This month, scores of black-studies programs around the country are celebrating their 20th anniversary and, in many ways, their academic maturity. Who can forget the stormy origins of the field and the dire predictions of the skeptical that this fad would not survive the decade of the 70’s? But while many ill-considered programs seemed designed to fail -- and did -- black studies, as a central feature of the college curriculum, is here to stay.
Now it is time for the academic community to give these programs their due. For all their successes, too many scholars continue to view black-studies programs, and the people who work in them, with disdain. Too little effort is made to recognize the field’s intellectual maturity and to integrate its insights into other scholarship. Financial resources for innovative research and academic programs in black studies are still painfully scarce.
Yet in the face of this, the role of black studies in the academy has never been more crucial. For its interdisciplinary perspectives have not just added information; they also have helped bridge a serious intellectual gap among academic specialities and disciplines. No less important, black studies has also demonstrated particular strength in both attracting minority students into the academy and in increasing the numbers of minority students who enter Ph.D. programs in other subjects.
Recognizing the importance of black studies, and perhaps attempting to redress the imbalance in resources, the Ford Foundation announced a major initiative last year to support the growth and expansion of such programs. As a Ford Program officer, Sheila Biddle, remarked: “It is the foundation’s view that the current generation of scholars is anxious to secure the position of Afro-American studies, to confirm its legitimacy as a discipline in the academy, and is quite capable of doing so.”
Houston A. Baker, Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, has aptly charted the development of the field as a progression of four phases. The first phase was a sort of quick corrective, a concession to the political clamor in the late 1960’s. In the second phase, black academics (such as St. Clair Drake, Charles Davis, Eileen Southern, Darwin Turner) joined white faculties and became instrumental in administering black-studies programs.
By the third phase, academics largely trained by “phase two” scholars began to make theoretical innovations within their double-disciplines -- the doubleness coming from the overlay of a black-studies perspective on traditional disciplines (English, history, economics). As Professor Baker notes, this phase inevitably was in part theoretical, for “once Afro-Americanists gained a hearing, they needed to begin the task of developing paradigms from which to speak.” In this phase, black and white scholars made major scholarly contributions. Thus, one is careful to speak of Afro-Americanists today, whereas two decades ago the phrase “Afro-American” -- for political reasons -- was used to describe the scholar and the scholarship.
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The fourth phase of development has witnessed bold initiatives in black studies at several institutions (notably Princeton) and the formation of the black research institute, allowing for what Mr. Baker describes as the “consolidation, expansion, and innovation in Afro-American scholarly pursuits.” In addition to Professor Baker’s Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, and the Frederick Douglass Institute at the University of Rochester are playing primary roles in the development of new approaches to the field. At the same time, such research institutes are also places where the teaching of Afro-American scholarship can itself be taught. Summer seminars for high-school teachers have helped distribute the harvests of scholarship well beyond the professor’s granary. (The need for such “outreach” projects is documented by a recent report showing that only two black authors -- Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright -- appear among the 50 books most widely assigned by high-school English teachers.)
We also are seeing an increasing number of black-studies programs becoming departments, complete with the right to award tenure. Over the past 20 years, research methods in black studies have become increasingly innovative and “cross-cultural,” responding to the particular nature of the materials and data under analysis by fashioning new tools. Scholarship in black studies tends to bring together insights from several disciplines precisely because black studies started as a multidisciplinary field. And insofar as our particular content was excluded from traditional disciplines, it was incumbent upon us to draw upon innovative approaches to what was essentially a “new” subject matter within the academy.
Consequently, many of the signal texts in black studies in the last two decades -- John Blassingame’s The Slave Community, St. Clair Drake’s Black Folk Here and There, Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Nell Painter’s Standing at Armageddon, Eileen Nathan Huggin’s Harlem Renaissance, and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s work in linguistics and anthropology -- are characterized by a truly interdisciplinary approach. Historians of the Afro-American experience have long been noted for their historiographical innovations, pioneering techniques of historical reconstruction from oral testimony, folklore, and other non-archival sources. A broader, richer conception of expressive culture has been key in the study of African-American art and music, while insights from the study of oral and non-verbal performance have proven invaluable to literary criticism and theory.
