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THE BLACK STUDIES IDEA AND THE MAKING OF ANEW WORLD: INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND ACTIVISM
IN AN AGE OF DISASTER AND DISBELIEF
Opening Address25th Annual Black Studies Conference
Olive-Harvey CollegeChicago, IllinoisApril 18, 2002
By
Dr. Floyd W. Hayes, IIIAssociate Professor
Africana Studies andDepartment of Political Science and Public Administration
North Carolina State UniversityRaleigh, North Carolina 27695-7107
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
I want to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Armstead Allen, to the African
American Studies Association, and to the conference planning committee for selecting me to
present the opening address for the 25th Annual Black Studies Conference at Olive-Harvey
College. Because of the recommendation of my dear brother Seneca Turner, who used to work
in the Chicago Community College system and who now is retired in New York, I received my
first invitation to this meeting in 1981. Since then, I have waited anxiously each year to receive
a call from Professor Allen, inviting me to participate in what has been for me the most
important conference that I attend each year.
The Olive-Harvey College Black Studies Conference has contributed to my
development in a variety of ways. Much of the thinking and preparation that went into my
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anthology, A Turbulent Voyage: Readings in African American Studies, first published in 1992
and now in its third edition published in 2000, derived from my experience and participation in
this annual meeting. Moreover, I have developed valuable friendships and associations with
others who make the annual pilgrimage to this important gathering place. I have grown
intellectually, my scholarship has advanced, and my commitment to the Black Studies Idea has
been deepened, as a result of the opportunity to “ground,” as Walter Rodney used to say, with
brothers and sisters at our annual Black Studies conference. Yes, I speak in the possessive
because we create a needed community spirit and critical intellectual practice here. Each year,
the conference includes a trans-disciplinary menu of issues that elicits serious and sometimes
turbulent discourse and debate that span historical time—from the ancient African past to the
bio-technological future. At the end of a long series of charged sessions on some of the most
important issues of our time, I often leave the annual Olive Harvey College Black Studies
Conference physically exhausted. However, I always leave intellectually energized and with a
renewed commitment to continue the daily struggles to liberate our lives as Black people.
Most of you know that ours is the longest standing yearly Black Studies gathering at a
college in America. So it was with this understanding that I waited with anticipation again this
year, as I have done for over twenty years, for Professor Allen’s invitational call. However,
when he called this time, Professor Allen informed that he and the planning committee had
suggested that I be invited to give the opening address for this year’s annual Black Studies
Conference. To be sure, this is the highest honor that I have received in all my years of
participation in the Black Studies movement. It is the most important recognition in my career!
So, I sincerely thank you, Professor Allen, and I equally acknowledge my deep appreciation to
the members of the planning committee and African American Studies Association.
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All of you know that it is no small effort to plan and produce this conference each year.
We owe a serious debt of gratitude to all of those involved in bringing about this meeting over
the years. For their vision, innovation, persistence, determination, and workmanship in
bringing us together this year and for twenty-five years, please join me in congratulating and
applauding Professor Allen and his yearly ensembles, and especially this year’s aggregation. I
also want to thank the N’digo Magpaper, and especially writer Kevin McNeir, for the fine story
on this year’s 25th Annual Black Studies Conference (see McNeir 2002: 4).
When Professor Allen calls each year, we participants get an assignment—often we can
negotiate that assignment—to participate in a particular session that is given an extraordinary
and often daunting title. Over the years, I have attempted to construct remarks that hoped
would have meaning to audiences and participants. Sure enough, Professor Allen gave me my
assignment this year: “Floyd, your subject is ‘The Black Studies Idea and the Making of a New
World.’” Without doubt, this title presents me with a daunting task this morning, for it
possesses so many dimensions. Indeed, the topic forced me to ponder about whether I was up
to the challenge of saying something meaningful in these uncertain times. I have tried to craft a
few remarks that touch and concern this subject, to which I have added a subtitle:
“Institutionalization and Activism in an Age of Disaster and Disbelief.” Hence, the revised title
of my remarks is, “The Black Studies Idea and the Making of the New World:
Institutionalization and Activism in an Age of Disaster and Disbelief.”
