Within the last quarter-century, academia has gone through a series of struggles, usually painful, often bitter, sometimes violent, over racial segregation, exclusion, and discrimination. Until well after World War II, the record of our universities, professional associations, and scholarly journals constituted a racist outrage, the extent of which has not yet been properly assessed. It should be enough to recall that even the great W. E. B. Du Bois could not teach at a “white” university despite his Harvard degrees and outstanding academic record; that his work and that of numerous other black scholars now recognized as of high quality went unnoticed or was denigrated; that the professional associations went to great lengths to exclude blacks from participation and promoted flagrant racist propaganda under the guise of science; that black authors and work in Black Studies were unwelcome in the leading professional journals. In short, the professions disgraced themselves, perhaps none worse than the historical profession.
Much has changed for the better, but some of the deepest problems remain not merely unresolved but undiscussed. Here I wish to focus on a problem that arose during the 1960s and 1970s and remains with us: Black Studies as an intellectual discipline and the programs instituted to promote it. Black Studies programs may not rank as the most important racially charged problem on our campuses, but it may well be the most revealing. For unless the stagnation and ghettoization of Black Studies programs are arrested, we shall, however inadvertently, condemn our universities and professions to many years of shamefaced complicity in an increasingly ominous resurgence of white racism and black despair.
The black experience in the United States has been unique, not in the trivial sense in which all historical experience may be judged unique, but in the special sense that it has no analogue in the Caribbean, Brazil, South Africa, or anywhere else. A caveat: I shall argue that “black nationalism” is a historically legitimate expression of that unique experience, but I shall invoke that problematic term only because it is widely accepted as a kind of shorthand for a complex reality that cannot accurately be labeled. If the argument of this paper is sound, the term is a misnomer. It nonetheless remains unavoidable because our grossly inadequate political language propels us toward analogies and reference points that generate much more confusion than illumination.
Not until recently were white students in any numbers made aware of the grim realities of slavery, of the achievement of an Afro-American culture forged under conditions of extreme adversity, and of the richness of an African heritage previously and ignorantly dismissed as barbarous and without lasting value. Not until recently could black students in any numbers study their own heritage in a positive atmosphere outside the black colleges.
These hard-won gains are once more at risk. Despite the vast changes of the last quarter-century, the typical white student cannot avoid imbibing heavy doses of racism. America’s history, culture, traditions, socioeconomic realities—just about everything—conspires to that effect. If the universities do not accept a social responsibility to educate our young to reject racism, what social responsibility would they accept? Simultaneously, if black students are to be welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they must be offered a stable environment in which they are not patronized as perpetual victims whose every weakness is someone else’s fault and may be excused as the result of vast if vague objective forces. That environment must include, among other things, academically competent black professors and a curriculum that takes account of their heritage.
Black Studies programs are today being undermined by self-proclaimed supporters, white even more readily than black. Notwithstanding the honorable records of some campuses, most Black Studies programs have been condemned to ghettoization. Two reasons or, better, excuses are advanced for treating Black Studies programs as an intellectually worthless political plaything or for absorbing them into jerry-built programs in “Ethnic Studies,” “Urban Studies,” or something else.
First, we hear complaints about a decline in student interest. One must suppose that if our students decide not to enroll in mathematics or physics, to say nothing of art history or classics, those subjects should be abolished or reduced to a skeleton existence. Educators generally recognize that certain subjects are a necessary part of the curriculum and must be allowed to remain viable despite the vicissitudes of enrollments. The argument from enrollments reduces to a polite way of saying that the subject matter of Black Studies programs need not be taken seriously.
Except for those who wish to become teachers, professional scholars, and perhaps ministers, black students sensibly prefer to major in law, medicine, the sciences, business administration, engineering, or some other subject. Many readily cite potential income, but even the most militant and politically committed will acknowledge that their communities need doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.
Second, it is widely assumed, if less widely expressed, that Black Studies is just not a proper academic subject—not an intellectual discipline with a manageable subject matter and discrete methods. This argument was leveled at many other programs, now accepted as legitimate, for almost every interdisciplinary program, most notably American Studies, had to face the same charge when first launched. In its most benign aspect, it represents merely the institutional—not necessarily the ideological—conservatism of those who constantly struggle to keep maximum resources and prestige attached to their particular departments. Yet the best of the older interdisciplinary programs have demonstrated the advantages of combining the methods of discrete disciplines. The strength of American Studies programs, for example, has always lain in their combination of traditional methods of historical inquiry, sometimes fortified by mathematics and economic theory, with the methods of literary criticism and art history as well as, increasingly, folklore, archaeology, and other branches of the humanities and social sciences.
