Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

40 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
ultimate end of success in college would be adaptation to the values of conventional
White America,and thus a placing of distance between themselves
and other Black people; (6) their larger numbers, rather than making them
feel more at home, gave them a collective sense of malaise and made it easy
to divide the world into Black and White; (7) greater numbers also meant
peer-group pressure on those who otherwise might have adapted easily to
join in the general malaise; (8) the institution in all its aspects—courses,student
activities, facilities—could easily be divided into “theirs” and “ours.”
Black students could call little of what normally existed at predominantly
White institutions “ours.” Much of the emotional energy of Black
student protest was aimed at forcing faculties and administrations (generally
liberal and integrationist in values) to accept race differences in ways
that guaranteed Blacks a sense of “turf”while refraining from any racial distinctions
suggestive of racism. While the student demands might have
begun as requests for programs and activities “relevant to Black people,”
with no implication of being exclusionary, they almost always evolved into
de facto Black dormitories, cultural centers, programs, etc. The few curious
Whites who ventured in were soon made to feel hostility against them and
their alienation. Demands for Black “turf” generally resulted in separatism.
Students at San Francisco State (1968), U.C. Berkeley (1968), Cornell
(1968–1969), Wesleyan (1970), and Barnard (1970) were, in fact, explicit in
their demand for racially separate programs or facilities.
Little wonder that in such an atmosphere demands were heard for
“courses relevant to us as Black people.” The standard curriculum’s indifference
to the special problems, concerns, and basic humanity of Afro-
Americans and other non-Europeans seemed glaring. Socrates, Plato,
Aquinas, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Milton, Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, Dylan
Thomas, were all theirs, and they celebrated them.“Who are we?”Black students
asked. “What is ours?”
It was generally assumed that those questions could best be answered
by courses on the African and Afro-American experience: on Black history,
literature, music, and “culture.” For some, the informational content
of such courses was paramount. For others, course content was less important
than the mere presence of such courses in the catalog. Students in