On The CHE‘s Reinforcement Of Suspicion Of Black Academia

Such commentators routinely use influential media platforms to complain about how put upon they are by anything that centers PoC. They present themselves as edgy, brave souls, risking livelihoods to speak “truth” about race–because attacking PoC is so taboo–while they repeatedly attack POC with impunity. It’s a prevalent mindset exemplified by the white theater critic who recently derided the all-black production of A Streetcar Named Desire, not based on its quality, but because there are no all-white August Wilson plays–implying that black folks are somehow taking something from him and other white people in an industry where black actors are extremely marginalized and black critics are virtually nonexistent. As Blair Underwood, the star of this adaptation,  put it on his Facebook page, the clear message is “BLACK FOLKS, STAY IN YOUR PLACE.”

4. Black scholarship and black scholars are viewed as suspect and having to be justified, while implicitly white scholarship is seen as neutral, worthwhile, and objective.

What’s true of the media is true of academia: the legitimacy and value of “traditional” (disproportionately white) fields are taken for granted. There’s little room to question the “objectivity” of white mainstream scholarship, despite the long history of institutional racism in academia; still less room to articulate the indispensable contribution Black and other Ethnic Studies have made to our knowledge.

Without Black Studies, what would we know of black protest of Jim Crow, slave revolts (and white suppression of records of these revolts), or the medical exploitation of black and brown bodies? Who would chronicle not just the struggle, but the achievements, creativity, and joys of black lives and experiences? Do naysayers really imagine white scholarship, on its own, has given an honest account on these topics? Or are such accounts simply irrelevant to them?

If anything is intellectually fraudulent, it’s scholarship that, consciously and not, excludes POC scholars or ignores race and ethnicity as categories of analysis. We all, white people included, need Ethnic Studies. Both academic scholarship and our understanding of the world are better, more honest, more robust with them than otherwise.

None of this is to say that black studies is perfect. Like many academic disciplines, it can be deeply bound to “traditional” approaches that marginalize scholarship from or about women, queer, and/or trans people. But it’s also the case that substantive critiques of Black Studies by scholars who take race and racism seriously (i.e., not Sowell and Steele) already exist. That critics are wholly ignorant of both the contributions and critiques of Black Studies is an example of what Spelman anthropologist Erica L. Williams describes as the “emotional labor” PoC scholars “must perform … beyond our job descriptions” and not just in the humanities. The considerable stresses of educating and producing scholarship are compounded by the suspicion and racial hostility PoC scholars routinely face.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and La TaSha B. Levy (l-r). Courtesy:Afrodiaspores.tumblr.com

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