In the wake of the spectacle of September 11, 2001, we now face the genuine insistence
and persistence of having to think in the midst of disaster and disbelief. The end of World War
II proclaimed the coming dissolution of the European colonial empire. Similarly, the willful
attack on the symbol of the USA’s military power and the complete destruction of the twin
3
pillars of the Western world’s economic dominance—that is to say, the Pentagon and World
Trade Center—enunciated to the world the vulnerability and coming breakdown of the
American Empire. Has America come to a point in its history when there is a growing
senselessness of existence? To witness these disasters, one can no longer avoid posing the
question of pessimistic disbelief—of nihilism today on a national and global scale (Conway
2000).
Nihilism is not a belief in nothingness, it is the disbelief in what power represents as
truth and perhaps the desire to go beyond that representation (see Camus 1984). American
history has been built on nihilistic foundations. American democracy has not so much failed,
as it has never actually been designed to commence. The advent of nihilism today has become
necessary for our time because it represents the ultimate logical conclusion of great American
values and ideas. Historically, white Americans articulated lofty principles and ideas—of life,
liberty, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness for all. Yet, by means of annihilating
wars against Native Americans, enslaving captured Africans, appropriating Mexican land,
exploiting Asian labor, supporting genocide in the Middle East, and employing other forms of
terrorism, white Americans have devalued the nation’s highest values. American nihilism
today represents the cynical disillusionment with the idea of American progress.
For a half-century, many have lived under an illusion that the American Empire was
invulnerable and invincible. Indeed, many came to believe that the last century was the
American Century. For it represented American economic dominance and cultural
imperialism, as well as a white supremacist political organism, all buttressed by a logic and
practice of global power and violence. America’s ruling managerial elites thought they could
continue to police and terrorize the world well into the twenty-first century. However,
4
September 11, made these beliefs untenable. We have entered a new period of human history
when illusions are being shattered and when the great lies are being exposed as lies for all to
see. Americans can no longer play the politics of innocence, acting as if they are ignorant of
the changing character of world affairs. Recent events now disillusion Americans, especially
white Americans, forcing them to realize their vulnerability. We now are witnesses to the
dawn of a new era of globalization; however, it is not a new ordered world. Rather, it is the
coming of a new disordered and chaotic world, which signals the ascent of an era of nihilism
and resentment. In the new global society, old ways of being, seeing, thinking, and doing no
longer are capable of handling the complex realities of the new trajectory of human, and
perhaps even post-human, evolution (see Baudrillard 2001; Brooks 2002; Fukuyama 2002;
Kurzweil 1999).
It is within the context of the ascent of nihilism and resentment, as I have characterized
the emerging period, that we need to think about “The Black Studies Idea and the Making of
the New World: Institutionalization and Activism in an Age of Disaster and Disbelief.” I want
to discuss three themes: (1) the Black Studies idea: institutionalization and activism, (2) the
struggle for a new language of inclusion in the making of a new world vision, and (3)
unmasking whiteness: the Black Studies Idea and the making of a new world.
Institutionalization and Activism: Contradictions and Dilemmas
Black Studies, as an organized academic enterprise, grew out of the late 1960s struggle
for black liberation. Before that, only a handful of historically black colleges in the south had
paid attention to the scholarly examination of Africa and its American legacy, particularly in
the discipline of history. The field of Black Studies developed simultaneously with the social
movements that sought to transform both American society and its academy. By the mid-
5
1960s, the Black Power Movement was challenging the cultural and racial exclusivity of
American society and its social institutions, including the academic institutions. Black student-
activists argued that the policies, programs, practices, and curricula at white supremacist
colleges and universities discriminated against Black people. Consequently, the demands grew
louder and stronger for more Black students, more Black faculty, and the establishment of
Black Studies.
