It was the first thing I fell in love with on this campus. Everything that I do, I do because it said I could, because it changed my implicit definitions of "scholarship" and "intellectually significant". It made me realize how much I didn't know about my people, about myself, and about what learning should feel like. And so, while I was off the map when Schafer Riley attacked those graduate students and the discipline I think of as home, I'll be damned if I stand for it. The work we do is important BECAUSE it's not mainstream, because despite all of the post-racialness people like Riley proclaim, no one will do this scholarship if we don't. #Blackademicsunite
Without Black Studies, what would we know of black protest of Jim
Crow, slave revolts (and white suppression of records of these revolts),
or the medical exploitation of black and brown bodies? Who would
chronicle not just the struggle, but the achievements, creativity, and
joys of black lives and experiences? Do naysayers really imagine white
scholarship, on its own, has given an honest account on these topics? Or
are such accounts simply irrelevant to them?
If anything is intellectually fraudulent, it’s scholarship that,
consciously and not, excludes POC scholars or ignores race and ethnicity
as categories of analysis. We all, white people included, need Ethnic
Studies. Both academic scholarship and our understanding of the world
are better, more honest, more robust with them than otherwise.
None of this is to say that black studies is perfect. Like many
academic disciplines, it can be deeply bound to “traditional” approaches
that marginalize scholarship from or about women, queer, and/or trans
people. But it’s also the case that substantive critiques of Black
Studies by scholars who take race and racism seriously (i.e., not Sowell
and Steele) already exist. That critics are wholly ignorant of both the
contributions and critiques of Black Studies is an example of what
Spelman anthropologist Erica L. Williams describes as the “emotional
labor” PoC scholars “must perform … beyond our job descriptions” and not
just in the humanities. The considerable stresses of educating and
producing scholarship are compounded by the suspicion and racial
hostility PoC scholars routinely face.
PoCs are constantly expected to be emotional midwives to white
people. Attempts to claim space or identity for ourselves—without
deference to whiteness—are inevitably met with suspicion, anger, fear,
and guilt (witness white anger over the President’s racial
self-identification). We’re expected to have a conversation on race and
racism that centers and assuages white emotions, to speak about race in
terms and frameworks that are neither by, for, or ultimately about us.
What little space we’re afforded in mainstream media is taken up with
101-level education, demands that we justify our existence, and prove
the merit of our perspectives and accomplishments beyond the shadow of a
doubt. White critics and, occasionally, other people of color, often
feel a casual entitlement to pass judgment on PoC narratives of our own
experiences, and on our scholarship, without putting in the effort to
learn about or engage with either.
--T. F. Charlton
