by Bruce Bawer
After SFSC fell, the domino effect took over. Black Studies, writes Rojas, became a nationwide phenomenon “overnight.” As Karenga puts it, black students at other colleges “paid close attention to the struggle at San Francisco State and were impressed with the capacity of students to win concessions from the administration.” Within a few months, student strikes at a wide range of colleges and universities—including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Howard, and Amherst—had coerced terrified administrators into establishing Black Studies there, too. As Rojas notes, “in the 1967–1968 school year, eleven of the eighteen California colleges experienced some form of black student activism,” ranging from “mild” (uprooting trees, setting fires) to violent. By 1969, writes Karenga, most major American institutions of higher education had “some form of Black Studies”; according to Rojas, between 1969 and 1974, 120 degree-granting Black Studies programs and departments were formed at institutions around the country. Though historically black colleges and universities resisted this movement at first (their “bourgeois” curriculum of “negro history,” as Karenga puts it, had little in common with the “liberationist” approach favored by Black Studies advocates), the rapid fall of Harvard and Yale to the Black Studies tsunami led these institutions, too, to institute Black Studies curricula.
In 1969, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin weighed in on Black Studies, encapsulating the major concerns about it in a handful of sharp questions: “Is Black Studies an educational program or a forum for ideological indoctrination? Is it designed to train qualified scholars in a significant field of intellectual inquiry, or is it hoped that its graduates will form political cadres prepared to organize the impoverished residents of the black ghetto? Is it a means to achieve psychological identity and strength, or is it intended to provide a false and sheltered sense of security, the fragility of which would be revealed by even the slightest exposure to reality? And finally, does it offer the possibility for better racial understanding, or is it a regression to racial separatism?”
For Karenga, Black Studies is a desperately needed corrective of “traditional white studies,” which was and is “inadequate and injurious in its omission and/or distortion of the lives and culture of the majority of humankind, especially the fathers and mothers of humankind and human civilization, African people.” It goes without saying, perhaps, that Karenga’s account of the founding of the discipline in Introduction to Black Studies is free of any mention of “hustlers.” In his view, given that “African people are the fathers and mothers of both humanity and human civilization,” Black Studies (which in Karenga’s definition includes “Black History; Black Religion; Black Social Organization; Black Politics; Black Economics; Black Creative Production . . . and Black Psychology”) represents “a vital contribution to the critique, resistance and reversal of the progressive Europeanization of human consciousness and culture” and “an important contribution to humanity’s understanding itself.” (Italics in original.)
Houston A. Baker Jr., who teaches at Vanderbilt and has been a top name in Black Studies since the beginning, doesn’t use the word hustlers, either. On the contrary, he describes in heroic terms the “[c]ourageous and brilliant . . . young black men” who started Black Studies at Yale. “The first covenant of what might be accomplished,” he writes (and, yes, this is the prose of a distinguished professor of Black Studies), “was limned by the symposium on Black Studies organized by black undergraduates, in coalition with well-resourced and influential white allies. The symposium produced a volume titled Black Studies in the University.”
The idea was that a committee—to which Baker, then age twenty-five and with “absolutely no Black Studies expertise or experience,” was appointed—would create a Black Studies program based on the proposals continued in the symposium’s book. Baker decided that the program had to be “autonomous” and generously endowed; must have full “departmental status” and grant Ph.D.s; must deal not only with black America but with “Africa, South America, and the Caribbean”; and must seek to transcend traditional notions of “‘legitimate’ academic work” by making a connection with and having an impact on the black community at large. But when he presented these demands to the committee’s white chairman, the other black committee members distanced themselves from him, and he ended up in hot water, “a ‘revolutionary’ . . . in the staterooms of Ivy League whiteness.” All these years later, he claims, the problem of white people planning the “study of ‘blackness’” continues to haunt Black Studies. Yet his story is ultimately triumphant: Black Studies at Yale was the result of the efforts of “thousands and thousands of uncowardly men and women. . . . There were exploding bombs in downtown New Haven, a Yale chaplain who was not afraid to take religion into the fray, and the cry everywhere of: ‘The ultimate solution is black revolution!’”
Charlotte Morgan-Cato, an associate professor emerita of Black Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York, spent thirty years at Lehman, where the Black Studies program was—like Black Studies programs at other colleges—a result of student disruptions: “After more than a year of strikes, scuffles, demonstrations, shutdowns, and lock-ins, Black Studies and Puerto Rican Studies were approved as departments.” This was in 1970. “[O]ne Sunday afternoon in Harlem more than 150 persons gathered in a dance hall to plan the successful strategy which forced university administrators to capitulate. On the chosen day, all involved Black and Hispanic students left their classes, exited the buildings, and chain-locked building entrances. The faculty were locked in a lecture hall where they were debating the establishment of Black Studies and Puerto Rican Studies. The programs were approved, and the departments were established within six months.” Black students, Morgan-Cato notes approvingly, rejected “‘objective’ pedagogy,” preferring classes that would “communicate the recognition, respect, even reverence for Black culture.”