In the years since the beginning of Black Studies, indications are that American society
seems to be headed toward increasing state violence and a garrison-prison complex, citizen
rage and outrage, and cultural nihilism and social anarchy (see Donner 1990; Garland 2001;
Goldfarb 1991; James 1996; Lasswell 1941). In the 1960s, Black people demanded attention to
their charges of white supremacy and economic exploitation, but the conventional channels of
political demand largely were blocked or ineffective for working-class and impoverished urban
residents. Dispossessed urban Blacks scarcely experienced the tangible benefits of civil rights
legislation and policies. As a result, a number of major American cities were engulfed in a
rising tide of violent uprisings and disturbances. The 1965, Watts rebellion signaled the
watershed of urban Black outrage and frustration with anti-Black racism, police brutality, and
economic disenfranchisement. Almost thirty years later, the 1992 Los Angeles insurrection
(triggered by the exoneration of white policemen whose vicious beating of a Black man had
been captured on videotape by a local citizen and later shown on television to the nation and to
the world) reflected mounting discontent among impoverished Los Angelenos, who destroyed
property throughout much of the city (see Oliver, Johnson, and Farrell 2000). As in the 1960s,
today’s American cities continue to be the visible terrain of frustration, rage, hopelessness,
cynicism, and unrest brought on by decades of society’s indifference to the growing pain and
6
suffering associated with urban economic and political underdevelopment. The urban polity
also is characterized by mounting police-state repression (Parenti 1999).
In contrast to the 1960s, however, it is apparent that as the twentieth-century ended and
the twenty-first century begins, popular feelings of cynicism, resentment, and anger are
expanding beyond impoverished Black and Latino communities to include alienated and
dispossessed white Americans. Increasing incidents of popular political rage represent a
developing culture of nihilism and violence in America—the Unabomber Manifesto, the 1995
domestic terrorism of Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that
killed 168 people, the growing presence of the militia movement, and the mass murders of
teachers and fellow students by white secondary school students. Moreover, today’s increasing
white supremacist hate crimes against, along with mounting police assaults and murders of,
Black female and male citizens, from New York to California, represent continuing patterns of
violence and control similar to the lynching, anti-Black riots, and segregation of the early
twentieth century (Jeffries 2000a, 2000b, 2001). Like the culture of racism, the culture of
violence is deeply rooted in the origin and development of American civilization (see Feagin
2000; Omi and Winant 1994). What must no longer be ignored is the historical truth that
America’s beginning sprang from the violent and dehumanizing underside of the early modern
European world-system—“discovery,” conquest, colonialism, genocide, and enslavement
(Blackburn 1997; Dussel 1995). America’s native populations, along with captured Africans,
were caught in the bubbling cauldron of barbaric systems of white supremacy. Contemporary
America’s increasingly multicultural society, therefore, is deeply rooted in a historic culture of
white supremacy and violence. If America is unable to break with its legacy of racist
7
barbarism and violence, then increasing internal and external chaos, anarchy, and disaster will
characterize twenty-first century.
It was in opposition to these trends and developments that the Black Studies Idea first
emerged and has sustained itself. In the heat of the Black Power Movement more than thirty
years ago, Black students led the struggle to establish Black Studies enterprises in white
supremacist universities and colleges across America. Starting with San Francisco State
University in 1968, Black Studies erupted in the context of university protest (see Chrisman
1969; McEvoy and Miller 1969). This new field of study was insurrectionary and
emancipatory as its supporters sought to challenge and transform the policies and practices of
institutional racism. Additionally, the Black Studies Idea represented a bold intellectual
movement that undertook to unmask the power/knowledge configuration of Eurocentrism and
the white supremacist cultural domination of the American academy. Hence, the Black Studies
Idea was intended to break the perceived connection between whiteness and rightness!
