Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 129
Black Studies scholar can pursue research which has a vital impact on public
policy. (Note that the new Institute for African American Studies at Columbia
University has declared its intention to emphasize questions of
public policy, and to some degree, the role of the Black Studies scholar as
an activist or public intellectual.)
Despite all economic difficulties, the 1980s and 1990s have been a time
of rapid intellectual evolution within the academy as a whole. Spurred to a
significant degree by what might be termed the Black Studies Movement (as
well as by the hard realities of America’s shifting demographic cartography),
colleges and universities in the United States have felt the pressure to revise
their curricula to reflect more fully the range of American “ethnic” groups.
In the midst of these national mandates and discussions, African American
Studies has been uniquely positioned for leadership.
Having sought, since its beginnings, to address problems of inclusiveness,
exclusiveness, and the meaning of “racial” and ethnic difference in
America, African American Studies has often played a vanguard role in this
season of scholarly and curricular change. Its scholars have been actively involved
in theorizing and consolidating African American Studies within
the traditional fields (i.e., History, Literature, Psychology, and Anthropology);
expanding it into other established fields (Natural and Physical Sciences,
Philosophy, and Linguistics); and establishing such newer
interdisciplinary methodologies as those of gender and cultural studies.
To be sure, this questioning of the agenda in Black Studies—both as
an independent area of study (some would say a discipline) and as part of
an interdependent community of scholarly units—has been good for the
field. Even when issues have not been definitively resolved, spirited debates
and the far reach of their implications signal the field’s vitality and importance.
No longer can African American Studies easily be pressed to the margins
as an off-beat province “for Blacks only” or dismissed as a sop to Black
student pressure. Serving many students (majors and nonmajors, Blacks
and non-Blacks; often doing so in required “core” or “distributional”
courses, African American Studies classes have come into their own.
Having become more self-consciously theoretical about its project as
an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, African American Studies is often