From the issue dated May 19, 2000

Taking Black Studies Back to the Streets In research and politics, scholars emphasize issues of poverty, criminal justice, and organizing communities By JEFF SHARLET Making a prominent black intellectual the spokesman for something called Black America is a grand old tradition. A few black thinkers seek the position, but most have it thrust on them by journalists and politicians. Booker T. Washington held the job once, James Baldwin took a turn, and Toni ALSO SEE: Black Studies 101: Introductory Courses Reflect a Field Still Defining Itself Black Studies 101: a Sampling of Approaches Africana Studies 4900, 'Cyberspace and the Black Experience,' at U. of Toledo Colloquy Live: Read a transcript from a live discussion about the new directions of black studies on Thursday, May 18, 2 p.m. Eastern time Morrison was the rare woman to hold the post, until she fumbled by calling Bill Clinton a black man. In recent years, though, we have made great progress. We know it'd be racist to imagine that a single person could tell The Truth about The Blacks; it'd take at least, say, two or three. Conveniently, they're all in one place, Harvard University's African-American-studies program. Dubbed the "dream team," Cornel West, William Julius Wilson, and the rest of the scholars assembled by Henry Louis Gates Jr. are indeed an impressive group. In fact, the stars over Cambridge glitter so brightly, one might even be excused for not realizing that there's a whole galaxy beyond them. And for stargazers, it could be difficult to discern that the old constellations are changing. If the new black studies has a motto, it might be an observation once made by the late civil-rights activist Ella Baker: "Strong people don't need strong leaders." Although many of the scholars in the new black studies are well-known, and more than a few have been tagged with the double-edged label "public intellectual," most reject the academic star system. Nor are they leaders, at least in the traditional sense. "We are led," says Manning Marable, director of Columbia University's black-studies program. "Intellectuals don't create history, they follow it." And if they're honest, says Joy James, a visiting scholar at Columbia, they follow it into the streets. "Think about [Amadou] Diallo," she says, referring to the unarmed black man shot 41 times by New York City police officers in 1999. "What we do isn't just scholarship; these are ongoing concerns, here and now. It's not a question of what is the appropriate role of an academic or a scholar, but what is the appropriate role of a citizen." Many of the scholar-activists are coalescing around issues such as police brutality. "You can only gun down so many people in public before you wind up with activists," says Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian at New York University. It's not enough to write books for your colleagues anymore, he says. But then, in black studies, it never was. With its emphasis on activism, collaboration, and scholarship for and from diverse black communities, the new black studies bears a strong resemblance to traditions in the field. "The future of African-American studies lies in part in its past," says Mr. Marable. "We're trying to replicate in new ways the same things W.E.B. Du Bois was doing." Black studies has always had three "great points of departure," Mr. Marable writes in his new book, an edited collection called Dispatches From the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (Columbia University Press): description, correction, and prescription. "Black studies tries to describe in rich detail the character of African-American life," he says in an interview. "Also to critique and correct racist pseudo-scholarship. And also to link ideas to social institutions." That's where prescription comes in. "It's not good enough to just interpret the world. You have to find a way to change it." For the last two decades, black studies has been remiss in that mission, he says. Mr. Marable lays part of the blame on the postmodern sensation within academe -- "esoterica" that obscured the day-to-day brutalization of black people, in Mr. Marable's view. But even scholars who work that vein agree: While black studies was gaining legitimacy in the white world of academe, it was losing ground in the black communities from which it sprang. Part of the problem was politics. As broad-based social movements withered during the 1980's and 90's, black-studies scholars across the spectrum turned away from prescription to the easier work of correction, of naming all the ways in which non-black people had misrepresented black people. But in the past few years, the factionalism of identity politics, the inward focus of Afrocentrism, and the careerism that infected black studies during the Reagan-Bush years have given way to a nascent era of collaborative research within academe and coalition-building beyond its walls. In one sense, because it is the best of times: "There's a resurgence in activism because the economy has improved," says Mr. Marable. "People have jobs, so they're free to think about the future instead of worrying about getting enough to eat." In another, because it is the worst. Perhaps the most staggering indicator is the growth in the incarcerated population: from one million to two million in the last 10 years. The figure is the largest in the world, both in terms of raw numbers and as a percentage of the national population. Roughly 