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Along the Color Line |
Transforming Black Studies Part Two of a Two Part Series by Manning Marable, April 1998 Black Studies must initiate a national discussion within the African-American community about strategies for power. This includes a critical reassessment of the strengths and failures of both racial integration and black separatism. Integrationist leaders successfully fought against racial segregation a generation ago, creating an expanded black middle class. But the material affluence and accomplishments of this new "Talented Tenth," produced in part by affirmative action, may have diverted out attention from the current crises of class inequality and poverty experienced by millions of other African-Americans. The opposite approach of group separatism, characterized by scholar Gayatri Spivak as "identitarianism," encapsulated racialized minorities within the narrow boundaries of their own experiences. The deeply conservative, patriarchal separatism represented by Louis Farrakhan, among others, represents a political dead end. Racial fundamentalism pushes oppressed minorities into an intellectual and political ghetto. A new paradigm is required, a perspective informed by scholarship that seeks the meaningful transformation of the power relations that perpetuate black inequality. That new approach especially must reach out to the young generation of black Americans born after the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, who are increasingly under assault by the forces of unemployment, imprisonment and social alienation. Black studies has begun to integrate the critical perspectives of class, gender and sexuality into its major projects. However, too many black studies programs have a tendency to focus largely on the arts and humanities, and much less on political economy, public policy and urban ethnography. This literacy and cultural studies orientation should by balanced by a grater emphasis on developing an analytic, critical approach to the science of society. But perhaps the greatest challenge for African-American Studies is simultaneously political and theoretical: by what means can the destructive consequences of institutional racism and inequality be reduced or eliminated in a liberal democratic state? This is no longer just an American question, or a problem that can be reduced to a black-white equation. Brazil, South Africa and other nations are also exploring the complex relationships between racial identities, inequality and power. We need a black scholarship that recognizes how the reality of "race" in the U.S. is being changed by the rapidly growing Latino, Asian, Pacific island and Caribbean minority communities. "Races" are not fixed categories. They are permeated by the dynamics of class, gender, nationality and sexuality. Thus an oppressed racial minority in one historical period, such as the Irish and Jews in the nineteenth century U.S., could be incorporated into the white mainstream. What may be occurring in both the U.S. and South Africa is a reconfiguration of both race and class, with the assimilation of some nonwhite elites within the corporate and political power structure, while many other racialized minorities are pushed even further from equality. Instead of race declining in significance, it may be mutating into new and unanticipated forms of domination. Black studies is challenged to raise hard, new questions about the meaning of race in American life. To do so, it must construct a new analytic language and theoretical approaches toward understanding this society. We should create new black "think tanks, " bringing scholars together with representatives of civil rights, labor, women's and poor people's organizations to develop public policy initiatives. The recent development of the Black Radical Congress involves both activist and scholars who are attempting to revitalize the black freedom movement. We can only advance our field of scholarship by reaffirming the connections between intellectual work and public advocacy of Du Bois, James, Paul Robeson and many others who established and developed black studies.
Editor's Note: This article was first published in The New York Times, April 4, 1998, as part of a debate with Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University.
Dr. Manning Marable is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. "Along the Color Line" appears in over 325 publications across the United States and internationally and at his website.
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