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Within the last quarter-century, academia has gone through a series of struggles, usually painful, often bitter, sometimes violent, over racial segregation, exclusion, and discrimination. Until well after World War II, the record of our universities, professional associations, and scholarly journals constituted a racist outrage, the extent of which has not yet been properly assessed. It should be enough to recall that even the great W. E. B. Du Bois could not teach at a "white" university despite his Harvard degrees and outstanding academic record; that his work and that of numerous other black scholars now recognized as of high quality went unnoticed or was denigrated; that the professional associations went to great lengths to exclude blacks from participation and promoted flagrant racist propaganda under the guise of science; that black authors and work in Black Studies were unwelcome in the leading professional journals. In short, the professions disgraced themselves, perhaps none worse than the historical profession.
Much has changed for the better, but some of the deepest problems remain not merely unresolved but undiscussed. Here I wish to focus on a problem that arose during the 1960s and 1970s and remains with us: Black Studies as an intellectual discipline and the programs instituted to promote it. Black Studies programs may not rank as the most important racially charged problem on our campuses, but it may well be the most revealing. For unless the stagnation and ghettoization of Black Studies programs are arrested, we shall, however inadvertently, condemn our universities and professions to many years of shamefaced complicity in an increasingly ominous resurgence of white racism and black despair.
The black experience in the United States has been unique, not in the trivial sense in which all historical experience may be judged unique, but in the special sense that it has no analogue in the Caribbean, Brazil, South Africa, or anywhere else. A caveat: I shall argue that "black nationalism" is a historically legitimate expression of that unique experience, but I shall invoke that problematic term only because it is widely accepted as a kind of shorthand for a complex reality that cannot accurately be labeled. If the argument of this paper is sound, the term is a misnomer. It nonetheless remains unavoidable because our grossly inadequate political language propels us toward analogies and reference points that generate much more confusion than illumination.
Not until recently were white students in any numbers made aware of the grim realities of slavery, of the achievement of an Afro-American culture forged under conditions of extreme adversity, and of the richness of an African heritage previously and ignorantly dismissed as barbarous and without lasting value. Not until recently could black students in any numbers study their own heritage in a positive atmosphere outside the black colleges.
These hard-won gains are once more at risk. Despite the vast changes of the last quarter-century, the typical white student cannot avoid imbibing heavy doses of racism. America's history, culture, traditions, socioeconomic realities—just about everything—conspires to that effect. If the universities do not accept a social responsibility to educate our young to reject racism, what social responsibility would they accept? Simultaneously, if black students are to be welcomed on predominantly white campuses, they must be offered a stable environment in which they are not patronized as perpetual victims whose every weakness is someone else's fault and may be excused as the result of vast if vague objective forces. That environment must include, among other things, academically competent black professors and a curriculum that takes account of their heritage.
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