The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  So it was that “as time went on, there came to be two kinds of black professors”—indeed, two kinds of black and Chicano and women professors. Some were “mediocrities and hustlers, who wanted independent departments precisely so they would not be under the purview of serious academic standards, so they could hide out there and enjoy all the perks of tenure and so forth” without ever having to be judged according to any standards of achievement. These people created departments that “became a haven for corruption and mediocrity.” At the same time “there were always black, Hispanic, and women scholars who were first-rate and serious people.” Steele notes that today “you can be invited to be appointed to the Black Studies program at Harvard [the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research] by Skip Gates,” the institute’s director, more formally known as Henry Louis Gates Jr., “but every single one of those people” who receive such invitations “demand an appointment in the discipline of their origin. ‘Okay, Skip, I’ll teach a class for you, but my professional credibility requires that I be appointed to the English Department or the Sociology Department or whatever.’ And there are many blacks who say, ‘I don’t want anything to do with you.’”

  Then again, “Harvard is a special case. If you’re teaching at a state university in the California system and you’re the black and you’re a natural appointment in Black Studies, there’s no worse thing to be. You have no credibility at all. You’re sort of a charity case. When I went to San Jose State [to become a professor of English in 1974], for example, they had a Black Studies program, and I said, ‘I’ll have nothing to do with it. I will teach whatever I please and your students can take whatever classes of mine they want, but I don’t want to be associated with you in any way.’ And I think that’s the way most serious minority academics really feel—even though they won’t admit it and don’t want to talk about it in public.”

  Bottom line: “It’s a shame.” He has to admit now that one prediction he made back in the early days of Black Studies has proved spectacularly wrong. Surveying Black Studies’ mediocrity and lack of seriousness “I thought: ‘This will never go anywhere.’ But no: it just got worse and worse and worse. And now they’ve taken over English departments. Now it’s all about ethnicity and racism. And anytime you see that, you know that it’s a hustle. It’s part of the larger affirmative-action culture. Once you implant an idea like racial preferences in the culture, people are going to run with it—money, fame. My generation of minority people has been ruined by this. We’ve been freed to be hustlers. It’s made us into hustlers. It’s demanded that we become hustlers. That’s how you move ahead: you keep trading on your race, and then you get good enough at doing that to trade on your race at a higher level, and then you get good enough at it to trade on your race at an even higher level, and then finally you become somebody like Skip Gates—an empty figure who could honestly now become the president of Harvard if he wanted to.” He laughs at the preposturousness of that picture. “He’s too lazy, but he could. They’d be proud to have him. Not that he’s ever written anything of any real interest. But he’s a talented inside trader in the culture of racial preference. He knows how to get money out of white people. He’s really good. They line up to give him money.”

  It didn’t have to be this way. In fact, there was a time when it wasn’t. Not only does there exist, as Steele says, a rich canon of African American literature; there’s also an impressive body of serious critical and scholarly writings about African American identity and culture that predates the Black Studies of the 1960s and afterward. In a 1973 book called Black Studies: Threat or Challenge, Nick Aaron Ford records that “Afro-American Studies . . . at [predominantly black] Atlanta University . . . extends back to the 1890s,” and he lists courses given at predominantly black Fisk University from the 1920s onward about “Problems of Negro Life,” “The Negro in American History,” “The Study of Negro Music and Composition,” and the like.

  A century ago the two most prominent black American intellectuals were a pair of deeply cultured and internationally respected educators named Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Washington (1856–1915), the son of a slave woman in Virginia, worked for several years as a laborer, acquired an education, and from 1881 to his death served as head of the Tuskegee Institute, a teachers’ college in Alabama; Du Bois (1868–1963), born in Massachusetts, was the first African American to be awarded a doctorate, and went on to become a celebrated educator, activist, and author, and a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

  Though both men were fervently devoted to the advancement of black Americans, they had extremely different views as to how this goal might best be accomplished. Washington, like Gates, was gifted, to borrow Shelby Steele’s words, at “get[ting] money out of white people”—among them John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. These donations didn’t go to anything remotely resembling today’s identity studies; for the most part, they were spent to build and maintain primary and secondary schools at which young black people were able to learn what they needed in order to be able to support themselves and be responsible citizens. Washington, who placed his emphasis on vocational training for blacks, devised the so-called Atlanta Compromise of 1895, whereby he accepted segregation in the South in return for basic educational and employment opportunities for southern blacks.