The Black Studies Idea sought to resist the rigid barriers between traditional academic
disciplines by emphasizing an innovative multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to
teaching and learning. To be sure, it was this new field of study that paved the way for current
trans-disciplinary studies, perhaps the most progressive intellectual movement in the academy
today. Long before contemporary postmodern theories and perspectives traveled to America
and to the world, the Black Studies Idea challenged fundamentally the ideological basis of the
Eurocentric paradigm, which assumes that the Western European structure of knowledge is
true, objective, and politically neutral, and applicable equally to all peoples and circumstances.
It was the Black Studies Idea early on, which pointed out that the Western European structure
of knowledge resulted in a representation of civilization that not only idealized Western culture
8
and thought, but also devalued and distorted all others (see Asante 1980; 1987; 1990). Today,
scholars around the world recognize the problematic status of the Eurocentric structure of
knowledge, which holds that white Western European views and values are and should be the
human norm, and which maintains that other cultural views and values can be discounted
insofar as they deviate from some Western and Euro-American imperial notion of whiteness.
We need to remember that it was the Black Studies Idea that set in motion a new wave of
contemporary intellectual interventions, such as ethnic studies, women’s studies, critical
cultural studies, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and subaltern studies. We must never
forget the significance of the Black Studies Idea in contesting the intellectual domination of
Eurocentrism on the global scene!
However, as we fought to institutionalize and legitimize the Black Studies Idea
throughout the American academy from the 1970s to the present, many of us lost sight of the
dynamic intellectual-activism that initially set the Black Studies Idea in motion. Historically,
the social role of intellectuals was to criticize and to speak truth to power, and that is what they
should continue to do (Said 1994; see also Posner 2001). Rejecting this tradition, however,
some of today’s popular scholars associated with Black Studies have become public
intellectuals, who seek to curry favor with, and become the servants of, managerial power
brokers, while demanding gargantuan payoffs for forty- to sixty-minute lectures. Recently,
considerable public attention has focused on Princeton University’s purchase of a few Black
public intellectual luminaries from Harvard University’s African American Studies
Department. Many of us may be asking ourselves about the new academic slave trade. Who
will be the next intellectual commodities sold in this academic marketplace, and what academic
plantation manager will grab them? Fortunately, the media-hyped trade in professional-
9
managerial Black minds and bodies does not dictate the evolving significance and intellectual
dynamism of the Black Studies Idea—certainly not as we practice that idea here.
The presence of prominent Black intellectuals and scholars has a relatively long
tradition in America. Yet, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black intellectuals
were activists—they were not tied to university settings—who spoke truth to white power in
America. It needs to be said that early formulators of the Black Studies Idea sought to emulate
that intellectual-activist tradition. However, since the establishment of Black Studies in the
1960s, the dynamic activism on the part of Black Studies intellectuals gradually faded. This
happened as the American state-apparatus crushed the Black Power movement. As a result,
most Black students turned away from campus activism. Additionally, many of us who
transitioned from student-activists to university professors found ourselves constrained by
teaching a variety of courses, struggling for promotion and tenure, publishing our research, and
often fighting white perceptions about the intellectual rigor of Black Studies. Yet, in the face
of mounting white supremacy and anti-Black racism, which plague contemporary historically
white universities and colleges, too many Black professors now remain silent and invisible,
demonstrating little or no anti-racist leadership and resistance. In view of these develpments, it
is not enough to write books, articles, and papers for our colleagues anymore.
Therefore, I want to argue that, because of the transformation of American society, we
need to revive the activism and popular struggle that gave rise to the Black Studies Idea in the
first place. This is because in the evolving managerial era of knowledge, science, and advanced
technology, educational institutions, as knowledge-producing organizations, are becoming
important sites of political struggle.
10
The managerial transformation of American society is characterized by the transition
from a capital-intensive economy based upon physical resources, which dominated the first half
of the twentieth century, to a knowledge-intensive economy based upon human resources,
which has characterized the second half of the last century to the present. The principal
resource in America’s declining capital-intensive economy has been finance capital, invested in
industrial plants, machinery, and technologies that increase the muscle power of human labor.