The charge against Black Studies, therefore, concerns the intellectual content. Is there a legitimate subject with appropriate data? This question immediately reveals itself as ideological projection—a charge that Black Studies is merely a political enterprise designed to develop and disseminate Afrocentric and black-nationalist ideology and propaganda. The argument that Black Studies is not a proper subject reveals a breathtaking ignorance of an enormous body of excellent scholarship. A long list of our country’s most respected scholars—to say nothing of outstanding scholars in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Israel, and Europe—have created, by all reasonable criteria, a distinct subject. Even the sourest of critics do not deny the high level of much of the work on the black experience. Let that much be duly registered.
The argument has nonetheless become more subtle. It denies the validity of anything that might be called the black experience. More precisely, it seeks to assimilate that experience to the experiences of European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants and thereby to deny its claims to being unique.
Hence, the argument concedes only that the activities of black people should command attention in such traditional disciplines as history, economics, sociology, and literature or should be included in Urban Studies or Ethnic Studies programs. In this view, the demand to study the black experience only makes sense on allegedly discredited black-nationalist assumptions and is therefore merely a political stratagem. It never seems to occur to those who make this argument that their own position only makes sense on integrationist assumptions and is therefore not one whit less ideological and open to the charge of being a political stratagem.
Academia normally defines as political that which lies beyond its liberal consensus, which is generally, if not always accurately, perceived as “liberal.” And academia defines as objective and scientific that which expresses its own prejudices and viewpoint. At least rhetorically, integrationism is “in” even for those who show little enthusiasm for it in their own communities. Black nationalism is “out”—and that is that, with “that” defined as objective, scientific truth.
To speak of a black experience implies that the African diaspora offers a body of subject matter worthy of discrete study. It does not imply any particular concept of Negritude or Panafricanism or the assertion that black peoples everywhere in the world have more in common with each other than they have with the whites of their particular countries. Such ideological constructs should not be rejected out of hand, for they do lend themselves to respectable intellectual defense. But within the universities they ought to be seen as hypotheses to be investigated along with alternative hypotheses and subjected to rigorous empirical investigation in an atmosphere of mutually respectful intellectual discourse. Any serious Black Studies program ought to be viewed as a terrain of ideological as well as scientific contention. But then the same might be said of the humanities and social sciences in general.
Consider, for example, the vigorous and salutary storm over Time on the Cross, by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. The debates over econometric methods and scientific calculations of economic growth and labor productivity accompanied harsher debates over their bold attempts to analyze black culture in slavery. Basically, they argued that the slaves absorbed bourgeois values, especially a bourgeois work ethic. Their opponents challenged these theses and insisted that a growing body of scholarship on black work habits, religion, family life, and folklore pointed in an opposite direction—that a distinctly black culture had arisen from the slave quarters to resist not only slavery but the attempt to impose white culture and values.
Fogel and Engerman, whatever else they had in mind, knew that they were writing an integrationist tract, and, indeed, they said as much in response to criticism. Yet most of their critics have maintained an embarrassed silence over the implications of their counterargument, which emphatically provided aid and comfort to those who build on the premises of black nationalism. These questions cannot be fudged without a plunge into rank intellectual dishonesty and political irresponsibility. But there is virtually no place in the traditional curriculum and departmental structure for a full-scale airing of such urgent problems. They can only be taken up in a program that simultaneously studies black history, religion, folklore, and family life together with the more familiar problems of political economy, anthropology, political theory, and social psychology.
To put it another way, Black Studies has emerged as quintessentially interdisciplinary. And it is wonderfully funny to notice how, at one and the same time, so many educators are pleading for increased interdisciplinary studies while frowning upon a body of subject matter that has proven especially amenable to the combination of methods and data across a wide spectrum of discrete disciplines. It may be doubted that any other subject has so successfully lent itself to the highest quality of work in such “hard” disciplines as econometrics and such “soft” disciplines as folklore.
Black Studies has emerged on the cutting edge of the long-sought integration of the humanities and social sciences. For a quarter-century it has flourished on the frontier of creative scholarship, as exemplified by Fogel’s Nobel Prize in 1993, to say nothing of no few Pulitzer, Bancroft, and other prizes. Specifically, no longer does the historical profession satisfy itself with the study of elites and politics, narrowly defined. A broad consensus has proclaimed the need to study “popular” as well as “high” culture and the relation between the two. But nowhere, not even in the burgeoning studies of working-class and women’s history, has the achievement in Black Studies been matched.
