The Importance of African American Studies
African American Studies, as organized academic enterprise, grew out of the late 1960’s struggle for black liberation. Before that, only historically black colleges in the South had paid attention to the scholarly examination of Africa and its American legacy, particularly in the discipline of history. The field of Black Studies [as it was originally called] developed simultaneously with the social movements that sought to transform both American society and its academy. By the mid-1960’s, the Black Power movement was challenging the cultural and racial exclusivity of American society and its social institutions, including the academic institutions. Accusers of the academy said that the policies, practices, and curricula at historically white universities discriminated against African Americans. Consequently, the demand grew for more African American students and faculty and for Black Studies.
In the year since the beginning of African American Studies, indications are that American society seems to be headed toward increasing state violence, citizen rage, and social anarchy. In the 1960, African American demanded attention to their charges of white supremacy and economic oppression, but the conventional channels of demand largely were blocked or ineffective for working- class and impoverished urban residents. The dispossessed urban African American scarcely experienced the tangible benefits of civil rights legislation and policies. As a result, a number of major American cities were engulfed in a rising tide of violent disturbances. The 1965 Watts rebellion signaled the watershed of urban black frustration and anger with anti-black racism, police brutality, and economic disenfranchisement. Almost thirty years later, the 1992 Los Angles insurrection [triggered by the exoneration of white policemen whose vicious beating of a black man had been captured on videotape by a local citizen and later shown on television to the nation and to the world] reflected mounting discontent among impoverished Los Angelenos [African American, Latino, Asian America, and white], who destroyed property throughout much of the city. As in the 1960’s, America’s cities are becoming the visible terrain of frustration, rage, hopelessness, cynicism, and unrest brought on by decades of society’s indifference to the growing pain and suffering associated with urban economic and political underdevelopment.
In contrast to the 1960’s, it is apparent that as the twenty-first century begins, popular feelings begins of cynicism, resentment, and anger are expanding beyond impoverished African American communities to include Latino and dispossessed white Americans. Such recent incidents of political rage as expressed by the discourse of the Unabomber Manifesto, the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people, the growing presence of the militia movement, and the mass murders of teachers and fellow students by white secondary school students represent a veritable culture of violence in America. Moreover, today’s increasing white racist hate crimes against, along with mounting police assault on and murders of, black female and male citizens, from New York to California, represent continuing patterns of violence similar to the lynching, anti-black race riots and segregation of the early twentieth century. Like the culture of racism, the culture of violence is deeply embedded in the origin and development of American civilization. What must no longer ignore is the historical fact that America began as a nation when Western European immigrants conducted annihilating war against Native Americans and brutally enslaved capture Africans. The process continued as European Americans savagely confiscated Native Americans and Mexican territories, forcing the original inhabitants to become alien in their own homelands. Therefore, deeply ingrained cultures of racism and violence characterize America’s increasingly multicultural society. If these frightening trends and developments continue to worsen, chaos, anarchy, and disaster will characterize twentieth-first-century American society.
Since the 1960’s and the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, there has been a progressive economic polarization between more affluent and less affluent Americans. The economic policies of the Reagan and Bush administration speeded up the process. Moreover, the welfare reform policies of the Clinton administration the very survival of economically impoverished Americans. The effects of this economic development are of particular significance to African Americans. Even though the 1960’s breakthroughs resulted in a growing middle class of African American slid further down the slope toward economic disaster. Trapped by poverty and powerlessness, black residents of the central city remain alienated from America’s mainstream, while their institutions are under attack and their children are betrayed in public schools, where the fundamental tools of knowledge building have been discarded. Embittered, angry, and cynical, and expanding underclass struggles to survive in a nation where unemployment is rising steadily. Not surprisingly, crimes and other social problems associated with persistent impoverishment increase. Therefore, whether we speak of the liberal Johnson administration’s welfare capitalist state policies, the reactionary Reagan-Bush competitive capitalist policies, or even the Clinton regime’s neoliberal managerialism, the fundamental social condition of the African American dispossessed seem to be worsening. The racial division of labor, the social problems of disenfranchisement, and the legacy of racial stereotyping –which have been inherited from the master slave tradition and which have been employed by America’s ruling elite to express effectively their determination to maintain the subordination of the African American masses—remain, and are indeed expanding as we begin the twenty-first century.
If American society continues on its present trajectory toward socio-economic polarization and cultural clash, this nation cannot hope to remain a great power in the emerging global economic order, which is organized increasingly on the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge. The earlier social-scientific conception of American society as “melting pot” actually meant the engineering, as closely as possible, of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. However, it is not racial and cultural assimilation but racial and cultural domination of diverse groups that historically has characterized the American social order. The result has been the suppression of America’s historic multicultural reality. Such practices must give way to practices that acknowledges, values, and encourage the multicultural character of American society.
To achieve this goal, quality education for all is critically important. Educational institutions at all levels must ensure that all students master the fundamental tools of knowledge [reading, writing, computational skills, and critical thinking]. In an increasingly knowledge-intensive age, advanced learning will constitute the essential ingredient of occupational advancement and robust citizenship. Additionally, the time is now for educational institutions to (re)develop curricula that recognize and respect the historical and contemporary contribution that people of color have made to America’s multicultural society. This quest of African American Studies, for this field challenges America to refashion its self-understanding.
The white American cultural tradition has long ignored or excluded the contribution and experiences of others. African American Studies and the other “new studies”—American Indian, Latino, Asian American, and Women Studies—Challenge and correct the Euro—American interpretation of history and contemporary affairs, which is the source of much misunderstanding. African American Studies and the other “new studies” do not fragment, as some writers have claimed; rather, they encourage the recognition and appreciations of the diverse cultures that make up the American experience. America’s continued prominence in the coming global order will depend on its ability to provide to all of its people a quality education – from preschool to postgraduate—that encourage all Americans to value multicultural society. African American meets this challenge.
From: The Turbulent Voyage. Edited by: Floyed W. Hays III. Colligate Press, 2000
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