  Washington had many black critics, first among them Du Bois, who rejected both the Atlanta Compromise (his answer to it was the Niagara Movement, founded in 1905) and Washington’s focus on vocational training. Du Bois believed that black Americans would achieve little progress unless they were granted equal rights and unless a significant number of them were able to receive a respectable higher education, including extensive exposure to the arts and humanities. He rested his hopes largely on the “best minds” of the black race—the “Talented Tenth,” as he famously called them—who, he argued, would, if properly educated, elevate the entire race through their contributions.

  Du Bois is generally viewed as the seminal figure of Black Studies, and his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, is usually listed as the most important text in the field. (The editors of A Companion to African-American Studies, Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, note that “the undisputed, most influential intellectuals in the development of African-American studies are W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon.”) What’s ironic, given the course of development Black Studies has followed, is that Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, placed immense emphasis on the significance for both whites and blacks of a thorough grounding in Western history and culture. His constantly repeated point was that the heritage of the West was the heritage of all; as he explained, in eloquent homiletical cadences that foreshadowed the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., he did not snub the glories of Western civilization, and they did not snub him, but were in fact his own possessions as much as they were anyone else’s:

  I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

  To be sure, Du Bois maintained that while American blacks could indeed understand, profit from, and relate to the Western classics, they approached these works with a set of intellectual equipment different from white people’s. They were equipped, as he put it, with “double consciousness,” which he defined as “an anxious ‘twoness’”—meaning that American blacks lived in, or shuttled between, two worlds. Du Bois’s explanation of this concept
is one of the most frequently quoted passages in African American letters: “[The Negro] ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” This twoness was exemplified by Du Bois’s own life. In his later years, increasingly involved in civil rights activism, he grew less interested in communing with Shakespeare, Balzac, and Aristotle than in encouraging the writing of black fiction and poetry that would serve as propaganda for the cause. Indeed, after decades of flirtation with radicalism—which landed him in hot water during the McCarthy era—Du Bois joined the Communist Party at age ninety-three, not long after receiving the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize.

  Still, the admirable and humane vision articulated in The Souls of Black Folk remained, serving as a powerful influence for a generation of scholars who, during the first half of the twentieth century, produced a number of pioneering studies of black American history and culture. For instance, Carter G. Woodson (1875–1950), known as the father of black history, founded the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and ten years later introduced “Negro History Week,” the forerunner of today’s Black History Month. Lorenzo Dow Turner (1890–1972), who pioneered the study of the Gullah language spoken along the Carolina coast, was head of the English departments at Howard and then Fisk universities, and founded an African Studies program at the latter institution as early as 1943.

  One can imagine Black Studies, then, taking a very different course than it did, and building on the achievements of people like Du Bois, Woodson, and Turner to become a legitimate and serious field of academic study. But it was not to be: history intervened. First there was the civil rights movement. In 1954 the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, declared segregation in schools unconstitutional; in 1955, the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her bus seat to a white man led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Ten years later, riots erupted in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and helped trigger disturbances in cities across the country. The Black Power movement was born. To quote Black Studies veteran Maulana Ron Karenga, author of Introduction to Black Studies (1979) and currently the director of the Kawaida Institute of Pan African Studies, this new movement “argued for a relevant education” focused “on cultural grounding, studying and recovering African culture and extracting from it models of excellence and possibility.”

  In 2007, Fabio Rojas, a sociologist at Indiana University, wrote a history of Black Studies that has been widely embraced as definitive. The title and subtitle say it all: From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. By way of background, Rojas points out that as early as the 1700s, American schools had provided at least some coverage of African American history. Rojas also highlights court cases argued by Thurgood Marshall in the 1930s and ’40s that helped open white colleges to black students and led to Brown v. Board of Education. Yet not all black intellectuals, Rojas emphasizes, prioritized integration: in the 1960s, the Negro Digest promoted “cultural nationalism,” which would lead to “demands for black-controlled education and black studies.” Meanwhile the NAACP’s publication The Crisis supported integration and “liberal reform,” running, for example, an article by a black judge, Francis Rivers, arguing that Black Studies would hinder students’ development of critical skills and that “black identity was an inherently extracurricular concern.”

  Yet “cultural nationalism” was on the rise—a rise abetted by the founding of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a Black Power group, by students who’d been “[p]ersuaded by [Robert F.] Williams’s analysis of black America as a colony inside the United States with much in common with Cuba, China, and other nations.” While “the Nation of Islam provided a religious model of what a self-sustaining black community might look like” (and showed blacks “that nonviolence was not the only option”), RAM offered a secular model; Rojas calls its founding “a critical moment in black nationalism’s organizational development.”