In addition to Black Studies, another fruit of the Black Power tree was the Black Arts Movement, founded in 1965 by the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones), a devotee of Karenga’s Kawaida philosophy (about which more shortly). Black Arts, which is considered to have begun with Jones’s establishment of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) in Harlem, and which Baraka conceived of as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement, represented a fusing of art and militancy; among its most prominent members were Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, and Lorraine Hansberry. The movement’s quick fade-out in the 1970s was triggered by Baraka’s own ideological shift from Black Power and black nationalism to Marxism. Without Black Arts, novelist Ishmael Reed has said that “there would be no multiculturalism”; indeed, the Black Arts Movement may be described as the real beginning of the contemporary practice of according points to mediocre work by minority writers simply because they are minority writers and because their writing focuses on (or obsesses over) group identity, oppression, and enraged victimhood. Given the presence of major Black Arts figures in academic Black Studies programs, one cannot really separate Black Arts from Black Studies, any more than one can isolate Women’s Studies from feminism.
Though other Black Arts figures have become more famous, it is Baraka who shaped the movement and who remains its public face; it is defined by him as modernist poetry was defined by Ezra Pound. I first became aware of Baraka in the 1970s, when I was an English major at Stony Brook University on Long Island and he was the crown jewel of the Africana Studies Department. Born LeRoi Jones in 1934 to a middle-class black Newark, New Jersey, family (he changed his name in 1967), Baraka was at first a communist, Castroite, and fringe Beat poet, then (after Malcolm X’s murder) a black nationalist revolutionary, and later a Marxist (specifically, a Maoist) and Pan-Africanist. But throughout his career, whatever political label he has attached to himself, his writing has been racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic—and violent. Some of it reads like a parody by Howard Stern or a young Eddie Murphy of mindless black radical hate: “Rape the whi
te girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” In a single 1965 essay Baraka managed to be equally appalling about whites, gays, and women, writing that “[m]ost American white men are trained to be fags,” that black men should want to rape white women as a way of taking from white men everything they have, and that white women know that only when they’re raped by black men will they “get cleanly, viciously popped.”
Baraka’s long rap sheet includes arrests in the 1960s for possessing firearms and disturbing the peace, in the 1970s for domestic violence, in 1989 for assaulting a police officer, and in 1990 for inciting a riot. A post-9/11 poem containing the line “Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home that day?” caused a public outcry that lost Baraka the title of New Jersey poet laureate. Because of the virulent hate expressed in his plays and poems, there has, over the years, been a degree of hand-wringing in literary, academic, and theatrical circles to the effect that his work is morally problematic. On the contrary, there’s nothing problematic about it: he’s repellent and his writing is mediocre. That he’s considered a literary luminary and that such institutions as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts have showered him with awards and grants only affirms that being a fourth-rate black artist who oozes race hate is, in at least some cultural elite circles, not a minus but a plus.
For some years after its founding, Black Studies thrived—benefiting, as Rojas writes, from “the intense time after King’s assassination and the ensuing urban riots.” For professors and administrators, the discipline provided a way “to pursue novel intellectual agendas, diversify a college’s faculty and course offerings, offer social support for black students, encourage discussions between blacks and whites, or mollify disruptive students.” Priorities differed: for some, Black Studies was above all about “community education”; for others, it was about “research.” While “students with a nationalist bent tended to view black studies as a service to the African American community,” there were “other activists” for whom it was “comparable to area studies, such as Africa or China studies.”
Of course, as longtime Black Studies professor Molefi Kete Asante points out, the discipline had, and has, a variety of names: “Among the more popular . . . were ‘Afro-American Studies’ as in the UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies; ‘Africana Studies’ as in the Cornell University Department of Africana Studies; ‘African-American Studies’ as in the Temple University Department of African-American Studies; ‘Africa World Studies’ as in the Miami University Africa World Studies program; ‘African Diaspora Studies’ as in the PhD program at UC Berkeley; and ‘Africology’ as in the Department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.” At American University, the department is called “African American and African Diaspora Studies.” Rojas notes in passing the rise of the concept of “Inner-City Studies,” and quotes a 1970 memo indicating that Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago would be based not on race but on “one’s relationship to the imperialist system.”
Karenga’s coverage of post-1960s developments in Black Studies places emphasis on what he calls its “multidimensional thrust toward consolidation and expansion,” as exemplified by the emergence of such subjects as Black Women’s Studies, Multicultural Studies, and Classical African Studies. He notes the 1976 founding of the National Council for Black Studies, “the preeminent discipline organization.” Black Studies and Black Power, in Karenga’s view, were engaged in a “revolutionary struggle . . . to end racist oppression and change society and the world.” They also rejected the goal of turning “[b]lack students into vulgar careerists with no sense of social commitment” or into “pathetic imitators of their [white] oppressors.” Karenga quotes Nathan Hare, who ran the Black Studies program at SFSC and whom Karenga calls “one of the guiding theorists and founders of the Movement,” as saying that “a Black education which is not revolutionary in the current day is both irrelevant and useless,” and cites Fanon’s statement that “each generation must . . . discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” “For Fanon and the Black Studies advocates,” Karenga writes, “this mission was the liberation of the people and building of a new world and a new people in and for the world.” He quotes Hare’s “statement which became a slogan” of the movement: “We must bring the campus to the community and the community to the campus.”