70 percent of the prisoners are people of color, and more than half of the two million are black. Both trends are having major effects on black studies. Many scholars, from the safety of tenure, have set aside traditional academic writing in favor of organizing community conferences, rallies, and political parties, often behind the scenes rather than at the podium. Columbia's Ms. James says she doesn't speak at political events anymore, not because she's lost her passion for politics, but because she has more to learn from today's activists than they from her. Some scholars, such as N.Y.U.'s Mr. Kelley and Craig Werner, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have decided to write mainly for general audiences. They say they won't abandon the rigor of their work, but they won't abandon their communities either. Others, Ms. James and Mr. Marable among them, plan to work more with prisoners -- building alliances to change the prison system, publishing the work of prisoner-intellectuals, and going into the prisons themselves to offer courses. Not all black-studies scholars are taking to the barricades. In a debate with Mr. Marable that appeared in The New York Times two years ago and is reprinted in Dispatches From the Ebony Tower, Harvard's Mr. Gates argued that the field was most valuable for its place outside of the fray, a position from which it could attempt to produce disinterested scholarship of a pluralist nature. Such work, he wrote, "remains the basic rationale of the university." Even one of the most radical and activist of black-studies scholars, Adolph Reed Jr., a political scientist at New School University, might agree with Mr. Gates. "Our civic lives and our academic lives are two distinct issues," he says. Paul Gilroy, a Yale University sociologist, argues in his new book, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Harvard University Press), that activism that takes black studies as a point of departure is built on a false foundation. Scholars "must step away from the pious ritual in which we always agree that 'race' is invented but are then required to defer to its embeddedness in the world and to accept that the demand for justice requires us nevertheless innocently to enter the political arenas it helps us to mark out," he writes. But even Mr. Gates has entered the debate over whether the descendants of slaves are owed reparations, and Mr. Reed, for all his skepticism, is also a radical political organizer with few equals in skill or energy. Nell Irvin Painter, a Princeton University historian who hews to a more bookish approach -- "my scholarship is my activism," she says -- has also joined the reparations fight. And David Levering Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a two-volume biography of Du Bois, says that although he doesn't follow activist trends, he thinks that Du Bois's later, more-radical work is coming to be fully appreciated in the more ideologically open post-cold-war era. "The clarity with which Du Bois saw the connection between racial justice and economics is only now being widely considered," he says, complicating the "racial romantic" Du Bois that mainstream liberals might find acceptable. Du Bois's later work may well find an echo in the growing political movement against global capitalism, he says, building bridges between black activists and the mostly white protesters who took to the streets of Seattle last fall. Support -- or reinforcements -- for the renewed activism is indeed coming from surprising corners. Although most black-studies scholars say they're still forced to fight with other scholars and politicians who dismiss the legitimacy of the field, students -- including the mostly white, middle-class students at elite universities -- have found new bases for coalitions within, and with, black studies. "These are the kids we've been waiting for for 20 years," says Mr. Werner, who recently served as a faculty adviser to a student-organized conference on hiphop culture and politics -- "something we wouldn't have seen even five years ago." The meeting gave equal time to Nation of Islam activists, feminists, socialists, and environmentalists, groups he says would hardly talk to one another in the past. "It's exciting to be studying social movements and to be in the middle of a dynamic one," says Timothy B. Tyson, another Wisconsin historian who writes on the roots of black power and has worked with Wisconsin students trying to make connections between the growing anti-sweatshop movement and issues more traditionally of concern to black people. As affirmative action comes under fire, he says, many black students are fighting just to stay on campuses. But while the top priorities of black activists and sweatshop activists may not match up, he adds, "your priority No. 2 might be my priority No. 1, and vice versa." Mr. Werner attributes the bridge-building to a late-1990's concern with global economics. Reginald D. Butler agrees. As a historian and director of the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and Afro-American Studies, Mr. Butler charts the field according to the research proposals that cross his desk. "Increasingly, black studies is situated within the larger global context," he says, noting the many young scholars interested in retracing old slave routes to explain the economies and cultures of today. Of course, such perspectives aren't new, but they may have been out of fashion for a while. Black studies