In the evolving knowledge-intensive economy, the decisive resource is cultural capital: the
nation’s investment in and management of education, knowledge, computers, robots, and other
technologies that enhance the mental capacity of workers (see Botkin, Dimancescu, and Stata
1984; Drucker 1968, 1993; Lyotard 1984; Reich 1991; Toffler 1990). Important now are
specialized knowledge, communication skills, the capacity to process and utilize collections of
information in strategic decision-making processes, and an increasingly
professionalized/managerial approach to controlling people. With this expanding role for
formal or specialized knowledge, professionals and experts—intellectuals and the technical
intelligentsia—have become a “new class” in the public and privates sphere, particularly with
regard to making public policies (Bazelon 1971; Derber, Schwartz, Magrass 1990; Ehrenreich
and Ehrenreich 1979; Freidson 1970; Galbraith 1971; Nachmias and Rosenbloom 1979; Perkin
1989).
Mental capacity and managerial skills are supplanting money and manufacturing as the
sole sources of power. Life-long learning, therefore, is becoming an indispensable investment
for social development, and educational credentials are more and more the key to a person’s
role in a knowledge-intensive society (Collins 1977). In view of these trends and
developments, more and more parents are becoming preoccupied with the educational
11
advantages they can confer on their children, and many university students are realizing the
importance of advanced educational credentials, if not the need for advanced educational
attainment.
Society’s new power wielders are located in government, elite universities,
philanthropic foundations, the mass media, elite law firms, political action committees, and
major policy research institutions (see Benveniste 1972; Burnham 1960; Fischer 1990; Keane
1984; Lebedoff 1981; Smith 1991). Their influence comes from the capacity to conceptualize
the character of complex social problems and to design strategies for handling them; they also
produce and manage ideas and images that direct the cultural, intellectual, and ideological
development of managerial society. For example, recall that since the 1980s, policy
intellectuals of various ideological persuasions have driven the debate about the so-called urban
underclass and the assault on welfare polices (see Auletta 1982; Cottingham 1982; Jencks and
Peterson 1991; Jones 1992, 1998; Katz 2000, 2001; Lawson 1992; Loury 1995; Mead 1992;
Murray 1984; Wilson 1987, 1996). In the future, criminal justice policy scholars now being
trained in universities across the nation may very well become the professional experts who
will legitimize the dramatically increasing incarceration of undereducated, dispossessed,
unwanted, and disenfranchised urban dwellers in America’s emerging prison-garrison state. As
America’s urban police forces become increasingly militarized, which began happening in Los
Angeles under police chief Daryl Gates, criminal justice policy elites (as members of the
professional-managerial class) will rationalize the prison-garrison state in lockdown America
(see Parenti 1999).
It is an understanding of this emerging reality that encourages me to see the growing
need for Black struggle in educational institutions, especially at universities. Since the late
12
1970s, many urban school systems, including many of those controlled by Black educational
managerial elites, have been engaged in undermining the intellectual development of Black
youngsters (see Henig, Hula, Orr, and Pedscleaux 1999; Stone 1998). Many urban systems
have placed quality education on the backburner. They have abandoned the distribution and
mastery of the fundamental tools of knowledge, academic motivation, and positive character
development. Denied quality education, many Black high school graduates matriculate to
universities and colleges where they are scarcely equipped to handle the rigors of advanced
academic performance (Hayes 1990; Mazique 2000). Moreover, many Black students find
themselves increasingly caught in the crucible of intellectual sabotage and anti-Black racism at
historically white universities. Hence, there are institutional strategies in place that prevent
many Black students from obtaining the necessary quality education needed to perform
optimally in a future American society that is based largely on knowledge, science, and
advanced technology.
For at least two decades, I have observed the increasing viciousness of white supremacy
directed at Black students and faculty in the American academy. Largely unfamiliar with the
history of campus struggles of the 1960s, many of today’s Black students seem confused. In
the face of racist assault, they appear to possess no armor; and many seem unprepared to
negotiate university bureaucracies and institutionalized racism. At historically white
universities and colleges, when they come to Black faculty for assistance and support, we often
are not available to them. Many Black faculty, staff, and managers are invisible, silent, and
fearful, failing to demonstrate to our students courage, confidence, and leadership in
challenging white supremacy and anti-Black racism. For we have abandoned the activism and
popular struggles in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in our employment at these institutions.
