Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 25
methodologies defined the objective condition of the subject under study,
implying solutions.
Few social scientists took up questions having directly to do with Afro-
American life and circumstances, and few courses offered could be said to
have to do with Blacks. Events outside the university nevertheless spoke
loudly to the fact that questions regarding race were at the heart of American
social, political, and economic problems. When social scientists discussed
Blacks at all, Black students found, they often did so in pathological
terms,asking why Blacks had failed to move into the social mainstream more
quickly. The most flagrant example was Daniel P. Moynihan’s The Negro
Family—the so-called Moynihan Report—which seemed to place the blame
for continued poverty among Blacks on a dysfunctional Black family. 9
Black students and scholars thus began to challenge the “objectivity”
of mainstream social science. In most “scientific” discussions of “problems”
a norm was assumed, that of the White middle class; the social scientist,
himself, was at the center, defining all variation as deviation and “blaming
the victim,” as critics liked to say. The demand of Black students was for a
discussion of what they saw to be the inherent racism in these normative
assumptions and for a shift in perspective that would destigmatize Blacks
and reexamine the “normalcy” of the White middle class.
Black students and their allies imagined that out of these demands—
for the introduction of non-White subject matter into the curriculum
and for the shift of normative perspective—would come a revolutionary
transformation of the American university. It was a transformation that
neither Clark Kerr nor James A. Perkins anticipated; but then they could
not have predicted the course of the civil rights movement and its impact
on the university.
The Black Student Movement
There are those who claim that the general unrest on college campuses in
the sixties had roots in the movement of southern Black students to bring