne, the state's superintendent of public instruction since 2002, has long sought to kill the Tucson school district's ethnic studies classes, including La Raza studies -- and he wrote the bill to target that single program. "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," he has said of ethnic studies classes that, he claims, teach Hispanics to resent whites.

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