13
Perhaps many of us have forgotten that we stand on the shoulders of those who fought defiantly
and tirelessly for future generations. It also needs to be stated that at many Historically Black
Universities and Colleges there has existed an authoritarian leadership tradition that also has
suppressed faculty and student dissent. This must stop! We must resist managerial repression!
In the face of an increasingly oppressive managerial society (see Parenti 1999; Garland
2001), I call on all of us to renew a sense of self-respect, courage, confidence, and defiance. In
a knowledge-intensive society in which universities (as knowledge-producing institutions)
increasingly become sites of political conflict, Black faculty must become coalitions of
defiance and advocates for social justice. In addition to our scholarly pursuits, Black faculty
need to fight back against racist practices throughout university and college workplaces. We
need to build coalitions with students and service workers. Black students deserve a quality
education in a university learning environment free of racist harassment and violence. Black
service employees deserve working conditions free of racism and exploitation. In the face of
the intellectual sabotage of Black students, I call on Black faculty to become advocates for
quality education. In the face of racist injustice, we need to demand racial justice. Indeed, we
need to revive, politicize, and radicalize Black student and Black faculty and staff organizations
in order to struggle for racial justice at historically white supremacist colleges and universities.
Similar organizational arrangement also need to be established at Historically Black Colleges
and Universities in order to challenge those leadership regimes that are repressive. The Black
Studies Idea contains a dual mission: intellectual excellence and social responsibility. The
present era of increasingly anti-Black hostility demands that we be clear about this mission. As
we pursue academic achievement, let us also renew the mission of social activism. I urge all of
us to remember and act on Frantz Fanon’s declaration: “Each generation must, out of relative
14
obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it” (1963: 167). Silence, invisibility, and fear
—in the face of injustice—constitute betrayal and collusion with the forces of evil!
New Language of Inclusion for a New Vision of the World
My second theme has to do with the struggle to develop a new idea, a new vision, and a
new language of inclusion necessary for the making of a new world. Indeed, we have to think
about thinking itself. As I have previously argued, the new world that is dawning is an
increasingly disordered, chaotic, and nihilistic world. The American reaction to the September
11, 2001, disaster and this nation’s continued intervention in the Middle East crisis,
demonstrate the dramatic growth of global antagonism and anti-American resentment,
especially in the Muslim world. Chaos is mounting everywhere, and resistance to American
political hegemony is increasing by leaps and bounds. Moreover, old and new liberation
struggles continue in various sectors of the world. What may be different from past eras is the
increasing demand for reparations by those people who have been unjustly impoverishment as
a result of the unjust enrichment of white, Western civilization. The dominant issue of the
twenty-first century may well be the demand for restitution for the European and Euro-
American imperialism and colonialism, especially crimes against African and African
American humanity (Barkan 2000; Robinson 2000; Worrill 2001).
Yet, even as the global demand for recognition and reparation continues to grow among
the oppressed and exploited peoples of the world, the Black Studies Idea needs to find a new
language of inclusion that connects the liberation struggles of disenfranchised people around
the world. I speak of subordinated men, women, and children throughout the world whose
right to exist and reproduce themselves is being threatened increasingly by nuclear and
biological weapons of mass annihilation in the new age of knowledge, science, and advanced
15
technology. These are the laboring masses on the global scene, who are struggling for human
dignity and personal worth, family survival and community solidarity, a living wage and
adequate housing, quality education and good health care, and sustainable human development
—all with the hope of a livable environment on planet earth. Can the Black Studies Idea think
through the many veils of illusion necessary for developing a discourse that links “the damned
of the earth,” which would include the Palestinians as they struggle for a homeland of their
own? Can the Black Studies Idea construct an alternative vision of the world—beyond the
encroaching disorder, chaos, and nihilism—that would save humanity and, thereby, save the
African world? Can the Black Studies Idea fashion strategies and tactics the will make the new
world work not for crass economic gain or human management and destruction, but for a new
humanism and a new environmental theory and practice free of racist, economic, political, and
cultural injustice (see Bullard 1994)? In the last analysis, if we do not protect the environment,
all else may become irrelevant!
