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Afro-Am at 30
Thirty years after black activists demanded that Yale provide a relevant academic discipline and a cultural center, both continue to thrive. But on a campus where racial barriers are largely a thing of the past, the institutions are being confronted with some new realities.
Summer 1999
by Bruce Fellman
In the late 1960s, there was tear gas and revolution in the air, and while Yale was certainly no stranger to the threat of insurrection during that turbulent era, the University often managed to effect significant change without being split apart by violence.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the events that led to the founding of the African American studies program and cultural center, both of which have just celebrated their 30th anniversaries. Robert Farris Thompson, master of Timothy Dwight College and the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art, was one of the faculty members who presided over the program’s birth, and in explaining how Yale avoided much of the rancor that plagued other institutions, Thompson invokes an African proverb. “Kiyaala mooko, kufwa ko,” he says in Ki-Kongo, a language of central Africa. “The generous person lives forever.”
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“Our focus is on the black diaspora, not on the black experience.”
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The “generous person” Thompson refers to is the late Kingman Brewster, Yale’s 17th President, who, when confronted with angry demands from black students for a black studies program, responded by encouraging Armstead Robinson '68 and other undergraduates to convene a national symposium in May of 1968 to examine the issue. By the end of that year, Yale’s faculty had approved the establishment of the nation’s first academic major in African American studies, and the following fall, the program enrolled its pioneering students.
Three decades later, both the discipline that was spawned at Yale and the cultural center developed to give black students a refuge in a sea of whiteness are thriving. But the times are different, and the institutions are changing as well. The program, which “celebrated” its anniversary by hiring four new professors (three at the junior level and one at the senior level), is in the process of negotiating to become a full-fledged department. And the cultural center, which used to be the center of black undergraduate life at Yale, is adjusting to being one choice—and not necessarily the first choice—among many for its traditional constituency.
“We now have students who never come here,” says recent staff coordinator Tauheedah Rashid '99. “When you ask them why, they’ll say, 'I don’t want to pigeonhole myself by going to the house and being in a black organization.' In fact, for them, Yale may represent the largest black community they’ve ever been around.”
It is certainly a more diverse community—from a socio-economic, geographic, and political perspective—than it was when the civil rights movement dominated the scene and the Black Panthers camped out on campus. “Then, it was very clear what the struggle was, and there was no question that you'd be part of it,” says Rashid, a psychology major who is returning to her native Oakland, California, to teach in the public schools. “But while racism is very much alive and kicking, it’s more subtle these days, so it’s harder to see what you’re supposed to be fighting against. The struggle is no longer clear.”
In a sense, this is a welcome sign of success. Integration has become the norm at Yale, and racial barriers are largely a thing of the past. But in the late 1990s, there is so much diversity within the black community itself that the sons and daughters of the U.S. suburbs, the inner city, and the rural routes, as well as their counterparts from foreign countries, don’t necessarily speak the same the language. The old adage, “it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” no longer applies the way it once did.
“Many of us come to Yale already feeling like part of the system. There’s very little sense of culture shock,” says Brian Ingram '99, a Los Angeles native and cultural house staffer who now works for a Seattle-based firm specializing in socially responsible investing according to Islamic principles. “It’s also true that nothing is closed to us, so we have a much wider variety of activities to choose from than was possible in the early days.”
Frank Mitchell '89MA, acting director of the center, has seen a considerable change in student attitudes. “Young black people show up expecting to be doctors or lawyers,” says Mitchell. “They’re not particularly racialized, they feel comfortable in their rooms in the residential colleges, and they’re really committed to a career path. They don’t simply come here to hang out and find themselves as they once did.”
This is not to say that most of Yale’s 400 black undergraduates are strangers to one another. The space at 211 Park Street, which serves as the headquarters for more than two dozen student groups, is heavily used, says Mitchell. Among the organizations that meet there is the venerable Black Student Alliance at Yale, the group that formed in 1964 to fight for the establishment of the program and the major, as well as groups designed to address the needs of black students of various geographic heritages, professional interests, religious and political persuasions, or singing styles. BSAY sponsors an annual Black Solidarity Conference, an intercollegiate gathering that brought more than 300 black undergraduates to Yale to debate issues such as affirmative action and police brutality. The Black Pride Union specializes in cultural events, such as last spring’s Hip Hop Forum. And while activism is not the draw that it once was, the center still serves as a nexus for community outreach, as well as for protests like the one decrying the shooting of a local black youth, Malik Jones, who was killed by East Haven police in 1997.
“It’s a lot like visiting your aunt or uncle’s house, because you can find your comfort zone,” Demetria Silvera '01, BSAY student coordinator, explains. “ Yale is very easy to integrate, but it’s also nice to be able to go to the cultural center to watch Black Entertainment TV without having anyone question it.”
