Table For Two: T.F. Charlton and Tressie McMillan Cottom On The Aftermath Of The CHE Fiasco

How does a for-profit school with no institutional history, no embeddedness in the black community or the Civil Rights struggle, no marching band, no black greek-letter organizations, nothing that symbolically represents the black college experience–how did it become the number one producer of black degree-holders in such a short period of time? I think we’re talking, at most, 20 years here.

So, my first research question was: why in the hell are all the black folks going to University of Phoenix? I mean, I clean it up for research purposes, but that was my question.

Fast forward a couple of years into my doctoral degree, and I feel the burden of explaining why that question matters to academia; why it’s not a social agenda; why it’s sociology and not, god forbid, education or African American studies. No one says that directly, but eyes glaze over when the question is about racialized patterns of attendance in a sector of higher education with questionable benefits.

If I change the question to something about class patterns in for-profit attendance, or gender patterns or an institutional analysis of field of higher education, people perk up.

That’s not lost on me. I know that the success of degree plan and my entry into the academic job market is, at minimum, partly correlated to the number of eyes that don’t glaze over when I start talking about my research.

In these subtle ways I think questions about black people are marginalized. And that’s just one question. Can you imagine if the entire raison d’etre is to study black people and black experiences?

I don’t have an answer for that. But that’s my experience.

Charlton: How does Black Studies go about proactively reframing the narrative around race, and scholarship on race, and what does that mean in terms of access to  existing media platforms, or the need for new ones altogether? And for younger scholars in particular? (It’s striking to me that NSR went after young scholars who aren’t established and don’t yet have a professional reputation or presence to draw on as capital).

McMillan Cottom:I am taking very seriously this idea of a new media platform for scholars. Very seriously. If we’re going to challenge the hold of dead white men on intellectual traditions, how can we not challenge the hold of media and academic publishing models that privilege the scholarship of people who study dead white men? Makes no sense.

Also, it boggles my mind that we have thousands of scholars in this country–some of them black–and not enough community to produce a platform. Not that this is a black issue. But as is often the case, black scholars are disproportionately affected by poor publishing models. So, I’m trying to connect with like-minded thinkers across fields, disciplines, and platforms to imagine a different model. It’s there. I know it is. I think I even have an idea of what it looks like. But I’m just one woman…and I’ve got comps! I need partners.

Charlton: Can you share some concrete examples of things U.S. black studies have contributed to our knowledge our history and culture?

McMillan Cottom: I think it’s critical to note that when we study black people, particularly in the U.S. context, we’re also studying women, Latin@s, the disabled, etc. Our  experience is particular but not specific.

The knowledge produced in Black Studies programs is directly relevant to the study of Women’s Studies programs, and newer movements for Disability Studies and Prison Studies programs. We have many examples of this. Urban Studies owes a debt to [W.E.B.] DuBois for spatial analysis, for example. Psychology owes a debt to double-consciousness in understanding identity formation and symbolic interactions. We have plenty of reason to expect that rigorous research from Black Studies departments contribute as much to a greater body of knowledge as does rigorous research from any other field.

Finally, this idea of knowledge created and restricted to silos is in direct opposition to everything we know about how knowledge works. Ideas can’t be restricted to one discipline. What we learn about anything somehow impacts what we know about everything else.

Of course, sensible people know this. We know that when we’re musing about how to fix the coffee-maker we often figure out how to finally resolve that issue at the office. Any arguments that restrict Black Studies or the black subject to a knowledge ghetto are already lost to reason.

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