Unmasking Whiteness: The Black Studies Idea and the Making of the New World
My third and final theme centers on the struggle to dismantle the conception and power
of whiteness in the imagination and in the lived experience of Black people. When I ask my
white students what it is like (or what it means) to be white, they often get lockjaw and are
silent. Generally, they say that they have never thought about being white. They seem largely
invisible to themselves as whites. Only a few are aware of the manner in which America’s
white supremacist social order is based upon power, profits, and pleasure derived from white-
skin privilege. Most of my white students even deny that they benefit from systematic
privileges that whiteness provides (but see McIntosh 2001). The spotlight needs to be turned
on whiteness in such a way that it becomes problematic—that is, the subject of critical
16
examination from the standpoint and perspective of the Black Studies Idea. We need to break
the supposed connection between whiteness and rightness! This proposal is not a new
departure; rather, it is an extension of the primary intellectual objectives of the Black Studies
Idea.
Since the dawn of the Black Studies Idea in the late 1960s, a number of founding
scholars and theorists mentioned a need to re-examine the white experience as a corollary to the
main mission of the new field of study. According to Harold Cruse (1969), the Black Studies
Idea needed to employ Black cultural nationalism in the critical examination of both
developments and contradictions within the Black American population as well as the
manifestations of the larger American cultural apparatus and its effects on Black consciousness.
Referring to the Black Studies Idea as the systematic examination of the historic and
contemporary experiences of Black people, Maulana Karenga (1982) argued that its major
objectives were to challenge and correct the distortions and lies of white studies (or the
traditional university academic disciplines). Importantly, for over thirty years, he has
judiciously admonished Black people to tell their own cultural truths, which, as a result, would
also mean to expose the accepted fictionalized data of white studies. It was Francis Cress-
Welsing, who in her 1970 essay, “The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism
(White Supremacy): A Psychogenetic Theory and World Outlook,” leveled a frontal attack on
white supremacy, arguing that it is a psychological/behavioral response to white people’s
(especially the white male’s) fear of numerical deficiency and genetic extinction (see Cress-
Welsing 1991). Additionally, Molefi Asante (1980, 1987, 1990) demanded and demonstrated a
deconstruction of the fundamentally flawed Eurocentric grand-narrative. This earth-shaking
and myth-shattering scholarship, as well as the work upon which it was based (for example, see
17
Ben-Jochannan 1970, 1971, 1972 ; Birley 1972; Budge 1961 Diop 1974; Jackson 1970, 1972;
James 1954; Jones 1972a, 1972b, 1978, 1989; Massey 1970, 1974a, 1974b; Tompkins 1971;
Weiner 1920, 1922) paved the way not only for new scholarship about the world African
experience. Formulators of the Black Studies Idea also fostered a necessary counter-narrative
about Europeans and their white American descendants.
It is the expansion and elaboration of this earlier perspective that I call on the Black
Studies Idea to focus its critical gaze. What is required is the critical examination of modern
and contemporary European and white American culture and civilization refracted through the
lens of the Black Studies Idea. This is not a call for arresting the ongoing intellectual
examination of the global African experience; rather, it is a proposal for expanding a counter-
narrative about the paradox of whiteness for the purpose of dismantling its hegemony.