has always taken as part of its mission the rediscovery of neglected black people in history. Key to the revitalized black studies of the last few years has been an emphasis not only on activism now and in the future, but also in the past. One of the most relevant books in the field next year may well be a biography of Ella Baker, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press, by a former student of Mr. Kelley's, Barbara Ransby, now a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "I came to Ella first as an activist looking for organizing strategies," says Ms. Ransby. That research helped lead her into academe in order to write about what she'd found. Baker's life provides a counter-history to the civil-rights story most people are familiar with, the epic of Martin Luther King Jr. Baker's activism ran just as deep as King's and began long before his. Educated at Shaw College in the 1920's, Baker abandoned the "talented tenth" path laid out for black elites in favor of labor organizing. In 1935, she and Marvel Cooke wrote a study of the economic and sexual exploitation of black domestic workers during the Depression titled "The Bronx Slave Market." Although Baker has long been overshadowed by both male activists and male scholars, the essay is cited even now as a pioneering effort in the intertwined economic, racial, and gender analyses that black-studies scholars say are the cutting edge of the field today. Baker went on to serve as the de-facto director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. But she believed in a more grassroots approach than King did, and soon she and the S.C.L.C. parted ways. In 1960, Baker returned to her alma mater to convene the conference that gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. During the 1970's, she continued to organize for the freedom of the wrongly imprisoned, such as Angela Y. Davis, and for Puerto Rican independence. Since her death, in 1986, Baker has come to be seen by many scholars as a guide to a more enduring kind of organizing and political scholarship than either the drama of the 1960's or the culture wars of the 1980's and 90's. "A generation of radical scholars is coming of age," says Ms. Ransby, "and they feel the freedom to pursue a wider range of topics than ever before, to talk to people they disagree with. Black feminists are talking to black nationalists, academics are building bridges between their interests and the communities around them. ... In the last five years, the factionalization of the field has nearly reversed itself." Ms. Ransby cites as one example the Black Radical Congress, an organization of scholars and community activists she cofounded with Columbia's Mr. Marable and several other scholars in 1998. The group isn't about identity politics. The roughly 2,000 scholars and activists who participate in its monthly forums and occasional marches are more interested in understanding different black communities than in organizing on behalf of one mythical, monolithic Black Community. And they aim to put their knowledge to work in four major areas: discussion of and advocacy for reparations for descendants of slaves; more funds for public education; a living wage for all workers; and a drastic overhaul of the criminal-justice system, including residency requirements for police officers, a restoration of education programs in prisons, and an end to racial profiling and the death penalty. The black-studies agenda must be as broad as the forces it opposes, says Leith Mullings, an anthropologist at City University of New York and a cofounder of the Congress. "White supremacy ... is not merely a cultural or literacy project," she writes in Dispatches From the Ebony Tower. "At the foundation of racism is a system of savagely unequal economic and political relations." In an essay for a book he's editing called The New Black Intellectuals, Mr. Marable explains black studies' neglect of that analysis as "the paradox of desegregation." Most of the black-studies scholars who came of age in the late 1970's and 80's -- including many he admires -- lack connections to black institutions, he says. They attended white colleges, didn't go to church at all, considered the N.A.A.C.P. an organization of their parents, and ensconced themselves in ivory towers at colleges that gave out maps with warnings about the bad (read black) side of town. What's changed? Among other things, Mr. Marable and many scholars say that the culture of hip-hop is a new black institution that's bonding young scholars to black communities. "Hip-hop at its best is descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive," says Mr. Marable. At its worst, he says, listing the litany of misogyny, violence, and greed cited by the genre's critics, it's all the easy-but-false solutions that black studies has to guard against. The lyrics of much of hip-hop music point toward another, more unfortunate institution of black life -- prisons. "Incarceration studies," says Columbia's Ms. James (who's moving to Brown University next fall), must be a fundamental part of black studies. "We need more space within academe to investigate the flip side of American democracy -- which is enslavement," she says. "What does it mean to have the highest incarceration rate in the world? What does it mean to have one of the highest execution rates? And what does it mean that so many of those killed by the state, policed by the state, are black, brown, red, and yellow