Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

62 Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies in the United States
Council recommends. For the most part, existing programs stress Afro-
American history and culture. That stands to reason, because the great teaching
opportunities have been in this area. Afro-American history and literature
are fairly well-developed fields, and there has been a notable Black production
in music and the arts.It has been harder to create good courses in the social sciences
(or to appoint good scholars, for that matter). That is because, except for
sociology, none of the social sciences have taken subject matter and problems
related to Black Americans to be of such importance in their disciplines as to
constitute a specialization. Few economists or political scientists are willing to
define themselves as specialists on Afro-American questions.
The recent shift in student interests to business and law, and the universal
interest (especially among funding sources) in public policy is pushing
Afro-American studies programs to emphasize the social sciences more
than they have. I suspect, also, that the growing preoccupation among social
scientists with public policy will push them into more questions having
to do with Blacks, and they may find it to their advantage to be
associated with an Afro-American studies department. Courses on the economics
of discrimination, urban politics, social mobility, and the like are
logical offerings in an Afro-American studies department.
A word should be said about typical courses in the humanities. Except
for those in literature, the tendency of Afro-American programs is to offer
courses in the performing arts rather than their scholarly counterparts. Art
courses are seldom art history; music is taught rather than musicology and
music history; and there are courses in dance. This is important to note because
it varies from the traditional liberal arts relegation of performing arts
to extracurricular activities.
Afro-American studies programs remain tailored to available talent
and other institutional resources. For the most part, they are based on some
combination of history and literature with enough additional courses to fill
out an undergraduate major. Many closely resemble such interdisciplinary
programs as American studies. In practice, however, few students choose to
major in Afro-American studies, preferring to select Afro-American studies
courses as electives or, when possible, as course credit toward a conventional
major in, for example, history. At the University of Illinois at