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INTRODUCTION: LOOKING B(L)ACKWARD
AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE AGE OF IDENTITY POLITICS
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
(The tale you are about to read was inspired by Edward Bellamyâs Utopian socialist novel Looking Backward, published in 1887. My apologies to the late Mr. Bellamy for my shameless appropriation of the structure of his fascinating book. The ideas contained in this essay, however, are my own, and I take complete responsibility for all of themâincluding the most retrograde.
Finally, many of the characters herein are fictitious and are not intended to resemble real persons living or dead. If they do, it is purely coincidental.)
âDonât try to speak. If you can hear me, blink your eyes.â The voice was faint but distinctive. Obviously a mature, learned man, though in the flood of bright lights he was little more than a brown silhouette.
âWhere am I? Who are you?â I asked, trying desperately to gather my bearings and sound intelligible.
âYouâre at University Hospital. How are you feeling?â
âI feel fine. What am I doing in a hospital? Iâm perfectly healthy.â It was true; I felt very good, indeed, as if Iâd been vacationing in the Caribbean for three solid months. Given my usual pace, it had been a long time since I felt so rested and relaxed.
âThe matter is quite complicated,â the man replied. As my eyes adjusted to the light, the silhouette leaning over me became visible. He was an elegantly dressed black man, perhaps sixty years of age, with salt-and-pepper hair closely cropped around his ears. He had a kind face, though his expression was one of obvious concern laced with heavy doses of curiosity. âYouâve just been roused from a deep sleep, or, more properly, a coma. So much I can tell you. Do you recall when you fell asleep?â
âWhen?â I stammered, confused by the question. âWhen? Why, just last evening, of course. I was attending a conference on Postraciality at the Crossroads of SignificationâI think. I was on my way to a roundtable discussion on The Bell Curve but got turned around and couldnât find the room. I donât quite remember. In any case, there were two other sessions that caught my eye: one called Whatâs the âMetaâ For?: Narrative, Metanarrative, and Constructing the Sign in Post Modern America, the other titled Deconstruct to Reconstruct, Thatâs All We Do. I chose the latter, found a nice comfortable seat in the back of the room, and proceeded to doze off.â
âI understand, Dr. Kelley. But if thatâs your story, it wasnât last night.â As he uttered these eerily familiar words, I was suddenly overcome with anxiety; I felt an asthma attack coming on.
âHow do you know my name, uh, Mr. . . .â
âLegend. Ralph Legend. Iâm a part-time instructor at the university and a part-time medical attendantâwhat they called in your day an âorderly.â I know a great deal about your day because, like you, Iâm a historian. My specialty is the mid- to late twentieth century, which isnât very popular these days since everyone wants to work on the twenty-firstââ
âWait, hold on just a goddamn minute. Iâm sure your life story is all that, but I need to know how long Iâve been sleeping. What day is it?â
âThursday,â he said. âMaybe youâd like to rest just a bit before weââ
âThe conference was on a Saturday, so does that mean Iâve been sleeping for five days?â
âA bit longer than that, Iâm afraid.â
âMore than a month?â
âLonger. Please, Dr. Kelley; you need to preserve your strength. If you calm down Iâll tell you. Today is March 3rd . . . 2095.â Though his words fell somewhere between a whisper and a mumble, the final sentence felt like a gunshot in a dark, soundproof room. Silence stood between us for what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably more like thirty seconds.
âI know this is shocking and awkward, but I donât know how else to tell you. Perhaps you might want to rest a bit beforeââ
âHell no,â I shouted, surprised at the tone of my own voice and my use of profanityâsomething Iâve never been very good at, by the way. âTell me everythingâand I mean everythingâright here and now.â
âWell, Iâve been following your case for the past thirty years. For several months back in 1995 you were in the news. The headlines read, âPromising Young Professor Falls into a Coma during Academic Conference.â Just when you were about to fall out of the media, Charles Murrayâyou remember him, right?âused you as the basis for his book The Negro Mind: A Case of National Distraction, in which he argued that members of racial groups with lower average IQ scores who make it into the ranks of the cognitive elite are incapable of processing so much knowledge. Either they fake their way through their careers, suffer emotional breakdowns or severe nervous disorders, or fall into a coma. Granted, your case was his only evidence, but the man won a Pulitzer nonetheless.