  RAM’s Oakland chapter gave birth to the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, whose violent revolutionary ideology was based largely on Mao’s Little Red Book and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. By 1968 the Black Panthers had spread around the country and won thousands of members; by 1970, Panthers had killed over a dozen police officers and injured dozens more. Rojas notes that it was out of RAM, the Black Panthers, and other black nationalist organizations, such as Stokely Carmichael’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC, and which in 1969 replaced the word nonviolent in its name with national), that “[t]‌he black studies idea emerged.”

  Indeed, the founding of Black Studies, as Gordon and Gordon point out in A Companion to African-American Studies, was influenced by the Black Panthers’ goal of “decolonizing the minds of black people.” Thus, they write, “African-American Studies is an intrinsically politicized unit of the academy” whose objective is to overcome the “false consciousness” (a Marxist term) created by “white supremacy”—or, to put it differently, to understand “what W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness” but which after the 1960s was understood more as a matter of “contested truth.” (All italics in original.)

  Black Studies’ first beachhead would be San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). Rojas describes its targeting by black nationalists: over the course of two years “a handful of Black Panthers enrolled at San Francisco State College with the explicit goal of mobilizing black students to organize strikes.” The most important of these activists was Jimmy Garrett, a member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC. Garrett led discussion groups at which, as he later explained, “we would talk about ourselves, seeking identity, and stuff like that. A lot of folks didn’t even know they were black. A lot of people thought they were Americans.” Garrett and his group, writes Rojas, “spent much time thinking about how the entire college might be racist.” The college gave office space to the Black Panthers, who set up “tables with Maoist propaganda”—as did SFSC’s Black Student Union (BSU). A crucial event in the backstory of Black Studies, Rojas explains, was the establishment at SFSC of something called the Experimental College, which “allowed students to teach their own courses” and even turned “informal ‘rap sessions’ into formal courses.” Several of these courses were on black subjects, and at some point they were brought together “into a package called ‘black studies.’”

  But the real turning point was the so-called Gater incident. In November 1967, in response to violence by black students demanding “control of various student government organizations,” SFSC’s school newspaper, the Daily Gater, “ran editorials criticizing black students” and “accused the BSU of being racist.” In response, “a group of about ten black students”—including “BSU member and Black Panther” George Murray, who worked in SFSC’s Tutorial Center program—raided the newspaper’s offices and beat up its editor. After two years of hearings and trials, Murray was not only permitted to remain a student and to keep his Tutorial Center job, but also “gained admission to the master’s degree program in the Department of English,” where he was assigned to teach classes. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1968, he “gave a fiery speech” in Cuba attacking American soldiers in Vietnam, and that fall delivered a talk at the college calling for students “to carry guns to protect themselves from ‘racist administrators.’” Yet he went unpunished, for the mayor of San Francisco and the president of the college agreed that any disciplinary action “could lead to riots.” When Murray finally was suspended on October 31, 1968, partly under pressure from California governor Ronald Reagan, the suspension set off what would become known as the Third World Strike.

  The strike, engineered by the BSU, began on November 6 and climaxed with a clash between “hundreds of students and dozens of police.” Among the BSU’s demands was the establishment of a Black Studies department. (Such a department had, in
fact, already been approved and a chairman hired, but the administration had been dragging its feet.) That day the campus was closed indefinitely—an act that Reagan decried as capitulation. There followed what Rojas calls a “guerrilla campaign” on the part of the BSU. Its strategy, he writes, “was fairly straightforward: disrupt the campus through a combination of physical intimidation, bombings, and publicity campaigns. . . . A common tactic was to have a dozen or more students stand behind white students while they were talking. . . . Throughout the strike, nine bombs were set and four detonated on the San Francisco campus.” At one January 1969 rally, there were no fewer than 457 arrests.

  S. I. Hayakawa, a professor of English and linguistics, became a symbol of resistance, calling the BSU campaign a “reign of terror” and rejecting the claim that its critics were all racists; when the college president, unable to stand the heat anymore, tendered his resignation, Hayakawa took his place. But for all Hayakawa’s tough talk (which won him statewide popularity and eventually led to his election as a U.S. senator in 1976), he ended up giving in to the BSU’s demands. SFSC’s Black Studies program began offering classes in the fall of 1969. (Soon Hayakawa was one of Black Studies’ leading champions, defending it the next year not only on the grounds that “studying the Negro’s contribution” to American society was a “legitimate and necessary intellectual enterprise” but also on the grounds that black young people, cut off from their ancestors’ culture and “deprived of a sense of . . . worth by the heritage of slavery,” had a real need for Black Studies’ “therapeutic” effects as a counter to the sense of “inferiority” into which they’d been “brainwashed.”)