Writing several years ago in The New York Times Book Review, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., chairman of the Afro-American studies department at
Harvard, observed that “ours was the generation that took over
buildings in the late 1960s and demanded the creation of Black and
Women’s Studies programs, and now … we have come back to
challenge the traditional curriculum.” And, my, how they have
succeeded!

We had occasion to recall Professor Gates’s observation
recently when the “Education Life” supplement for the November 3
issue of The New York Times ran an article entitled
“Can Harvard’s Powerhouse Alter the Course of Black Studies?”
The burden of this long and flattering effusion, by the Times
reporter Peter Applebome, was that, yes, Professor Gates was doing
terrific things at Harvard. Among other things, he had dramatically increased
the “profile” of the Afro-American studies department, chiefly by
hiring left-wing academic celebrities such as Cornel West and
William Julius Wilson, but also by pursuing and instigating numerous
research projects both in his capacity as chairman of the
Afro-American studies department and as head of Harvard’s
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.
“What we’re doing,” Professor Gates noted in the Times, “is trying
to establish the field as a valid area of study, a valid area of
intellectual inquiry.” Elsewhere, Professor Gates has noted his
ambition to effect the “permanent institutionalization” of
Afro-American studies by producing or encouraging “foundational”
research that would result in “bibliographies, concordances, dictionaries,
encyclopedias,” and other reference works.

If the production of print is all that it takes to establish an
academic field of study, Professor Gates will have succeeded beyond
his wildest dreams. He and his colleagues and collaborators are producing
reams upon reams; just this week a plump Norton Anthology of African
American Literature, co-edited by Professor Gates, arrived on our desk;
a seven-hundred-page Dictionary of Global Culture, also co-edited
by Professor Gates, is due out in January; together with
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Professor Gates is pursuing his “dream” of
bringing Du Bois’s idea of an Encyclopedia Africana into being;
and so on.

But the question remains: is Afro-American studies a “valid area
of intellectual inquiry”? Mr. Applebome clearly wants the Times’s
readers to think so—at least insofar as Afro-American studies is
conceived at Harvard under Professor Gates’s leadership. To
reinforce the impression of intellectual legitimacy, Applebome contrasts
the activity at Harvard’s Afro-American studies department with
the program as it exists at Temple University under the leadership
of Molefi Kete Asante. Asante is a confirmed Afrocentricist—not
indeed the furthest-out of this far-out group of racialist rabble-rousers
(like Leonard Jeffries, for example), but still far, far from home. In his book The Afrocentric Idea, he rails against “the
preponderant Eurocentric myths of universalism, objectivity, and
classical traditions,” etc., urging instead a sympathetic
understanding of African Nommo and The Egyptian Book of the
Dead. Judging from Mr. Applebome’s presentation, Professor Asante
is deeply unhappy at all the attention Gates and company are getting at
Harvard. (“We’re not waiting for the messiah to come from Harvard.
The database is already at Temple.”) But the main point of bringing
in the Temple program was to suggest how respectable, by contrast,
Professor Gates’s enterprise seems.

It is now possible to major in Afro-American studies at Harvard; a
Ph.D. in the subject is planned. But still the question remains:
is it really a subject? Frederick Douglass observed long ago, “No
one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward
colored people of this country than that which makes Africa, not
America, their home.” And before he became radicalized, the novelist
James Baldwin wrote that “relations between Negroes and whites must
be based on the assumption that there is one race and we are all
part of it.” The whole premise of “Afro-American studies” programs
runs contrary to the spirit of Baldwin’s and Douglass’s
observations. “Afro-American studies” describes not an academic
discipline but a political fiefdom; such fiefdoms are created and maintained not to
aid in the pursuit of knowledge but to appease an
ideological demand. The same, incidentally, goes for “women’s
studies” programs. Indeed, we believe (to adapt a mot from George
Orwell) that all academic “studies” programs should be considered
guilty until proven innocent. As the philosopher Roger Scruton put it, “to construct a subject around a political agenda
is precisely to relinquish the pursuit of knowledge, and to abandon the
claim to a place in the curriculum.” No matter how lavishly funded
or expertly promoted, Afro-American studies, like women’s studies,
is a pseudo-subject, entirely parasitic on real disciplines
(history, English, anthropology, etc.). Such programs exist solely
to further a political agenda and to fulfill “affirmative action”
quotas that have been imposed upon the academy. As such, they
perpetuate and extend the ghettoization of their inhabitants. Of
course, a few individuals lucky enough to be at the right
institution at the right time will enrich themselves. But the sad
irony is that Afro-American studies, like women’s studies, serves to
continue the intellectual disenfranchisement of the very people
it was meant to liberate.