Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States 41
the former group were likely to be more concerned with the quality of instruction
than with the color of the instructors. Students in the latter
group were likely to insist that only Blacks were qualified to teach such
courses; some even demanded all Black classes or sections. 24 Carrying
such thinking to its logical end, some demanded complete academic “autonomy”;
a separate college (as was called for at Berkeley, San Francisco
State, and Cornell) or a separate department (as was called for at Harvard).
The indifference to course content and preoccupation with symbolism
rather than substance of those in the latter group caused many Black
Studies programs to be ridiculed and eventually abandoned by Black students
as well as White. 25
Quest for Identity
Many Black students on White campuses regarded the college experience
as a threat to their sense of ethnic identity, and thus to their sense of
personal identity. 26 Ironically, it was the very liberalization taking place in
society—residential desegregation, greater prospects of upward mobility—
that created the problem. In the past, Blacks had all been pretty much in the
same boat regardless of class and education. Now, Black prospects included
admission to a good college, a position—if only “token”—in corporate
America, entry into the mainstream middle class, a move “out of the
ghetto” and into the suburbs, and acceptance by conventional White America.
Such “upward mobility,” though attractive to many Black students and
increasingly common, was repugnant to others, who claimed that it cut
Black people off from the vast majority of their brothers and sisters and
from their ethnic and cultural roots. The best way to guarantee one’s personal
identity, it seemed to many Blacks, was to assert one’s ethnic identity.
The university could be transformed from a potential threat to identity into
an instrumentality through which to find a new wholeness—an instrumentality
potentially more effective than church, family, and community.
For those Black students, references in reading assignments or lectures
thattendedtoenhanceBlacks’senseof identityandself-worthseemedfewand
far between. In the liberal arts, Blacks (and practically all other non-Whites)