How do we mount a necessary critique of modern representations of whiteness? I want
to touch a few themes, but these scarcely are exhaustive of the categories of whiteness that the
Black Studies Idea needs to contest and dismantle. First, since Western culture’s late
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment is major source of contemporary white
supremacy’s justification, the Black Studies Idea needs to interrogate the relationship between
modern Europe’s philosophical anthropology and anti-Black racism (see Ani 1994; Eze 1997;
Gates 1985). Second, there is a serious need to expose what philosopher Charles Mills (1997,
1998) refers to as “the racial contract,” an historical agreement among whites which has
buttressed the global political system of white supremacy. Calling into question America’s
fictionalized history, this investigation also will demonstrate that the United States came into
existence not as a democracy but as a white supremacist republic (see Saxton 1990). The third
theme addresses the historical and social forces motivating Europeans to define themselves as
18
superior and “white” Americans and to define captured Africans and their American
descendants as the inferior Black “Other” (Allen 1994, 1997; Barrett and Roediger 1997;
Cleaver 1997; Ignatiev 1995; Johnson 1999; Roediger 1991; Sacks 1997).
Fourth, the Black Studies Idea must challenge the view that whiteness is the invisible
and unmarked norm in American culture and society; unmask whiteness as a system of unjust
enrichment, entitlement, power, privilege, profits, and pleasure; and break the assumed linkage
between whiteness and rightness (see Du Bois 1964; Feagin 2000; Frankenberg 1993, 1997;
Harris 1995; Hill 1997; Lipsitz 1998; Rasmussen, Klinenberg, Nexic, and Wray 2001;
Rothenberg 2002). Fifth is the need to explore systematically how Black people have viewed
whiteness—conquest, colonialism, genocide, enslavement, terrorism, segregation, and
contemporary and more subtle forms of white supremacy and anti-Black racism (Bay 2000; Du
Bois 1969; hooks 1992, 1994; Morrison 1992; Roediger 1998). Last, the Black Studies Idea
needs to incorporate an investigation of what Eric Lott (1995) has called “love and theft,”
meaning the ways in which whites historically have terrrorized, vilified, hated, and feared
Black people while simultaneously embracing, appropriating, commodifying, and exploiting
aspects of Black expressive and popular culture (see also Collier 1978; Daniels 2002; Davis
1989; DeVeaux 1997; George 1988; Jones 1963; Kofsky 1970; Lawrence 2001; Pieterse 1992;
Porter 2002; Roach 1999; Szwed 1997; Ward 1998).
Conclusion
The dawn of the twenty-first century finds America engulfed by a rising tide of
cynicism and nihilism; it is a cancer of the American spirit and a lethal assault on the nation’s
immune system. Suspicion is increasing. Trust is declining. There is a mounting sense of
despair about the modern culture of progress that America is supposed to embody. A growing
19
proportion of Americans seem skeptical about whether the institutions of progress are viable
and beneficial: political leadership, public bureaucracies, business corporations, public schools,
universities, political parties, religious organizations, the legal system, the mass media, and
even the family. Popular discontent is becoming more comprehensive, penetrating, and
corrosive. The September 11, 2001, disaster served to broaden and deepen a consciousness of
impending doom among the American public. Significantly, signs of growing cultural
decadence suggest that American culture and civilization are beyond redemption.
The expanding fear and disillusionment with respect to America’s sense of invincibility,
along with the growing instability of white supremacy as a global political system, hint at the
coming decline and dissolution of America’s world dominance. Against an expanding sense of
disaster and disbelief, what is needed is new thinking, new ideas, new concepts, and even new
thinking about thinking itself. In this talk, I have discussed three major themes appropriate for
advancing the Black Studies Idea—(1) increasing intellectual activism, (2) developing a new
language of inclusion for the world’s oppressed masses, and (3) constructing a counter-
narrative for unmasking and dismantling whiteness. The Black Studies Idea needs to break
fundamentally with the dominant structures of thinking and knowledge that characterize the
contemporary American academy. These critical and uncertain times demand, therefore, that
the Black Studies Idea provide intellectual leadership in the academic and nonacademic world
by developing new strategies and tactics that could save humanity and, thereby, save the world
African community. This is the twenty-first century challenge that the Black Studies Idea must
meet for the making of a new world.
20
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