bodies?" Ms. James thinks it's important to ask those questions not only in traditional scholarship, but also in other venues. She's done so in her two most recent books, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (St. Martin's Press, 1999), and an anthology, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin's, 2000). And she plans to raise the volume with her next, a collection of essays by prisoners called American Prison Notebooks, due next year from the State University of New York Press. That book will also appear, in its entirety, on a same-name Web site she hopes will become a forum for prison issues and prisoners themselves. "This is a two-way street," she says. "It's about prisoners getting information, and people on the outside getting information." To that end, she plans to challenge prison rules against Internet use. If that ban doesn't seem so draconian, consider it, as Ms. James does, in light of Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It says that all people have a right to freedom of expression, which includes the ability to "seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." "Aside from the question of what these people did, and what the right 'punishment' is, and how 'rehabilitation' works," she says, "there's a more basic question: Do we even consider them human?" By viewing prisoners in the same way black people have been seen, as less than fully human, she argues, Americans sidestep fundamental human-rights questions that challenge our notion of democracy, our prettiest pictures of ourselves. To most Americans, and even to many black-studies scholars, the field is supposed to be about progress: the march on Washington writ large as a long walk toward a colorblind America. If that sounds like a movie, that's because that's about all it is, says Wisconsin's Mr. Tyson. Like Ms. James, Mr. Tyson thinks race in America is more than a puzzle to be solved, and he's interested in stories that don't fit together neatly like jigsaw pieces. "When people say to me, 'The civil-rights movement,' I want to ask them, 'What civil-rights movement?'" Just as Illinois-Chicago's Ms. Ransby wants to reintroduce Ella Baker to the world, Mr. Tyson has been stirring up the ghost of the militant black activist Robert F. Williams, who in the 1950's, long before the Black Panthers, advocated armed self-defense against the Ku Klux Klan. In Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) -- which won awards from the Organization of American Historians as the best first book and the best book on race -- Mr. Tyson tells the late Mr. Williams's story. In While God Lay Sleeping, which Mr. Tyson is editing, Mr. Williams tells it himself. And in Blood Done Signed My Name, which Mr. Tyson is writing now, he aims to tell the story of the race wars he grew up with. "I think I became a historian one day when I was 10 and my best friend walked into the yard and said, 'Daddy and Roger and 'em shot a nigger.'" That was in 1970. The rest of Mr. Tyson's childhood was filled with violence of equal ferocity. After his friend's father was acquitted, Mr. Tyson's family, race liberals, moved to another North Carolina town. There his school was occupied by the National Guard, vigilantes patrolled the streets, classmates were killed. "I had no choice but to become a historian," says Mr. Tyson. "We have this cinematic civil-rights movement in our heads, and it brings tears to our eyes, and it brings joy to our hearts, and we're proud of it," he says. "But then we look at the enduring racial dilemma, the racial crisis that is so abundant all around us. And we say, 'Where did we go wrong? How did we get here from there?'" That so few scholars have tried to answer those questions even now makes the New School's Mr. Reed wonder if there is any new black studies. Mr. Reed describes himself as "the Eeyore of the movement." "I'm always looking for the trouble spots," he says. A cofounder of the Labor Party, in 1996, Mr. Reed distrusts instant-gratification activism. He believes in building slowly but surely, and he's not convinced all the blocks are there yet. "Even the best scholarship doesn't get us in a position to understand the South since 1968," he says. But he admits that "among younger scholars, I suspect there may be a flowering of work more solidly grounded" than that of recent years. He lists a half-dozen junior scholars and their projects to prove that the new black studies, if there is such a thing, deals with the concrete: "black-on-black gentrification" in a Chicago neighborhood; gender politics in Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement; African-American expatriates in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana. "There's no other way," he says. "Race isn't a thing, it's an idea. It changes all the time, and it takes place at specific times and specific places." Mr. Marable agrees. Race took place in the foyer where Amadou Diallo was killed, and it took place in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where judges ruled that race shouldn't have a place in college admissions. But after a long, dry season of black studies during which race took place mainly on pages and through office politics, says Mr. Marable, black studies may be ready to rejoin the communities in which it was born. "The intelligentsia can get lost," he says. "They need someone to ground them." http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A18 Easy-to-print version E-mail this article