Unfortunately, an Afro-Americanist using an interdisciplinary approach can be defined by a traditional department as having moved “outside the discipline” precisely because of her or his distinctive concerns and resultant adaptation or innovation in methodology. Nor is this problem peculiar to black studies. Newly developed programs in cognitive science, for instance, have arisen for similar reasons: New areas of inquiry generate new methodologies, new research interests. It is, after all, just this development in methodology that makes a “discipline” a discipline.
But black studies, born in the social strife of a turbulent era, has a role to play in the university beyond considerations of pure research. Its proponents can hardly ignore the alarming reversals on today’s campuses -- the diminishing presence of black undergraduates and graduate students; the fact that blacks make up about 2 per cent of the college faculty nationwide. According to the American Council on Education, between 1977 and 1983 the number of black faculty members dropped by 4 per cent, while the number of white faculty members increased by 5 per cent. Nor are the immediate prospects hopeful: Of the Ph.D.'s awarded in 1986, for example, 0.03 per cent went to blacks.
The graduate programs at Yale, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Cornell offer useful models for addressing these problems. The Yale program, to take just one, in which a student takes half of her or his master’s courses in a traditional department (thereby enabling the student to demonstrate ability independent of Graduate Record Examination scores), channeled 31 of 40 M.A. recipients into Ph.D. programs between 1978 and 1988. Many of those students were initially rejected by Ph.D. programs and “referred” to black studies, where they served a sort of apprenticeship, gaining in academic skills and preparedness. The remarkable success of this approach should encourage others to support such programs.
As administrators have also learned, the recruitment of black faculty members is vastly easier on those campuses that have well-established black-studies programs and a critical mass of black faculty members. Why do so many black scholars take an interest in black studies? For James Baldwin, writing about being a Negro was “the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.” Since each of us must come to an intellectual understanding of what it means to be black in a white society -- the individual’s complex engagement with (and concomitant estrangement from) an ethnic cultural tradition -- one inevitably turns to others who have confronted this very complexity and recorded their own, often painful, details of this encounter. It is for this reason that literary works by black authors fall into a tradition; writers ground their representations of blackness in other written representations. One must learn how to be black in America, from one’s parents, relatives, and friends in childhood and through books in late adolescence and adulthood.
Few of us -- very few -- wish to be the “only black on the block.” And the cultural isolation and estrangement that still prevail on college campuses that have been seen historically as bastions of white middle-class values and norms often prove discomfiting for black professors.
One thing is clear. Black studies, in its third decade, has an important role to play in educating a nation that remains woefully ignorant of the historical achievements of African-Americans. I recently was taken aback by the discovery that only one member of a college audience I was about to address had even the vaguest idea who W. E. B. Du Bois was. What I had planned to use as a rhetorical device to introduce my lecture became the subject of my lecture itself, as I put down my speech and addressed the relevance of black studies to the students’ lives and educations, whether they wished to be academics or investment bankers. It is not only white students who need this education; my audience was entirely black.
Far from being an artifact of “ghettoized” knowledge, then, the best black-studies programs can help acquaint our students and each other with our multicultural inheritance. They can help de-ghettoize the university as a whole. For the study of the humanities -- which is the study of the possibilities of human life in culture -- has always thrived on diversity. And if we have taken black studies for granted as a tool for integrating higher education, we may have only begun to glimpse its potential for integrating the American mind.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is a senior Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the National Humanities Center and the author of The Signifying Monkey (Oxford University Press, 1988), which won an American Book Award. He has taught African and Afro-American Studies at Yale and Cornell Universities since 1976 and will begin teaching at Duke University next year.