Alas, “[b]y the mid-1970s,” writes Rojas, “student protest had waned”—and without the activism, what was Black Studies? For a time, then, the discipline suffered from waning student interest. Morgan-Cato notes that after CUNY put an end to Open Admissions, made faculty cuts, and imposed a core curriculum, Black Studies at CUNY shrank (though “non-Black enrollment” in Black Studies did go up and core curriculum courses taught by Black Studies faculty served as “recruiting tools” for Black Studies). Morgan-Cato laments that in the 1980s “consumerism, careerism, and computer assisted instruction” led students “away from activist postures to the safety of the marketplace. They came to Black Studies asking not what they could do for their communities, but rather, what they could do to get a good job.” Moreover, as “memories of the 1960s faded,” “fewer students acknowledged the impact of racism.” Sylvia Wynter, professor emerita of Black Studies and Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Stanford, shares Morgan-Cato’s distress. Recalling that the black students who agitated for Black Studies were “galvanized by Stokely Carmichael’s call . . . for a turning of the back on the earlier integrationist, ‘We shall overcome’ goal of the first phase of the Civil Rights Movement, and for the adoption, instead, of the new separatist goal of Black Power,” she complains that over time the “original transgressive intensions” were “defused.” As a result, Black Studies became simply one more “Ethnic Studies” discipline that “served to re-verify the very thesis of Liberal universalism” in opposition to which Black Studies was (in her view) founded.
But Black Studies’ decline didn’t go on forever. The turning point came in 1991, when Harvard hired Gates to run its department. He brought in “star” faculty, assembling a Black Studies “dream team” funded in part by the Ford Foundation and by corporations like Time Warner. Gates’s achievement sparked a turnaround in the entire discipline—a turnaround aided (again) by the Ford Foundation, which spread around a lot of money and, according to Rojas, sought actively to steer the discipline away from politics, especially black nationalism.
Who is Henry Louis Gates Jr.? Raised in West Virginia, he went on to study history at Yale and English at Clare College, Cambridge. Though his oeuvre is, indeed, as Steele observes, less than spectacularly impressive, he has managed to convince a good many people in positions of power that he is a scholar, critic, and thinker of the highest order. He has been awarded no fewer than fifty-one honorary degrees (plus the National Humanities Medal), has been named a MacArthur Fellow, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the public face of Black Studies. Part of the reason for his celebrity, one senses, is that he has struck exactly the right balance: he presents himself in such a way as to seem respectable to white cultural authorities seeking a Distinguished Black Intellectual to honor and reward, yet at the same time is sufficiently provocative to satisfy many (if not all) black activists and fellow Black Studies academics.
Gates himself is an illustration of “double consciousness”: while citing in profusion the leading white purveyors of postmodern theory (Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida) and acknowledging what some Black Studies professors would call the “white” canon, he always views literature, whether by blacks, whites, or others, through a black lens, writing, for example, that “critical signification,” an academic variation on the traditional African American verbal practice known as “signifyin’,” is “a useful concept in explaining . . . black-white relations,” such as the “relation of Phillis Wheatley’s po
etry [Wheatley, of course, being the first published African American poet] to that of Milton and Pope.” Cannily combining the highfalutin language of European and American postmodernist theory with more homely ideas and imagery drawn from black American folk culture and from African cultural history, Gates manages to seem, depending on one’s vantage point, an establishment figure, an anti-establishment figure, or both at once. Consider this passage from his 1989 book Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self:
[T]he challenge of the critic of Afro-American literature is to translate it into the black idiom, renaming principles of criticism where appropriate, but especially naming indigenous black principles of criticism and applying these to explicate our own texts. It is incumbent upon us to protect the integrity of our tradition by bringing to bear upon its criticism any tool of sensitivity to language that is appropriate. . . . [I]t is language, the black language of black texts, that expresses the distinctive quality of our literary tradition.
Note the deliberate signs of strain here, his effort to seem as if he is struggling to articulate a complex idea with absolute precision, even though the point he is making here is essentially a commonplace; note, too, his use of words like principles, tradition, integrity, and sensitivity, which manage to convey the impression that African American literature could not be in better, safer, and more sober hands than those of Henry Louis Gates Jr., who labors here to communicate the idea that he reveres that literature and has the soul of a caretaker. But note, too, that even as Gates stirringly affirms the importance of “translat[ing]” African American literature “into the black idiom,” he is, in fact, speaking in what more than a few of his colleagues would call a “white idiom.” It is, one must say, an elegant tightrope walk.