Arizona's war on non-white people has reached a fever pitch.

Several weeks ago, Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, called for a ban on ethnic studies classes. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill that had been pushed by Horne for the past several years to ban these classes.

The bill claims to prohibit classes in Arizona from promoting "the overthrow of the U.S. government" or "resent toward a race or class of people." The bill also disallows classes that advocate "ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of people as individuals."

Many cities and towns in the state have courses on Native American, Mexican-American and African-American histories, which focus on the history, literature and influence of said groups.

In an open letter, Horne laid out his reasons for wanting the demise of ethnic studies.

"I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups," wrote Horne. "What is important about people is what they know, what they can do, their ability to appreciate beauty, their character, and not what race into which they are born. They are entitled to be treated that way. It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group and teach them separately." Horne decided to reach back to the 1960s to further explain his reasons for eliminating these courses in schools.

"I participated in the civil rights march on Washington in which Martin Luther King stated that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin," wrote Horne. "That has been a fundamental principal for me my entire life, and ethnic studies teaches the opposite."

Horne also devalued La Raza studies, claiming that students were being indoctrinated into an ideology of hating the white man and claimed that some of their students acted "rudely and in defiance of authority."

"When I began speaking out publicly against ethnic studies, one of the ethnic studies teachers had his students write me letters," continued Horne. "One of these letters states: 'All that the English classes teach is mainly about some dead white people.' I believe schools should teach the students to judge literature by its content and not by the race or gender of the author."

But the ban on ethnic studies wasn't enough. Law SB 1070 – which requires law enforcement officials to question the immigration status of individuals during everyday police encounters if police have "reasonable suspicion" – wasn't enough. Now Arizona is targeting teachers with "heavy accents."

The Arizona Department of Education is sending evaluations to audit teachers on their English-speaking skills. They want to make sure they're in compliance with state and federal laws. According to the department, teachers who make grammatical errors while speaking English, who don't appear to be fluent in the language or who have a distinctly heavy accent would be temporarily assigned.

Horne said that he would "expect science teachers to know science, math teachers to know math." According to his logic, those who teach English should "know English." This goes back to former President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, which included a provision that states schools wouldn't receive federal funds if an English teacher wasn't completely fluent in the language. During the 1990s, Arizona hired many Spanish-speaking teachers from Latin America to teach bilingual education.

John Hartsell, spokesman for the Arizona Education Association, said earlier this month that dealing with accents had "nothing to do with quality teaching." He reiterated that in the current economy, Arizona is undergoing budget cuts and this audit is a waste of time. Arizona proved several weeks ago that they didn't like history being told by the oppressed. No wonder – history may be repeating itself in the southwest.