Trying to understand the dynamics of a black community in transition has long been the goal of African American studies at Yale, explains Hazel Carby, who chairs the program. “Our focus is on the black diaspora, and our emphasis is on studying the diversity of peoples of African descent and their experiences, not on the black experience.”
To do so, the program adopted a structure that would, from its inception, guarantee both a diversity of intellectual approaches and a sense of inclusion in Yale’s academic life. Every professor associated with the program has at least dual University citizenship: Carby, for example, is a professor of African American studies, as well as of American studies. Paul Gilroy, who was among the crop of recent hires, will join the program this fall as a tenured professor of both African American studies and sociology. There are other instructors who hold joint appointments in African American studies and one or more of 14 different areas, including the Law School, the Medical School, and the Divinity School, as well as in the departments of music, English, economics, history, French, and the history of art.
This strategy served to blunt any criticism that Afro-Am was more about political correctness than academic rigor, says Robert Stepto, a professor of English, American studies, and African American studies. “Yale would never stand for that kind of mediocrity,” Stepto insists, adding that the faculty was not interested in creating an academic ghetto. “The program was built by deliberately not isolating people in a particular department. Everyone here has been hired and promoted by at least one traditional department and the program, so right from the beginning, we’ve been part of the fabric of this place.”
This material has also always been woven from black and white threads. “During the last academic year, we had over 1,000 undergraduates enrolled in our courses, and that included a lot of white students who’d be terribly upset if you asked them, ‘what are you doing here?’” notes Stepto.
The same could be said of the program’s graduate students and faculty, who definitely come in more than one skin color. “We’re about comprehensiveness,” says Stepto.
Afro-Am scholars investigate a wide range of topics: blacks in Canadian history, the cultural significance of the tango and mambo, the impact of race on images of masculinity, the representation of slavery in Afro-Hispanic narratives, and the sociology of protest movements, to name but a handful. What unites these disparate investigations—indeed, what unites the program—is an emphasis on interdisciplinary study.
But this is a kind of scholarship for which there are no roadmaps, says Cathy Cohen, an associate professor of African American studies and political science who has cobbled together an Afro-Am methods course. “To train a new generation of scholars to examine the interconnectedness of experience, we’ve had to define how to do interdisciplinary investigations,” says Cohen.
A political scientist by training, Cohen learned new methods of inquiry to examine AIDS in the black community, a study that resulted in her most recent book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics."I was used to working with public opinion data and traditional statistics techniques, but those techniques weren’t helping me understand why organizations such as the NAACP, the black press, and the church were exerting only minimal leadership,” she explains. Different methodologies from other humanities and social science disciplines were required to penetrate an increasingly stratified community that no longer speaks with one voice.
“In the days of severe segregation, there were minimal differences, but upward mobility has changed all that,” says Cohen. “There’s been what we call a 'disaggregation of the whole,' and we need a wide array of new tools to understand what’s going on.”
The program could also benefit from a new structure, says Hazel Carby, who is lobbying for departmental status. “Our peer institutions have African American studies departments, and there are advantages to becoming one, particularly in the area of hiring,” Carby notes. (Harvard’s department, which is chaired by Henry Louis Gates '73, started in 1969.)
Bryan Wolf, chairman of the American studies program—the intellectual grandparent of interdisciplinary endeavors—understands the temptation to go it alone. The union between a program and its departments is “an uneasy marriage, and one that requires constant counseling,” says Wolf. Still, the arrangement can be worth preserving, he notes, because “programs stand at the forefront of knowledge and they have a certain flexibility you lose when you become a department.”
While Carby and the provost’s office attempt to negotiate a suitable configuration for Afro-Am, the students they teach, the black undergraduates in particular, seem to agree on one point: Yale needs more black professors. “It’s encouraging to see someone who looks like you in a leadership position,” says BSAY’s Silvera. “It’s nice to know that there are black doctors, lawyers, and stockbrokers, but we’re also desperate to see more black people in academia.”
An initiative announced last March by the President and the provost (“Time of Arrival,” May) is designed to increase the numbers of both women and minority professors, but no one is expecting changes to happen overnight. Even so, says Kevin Quinn '01, an English major from Detroit, “Yale is a great place to be a black student because there’s just the right amount of identification and distance.”
But while things have certainly improved, says Brian Ingram, “life is far from perfect for African Americans. There have been racist incidents here, and despite all the conversation about diversity, a lot of black students don’t feel completely part of Yale.”
The same, of course, can be said about the rest of American society, and while everyone wrestles with issues of inclusion, Quinn offers a model of how theory might be turned into practice: Shades, his a cappella singing group. Although associated with the cultural center, Shades is multiracial, multiethnic, and coed. And despite obvious differences, the group’s 15 singers manage a fine, if not always seamless, harmony. “It just takes work,” says Quinn.  |
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