Continuing Struggles in Black Studies

BY Halford H. Fairchild, Ph.D. and Dipannita Basu, Ph.D.

Pitzer College

________________________________________________________________________

Black Studies--the formal discipline that examines the lives, histories and cultures of African people in a global context--was born in struggle. It was the merger of the Free Speech and Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s in what Houston Baker described as “the metonym” for social chaos: America’s colleges and universities (Baker, 1997, p. 34).

The spirit of freedom and liberation, smoldering for 400 years within the souls of Black folks, erupted literally and figuratively in the urban and intellectual fires of 1965.Black students and White students and Asian students and Latino students didn’t ask for physical and intellectual representation at American colleges and universities, they demanded it. It was a time of not-taking-no-for-an-answer as students took up the gun, Marxism and a revolutionary pan-Africanism to create the discipline that is today resolving into a coherent challenge to the business-as-usual ethnocentric indifference of predominantly White academies of (mis)education.

The incorporation of Black Studies, at White and Black colleges and universities alike, was an in-your-face confrontation to the intellectual hegemony of White cultural studies (i.e., history, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, psychology, literature, etc.).As such, the opposition to Black Studies, as with the opposition to Black people, has been relentless. It has been what Baker referred to as a “space of territorial conflict” within the academy (Baker, 1997, p. 36).

Because Black Studies, now evolving into “Africana Studies” (see Hine, 1997), exists within an institutionalized framework of White supremacy (Swindell, 1997), the luta comes from deeply embedded structures that isolate, fragment and underfund the programs and departments that are seeking higher education’s true mission:the illumination of the Truth about human affairs. In this, Black Studies serves the intellectual needs of Blacks, certainly, but it serves an even more vital function in re-orienting Whites to the lies, myths and distortions of their own cultural past that have masqueraded as objective academic discourse (see Fairchild, 1995).

The contemporary challenges of Black Studies are many, from the settling on a name for the discipline (Hine, 1997; Kelly, 1997), the settling of internal disputes (Swindell, 1997), the overcoming of ghettoization and marginalization (Hine, 1997), the development of a coherent curriculum with graduate programs (see Basu & Fairchild, in preparation; Hine, 1997), and responding to the “…right-wing, racist onslaught…” now confronting the field (Kelly, 1997, p. 179).But more than these struggles within the academy, the most serious current challenge for Black Studies is to redress the inequities that exist between Blacks and Whites in contemporary world political economies (Chideya, 1995).These inequities have life-and-death consequences due to the doubling of the rates of infant mortality, a multiplicative disproportion of HIV/AIDS among Africans throughout the Diaspora, and an average of 6 years less life expectancy for African American men and women in comparison to White Americans (Chideya, 1995).

We must turn, Sankofa style, to the past to reclaim our heritage, our lineage, our sense of where we are in the present (and how we got here), in order to chart a path to the future liberation of Black people around the world (also see Kelly, 1997, in this connection).

Black studies is important as a prescription to dismantle structured racial inequality.It shatters the popular myths about the African past and present.Its birth in struggle demonstrates that the past truly is prologue:the luta , the struggle, of Black Studies—for recognition, legitimacy, space, and resources—does continue.

References

Baker, Houston A. (1997). Black Studies: A new story. Chapter 3 (pp. 29-44) in Conyers, James L., Jr. (Ed.), Africana Studies: A disciplinary quest for both theory and method . London: McFarland and company. 

Basu, D., & Fairchild, H.H. (Eds.). (in preparation). Introduction to Africana Studies: An interdisciplinary chronology . Claremont, CA: The Intercollegiate Department of Black Studies.

Chideya, Farai. (1995).Chapters 1 and 2 (pp. 3-19 in Don’t Believe the Hype . NY: Penguin. 

Fairchild, H.H.(1995).Why Black history is not just for Blacks. Los Angeles Times , February 5, Page M6.

Hine, Darlene Clark (1997) Black Studies: An overview Chapter 1 (pp. 7-15) in Conyers, James L., Jr. (Ed.), Africana Studies: A disciplinary quest for both theory and method . London: McFarland and company.

Kelley, Robin D.G. (1997). Introduction:Looking B(L)ackward: African-American Studies in the age of identity politics. Chapter 1, pp. 1-16 in Judith Jackson Fossett & Jeffrey A. Tucker (Eds.), Race consciousness. NY: New York University Press.

Swindell, Warren. (1997). Notes on Administration of Africana Studies Departments and programs. Chapter 2 (pp. 16-29) in Conyers, James L., Jr. (Ed.), Africana Studies: A disciplinary quest for both theory and method . London: McFarland and company. 

The authors may be reached at Pitzer College, Claremont, CA 91711. ///\\\///\\\///\\\///\\\