Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

42 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
scarcely existed. In American history, Blacks were viewed as slaves or as problems,
rarely as contributing anything of value, or even as being central, to the
American experience. Black authors were seldom included in courses in
American literature; such Black characters as occurred in“White”fiction, like
Twain’sNiggerJimandFaulkner’sDilsey,oftenraiseddifficultquestionsabout
Black identity. Social science, with its pose of objectivity, was perhaps most
painful of all to Black students, who complained that Blacks were viewed by
most sociologists,economists,and political scientists as deviants from a norm
arbitrarily defined by White social scientists.
Thesolution,asmanyBlackssawit,wascoursesinAfricanhistoryandcivilization,
Afro-American history, Afro-American literature, Afro-American
“culture,” or Afro-American contributions to American “culture.” But most
White faculty members knew next to nothing about those topics, and were inclined,
not surprisingly, to regard what they did not know about—what none
of their colleagues ever talked or wrote about—as being of little or no importance.Fewscholarsweresympathetic,mostwerecondescending,andsomewere
actively hostile to the suggestion that the Black experience in any of its manifestations
was worthy of study. Many were heard to comment that the very idea of
Black economics,Black sociology,or Black literature was ludicrous.All of which
is to say that the problem implicit in the student complaint—the blind ethnocentrism
of American higher education—was for the most part ignored.
A major obstacle for those who wanted courses for identity building was
that this was not what most scholars understood their function to be. Courses
in history explicitly intended to identify and venerate heroes and heroines, to
celebrate a people’s “contribution”; to make students feel good about themselves
did not command the respect of good scholars. History had a different—a
critical and analytical—role to play. Of what good was a literature
course taught and attended by people so in awe of the mere existence of certain
works that there was little room for criticism and textual analysis? Most
teachers were likely to say “You can read anytime; courses are to make you
think in a disciplined way.” The onus was on Afro-American studies to prove
that it did just that.
Students in search of their ethnic and personal identity did not automatically
seek separatist solutions, although the hostility or indifference of
faculty members tended to move them in that direction. These students