The study of religion may serve as an illustration. Building on the pioneering work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, Melville Herskovits, Roger Bastide, and others, black and white scholars in the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Europe have been unraveling the religious experiences of slaves throughout the Americas. Among other accomplishments, they have demonstrated the links between traditional African religions and Afro-American variants of Christianity and have been exploring the relation of religious values and movements to economic performance, resistance, and accommodation to slavery, family life, and other subjects. In so doing, they have made methodological advances in the history of sociology of religion. What knowledgeable scholar would today deny these achievements?
Comparative history offers another example. American historians have finally recognized that the history of their country cannot be understood in isolation; that its economic development, political institutions, constitutional history, class structure, and national culture must be studied in relation to those of other nations and peoples; that in no other way can specific theses, broad interpretations, or claims to uniqueness be tested. Again, no subject has taken longer strides in the application of the comparative method than Black Studies has.
American history has itself been enormously enriched by the creative work in Black Studies. Yet somehow we are expected to believe that this work deserves prizes when done outside the structure of Black Studies programs but poses a threat to the Republic when done inside. Indeed, we face the absurd situation in which, as Black Studies takes great strides forward, Black Studies programs are increasingly scorned.
The problem is political, the facade academic. The problem concerns professional and institutional politics, which largely reduce to struggles for turf, but, more ominously, national politics. To be blunt: more than a few universities either designed their Black Studies programs to fail or caved in to political pressures of a kind everyone knew could only lead to failure. To meet political demands, administrations and faculties allowed hastily constructed Black Studies programs to appoint many professors who could command little respect on campus, and then they crippled the programs on grounds that they did not measure up to standards that were not applied in the first place. Some universities have established high-quality programs, and there is no reason other than political maneuvering that others cannot follow suit even at this late date. But to do so would require that universities educate their faculties on the intrinsic intellectual value of Black Studies.
It may be objected that blacks brought the worst on themselves. It was, after all, they who called for separation in autonomous all-black departments. And, in truth, much might be said about the scenarios that in the worst cases have resulted in cadre-training schools for those committed to the irrationalities of “Afrocentrists,” to say nothing of quasi-Hitlerian demagogues. It was apparent in 1968, when the political agitation for Black Studies programs burst upon us, that our leading universities were caving in to preposterous demands in order to ride out the storm. Whether deliberately or not, they effected a ghettoization that rendered the programs worthless or worse. In precious few cases, if indeed any, was a good-faith effort made to separate the reasonable and just demands of black students from the irrational and self-defeating.
The rage over Afrocentrism is merely the latest version of this decades-old story. No time need be wasted on blather that aims to denigrate the great civilization of the West while it presents a child’s version of Africa as well as Asia and precolonial Latin America. But once again the unwillingness of universities to promote full, open, honest debate has had ironic results. For not only are integrationists, black and white, being silenced. It is by no means clear that Afrocentrism, as normally preached, contributes to a serious black-nationalist interpretation of the black experience in the United States. Arguably, it encourages a black racism that would assimilate the black experience in the United States to a transnational racial myth and thereby render incoherent all attempts to construct a rational black-nationalist perspective on American history.
How far separate facilities for black faculty and students may legitimately and wisely be extended in state universities and predominantly white private universities is another question. Let us be frank: Without a strong dose of separatism, even the best Black Studies programs would have been swallowed whole by entrenched white faculty members, who would certainly have imposed an integrationist ideology on them in the guise of promoting nonideological and value-free social science. To correct centuries of injustice on campuses that were dominated by ideologically biased, if sometimes well-meaning, whites, a new generation of black intellectuals had to take possession of their heritage and of the training of black youth. Black Studies could never have advanced without the emergence of fresh black voices, as well as the willingness of whites to hear any black voices at all. That intellectual project was necessarily political, and the disorder, mistakes, and tactical extremism that went into the making proved a necessary, if disquieting, price to pay for the results.
