San Francisco State University College of Ethnic Studies

By Dr. Amy Sueyoshi

San Francisco State University’s College of Ethnic Studies was established in Fall 1969 after an extended student strike demanding a curriculum that respected the diverse intellectual traditions and cultural expressions of communities of color and indigenous people throughout the United States.

The Black Student Union, the Third World Liberation Front, staff and faculty members and community activists mobilized against systematic discrimination on campus. Their efforts resulted in the first, and what continues to be the only, College of Ethnic Studies at an American university. SF State’s College of Ethnic Studies currently houses four departments—Asian American Studies, Africana Studies, Latina/Latino Studies and American Indian Studies—and a program in comparative ethnic studies titled Race and Resistance Studies. The five units collectively offer more than 175 courses each semester to meet the largely general education needs of 6,000 students each semester.

In the past 20 years, the College has more aggressively incorporated curricula in sexuality studies, implementing new courses such as “AIDS and People of Color” and “Latino Sexualities” and hiring scholars working at the intersection of race and queer studies. Today, one in four of our tenured/tenure-track faculty have expertise in queer studies, and a third of our graduate students pursuing one of our two M.A. degrees (Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies) are engaged in thesis projects on queer and/or trans people of color. Last year, the College of Ethnic Studies mounted a queer ethnic studies initiative as part of its strategic plan to mobilize faculty expertise, to begin a graduate student scholarship and to investigate the creation of a major on queers of color.

Dr. Amy Sueyoshi is the Associate Dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at SFSU.

San Francisco State University Queer Resources

Educational and Referral Organization for Sexuality (EROS) http://asi.sfsu.edu/asi/programs/eros/about.html

EGAY (Everything Great About You)

http://www.sfsu.edu/~pride/orgs.html

Queer Alliance

http://www.sfsu.edu/~pride/orgs.html

Queer Trans Resource Centerhttp://asi.sfsu.edu/asi/programs/qtrc/

Academic Units

Women and Gender Studies (WGS)

http://wgsdept.sfsu.edu/

Sexuality Studies (SXS)

http://sxs.sfsu.edu/

College of Ethnic Studies (ETHS)

http://ethnicstudies.sfsu.edu/home

Research Centers

Center for Research and Education on Gender and Sexuality (CREGS)

http://cregs.sfsu.edu/

Family Acceptance Project

http://familyproject.sfsu.edu/