John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of such books as Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Authentically Black, has written a must-read article on Minding the Campus about the state of so-called African American studies departments.
The first African American studies department was created forty years ago. McWhorter questions whether what is taught can be called education.
What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?…The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.
One would assume African American studies would transcend oppression and victimhood and give equal or greater time to the “bootstraps” and “self-help” attitudes that seemed more prevalent among blacks when they faced actual racial discrimination, and not perceived personal slights. What do the courses focus on?
Typical is the curriculum of one African-American Studies department in a solid, selective state school west of the Mississippi. In this department, racism is, essentially, everything…Following from this glum desperation is a fetishization of radical politics as blacks’ only constructive allegiance. One would never know the marginal import of radicalism to most black lives from its centrality to so many African-American Studies department syllabi. One course analyzes “the tradition of radical thought and the relevance of this thought to the needs and interests of the black community” – but what does the “relevance” consist of except intellectually? Yet the same department also offers a course on, more specifically, black Marxism.
Why is academia so much more radicalized that the “real world”? McWhorter provides examples of African American studies courses at several schools, and concludes radical indoctrination is not education. He recommends departments revise what they teach to reflect that racism against blacks “is receding, and to such a degree that the race’s challenges today are vastly different than they were forty years ago”; and offer at least one course on black conservative thought as an alternative argument. Along with men like Booker T. Washington, include the work of people like Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Debra Dickerson, and Stanley Crouch.
There is an argument hardly unfamiliar in the halls of ivy that black writers of this ilk are irrelevant to serious discussion because they are traitors to the race. Those charges must be permitted as free speech – but have no place in any brand of academic inquiry. All of the writers I have listed are careful thinkers deeply concerned with the fate of black America. It will not do to tar them as “not scholarly” because they do not all write in academic format or publish in obscure scholarly journals. Writings typically assigned by James Baldwin, Cornel West or even most of the others in this school are not written in this format either.
He suggests additional conservative writers and thinkers. In other words, African American studies departments should allow students to reflect on both sides of the argument. That is what produces true “liberal arts enlightenment.” I can’t say it better than McWhorter.
(Photo by Robert Holmgren)
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