The implications for university structure and governance await sober discussion. But when we have worked through the hesitations, excuses, and confusion and have made due allowances for honest doubt, we come to the heart of the matter: the unwillingness of the white academy even to consider the possibility that black nationalism represents an authentic tendency within black America rather than a pathological response to oppression. To the best of my knowledge, no university that has set up a Black Studies program or that has refused to do so has even openly and frankly debated the issue. And now, some universities have retreated before the bluffs mounted by a handful of black racists who spout virtually national-socialist doctrine thinly disguised as Afrocentrism. Accordingly, the initial refusal to treat Black Studies with respect is turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy and a marvelous excuse to pander to campus bullies while ignoring the responsibility to create the academically viable programs with high intellectual standards.
The question remains: Why do the powers that be refuse to do their simple duty—refuse, that is, to carry through a thorough depoliticization of Black Studies programs that would provide a forum for respectful debate between integrationist, black-nationalist, and other ideologies, demanding only that all hypotheses and theses be subject, so far as possible, to proven methods of empirical investigation? Why, that is, do not our universities strengthen the academic performance of existing programs by adequate financing and an insistence upon professional standards as high as are demanded for any other subject? The answer, I fear, lies in the ultimate scandal in a generally scandalous story. Black Studies programs will remain sources of black-nationalist sensibility and ideological formation because the content of Black Studies as an intellectual discipline is increasingly revealing itself as containing a strong black-nationalist component.
It does so not only or primarily in response to the political strong-arm tactics and brutal psychological warfare that are in evidence and must be combatted, but also in response to the findings of the most respected, painstaking, and disinterested scholarly work. For the hidden truth of the matter is that such recent works as the much-praised studies of slavery overwhelmingly support a generally black-nationalist interpretation of the black experience in the United States. Consider such important general books as the masterly work on black history by John Hope Franklin, such general studies of slavery as those of John Blassingame, Leslie Owens, George Rawick, and Sterling Stuckey, and add some of the more widely praised books on specific aspects of the black experience in slavery—Lawrence Levine and Charles Joyner on black culture, Amiri Baraka on music, Douglas Dillard on language, Herbert Gutman on the family, Vincent Harding on political struggles, Leon Litwack on the onset of emancipation, Albert Raboteau on religion. When taken together, these books and no few others in essence reveal an overwhelming consensus on the emergence of a distinct black culture in slavery. Some of the authors are black, others white. Some sympathize with the integrationists, others with the black nationalists. Yet all, in one way or the other, have documented the emergence of a black community that lived in intimate contact with whites, contributed to a general southern and American culture, absorbed much from whites, and Indians too, and withal, forged a black culture significantly distinct, significantly autonomous, significantly African-influenced, and nonetheless specifically American.
The black-nationalist interpretation of the black experience is by no means “proven,” much less sanctified, by this scholarship. No such work in itself could prove the general superiority of black-nationalist over integrationist interpretation. What it does do is to bury the “pathology” interpretation of black nationalism and establish beyond reasonable doubt the claims of the black-nationalist interpretation to a fair hearing. At issue here is historical authenticity, not political correctness. Nationalism is a political process, not an intellectual abstraction. Blacks could take full account of the duality of their national development and its black-nationalist component and yet reject separatism in favor of integrationist politics. Or vice versa: They could take full account of their “Americanness” and strongly prefer integration and yet decide that only some form of separatist politics is necessary to protect the interests of the great majority of their people. All such questions they can and will decide for themselves, and whites would do well to withhold gratuitous advice.
Black Studies programs are no place to settle such political matters any more than, say American Studies programs are the place to settle disputes between liberals and conservatives. Rather, they are the place to do the scholarship and conduct the debates that can lay the foundation for rational political decisions made in an appropriate arena. Academic freedom, not political correctness in the service of one ideology or another, must become the order of the day in Black Studies programs as in all other programs. And note the irony: The cowardly administrations that have in many places permitted black nationalists or Afrocentrists or other ideologues to harangue students and hire faculty according to political criteria have thereby expressed their utter contempt for the legitimate claims to a measure of autonomy for black Americans. For what else are they doing except using the power of white-dominated institutions to determine the outcome of political struggles in the black community?
Recognition of the legitimacy of black claims to a measure of autonomy in the larger society can be served within the universities only in one way: by a firm commitment to the highest academic standards in an atmosphere of maximum academic freedom. But to achieve that goal the universities would have to adhere to their own endlessly professed principles—the one thing they once again seem incapable of doing.
Eugene D. Genovese is a retired Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the University Center in Georgia. This essay is reprinted with permission from The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and the Challenge of the American Past, edited by John Patrick Diggins (Princeton University Press, 1997). The essay also appears in Genovese’s book The Southern Front (University of Missouri Press).
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
