Black Studies Idea Floyd Hunter

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

[email protected]

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

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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,

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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-

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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