âAnyway, you were eventually brought to the university and placed under observation. I discovered you because I wrote my thesis here at City Community University on race and the rise of the Right at the turn of the centuryâthe twenty-first century. Since nobody wanted to publish the thing and I couldnât get a job, I ended up teaching one course a semester here at CCU and taking odd jobs to make ends meet. When I found out you had been relocated here, I took a position at the hospital so that I might be around if and when you woke up.â
I couldnât believe my ears. At first I thought it was some kind of a jokeâasleep for a hundred years? Be real! But as I carefully studied the hospital room and took notice of all the new technology, it quickly became clear that things were different. Once I realized it was not a joke, I became angry and resentful. I missed seeing my daughter grow up or my wifeâs artistic career take off. I never had a chance to say goodbye to anyone in my family, not even my mother. And I never had the pleasure of seeing a book of mine reviewed in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books, or the Village Voice, for that matter. Nevertheless, my melancholy mood was quickly overtaken by curiosity: after all, I am, in essence, a 132-year-old time traveler with a rare opportunity to see the future.
The doctors checked me out and released me that afternoon under Dr. Legendâs supervision. Legend kindly offered to show me around campus. âI read many of your articles and both of your books,â he told me, âdespite the fact that neither the Times nor the New York Review of Books reviewed them.â
âDonât forget the Village Voice,â I added, perversely grateful that Iâd outlived all those book review editors.
At first I walked slowly and tentatively across the sprawling urban campus; although modern technology preserved my thirty-two-year-old frame, my legs were still weak. Once I got my stride, Dr. Legend started to fill me in.
âA lot has changed since your day,â he warned. âBlack college students make up about one tenth of one percent of the undergraduate students nationally and an even smaller proportion of the graduate population. With the exception of English, the number of black faculty has dropped to about a fifteenth of what it was a hundred years ago. To make matters worse, the Afro-American Studies program here at City Community, and elsewhere, is now balkanized into several different programs.â
Dr. Legend gave me much more than I could absorb. After a few minutes I began to fade out, hearing bits and pieces of his narrativeânone of which sounded uplifting or positive. Fifteen minutes later, we entered a tiny gray building in bad need of repair. âThis is Asante Hall, the home of the Center for Africological Thought and Practice. The director, Dr. Muhammad Khalid Mansa Musa, usually has office hours about this time. He is pretty well known around these parts, does a lot of media spots, and holds the Distinguished Man of Kemet Chair in Africology. I should add, however, that all black faculty nowadays have chairs except for those of us who teach part-time.â
Dr. Musa seemed genuinely pleased to see us. The place was dark and deserted and, besides himself, the only other live body in the building was his part-time secretary. There were no students to be found anywhere.
âI heard on the radio that you had finally been jolted out of your deep sleep,â he said as he extended his hand to greet me. âThe ancestors work in mysterious ways.â Without skipping a beat, he proceeded to tell me about the strength and vision of Africology generally and his program in particular.
âWe are out here in the community working with folks who buy our literature religiously. Itâs these outside funds that keep us going, not the university but the street vendors. Unlike those other Negroes, always talking about difference and diversity within blackness, we know that the man sees only one typeâNiggerâand weâve been fighting for him to see us as Africans, noble and proud. Any scholars not down for the struggle, not writing about the history or liberation of black people are worthless to us.â
âWith all due respect, Dr. Musa,â I interrupted, âthatâs a very old debate. The pioneering black scholars practically had no choice but to devote their work to uplifting the race. But is that always the best place for them to be? Arenât there some negative consequences to allowing skin color and ethnic allegiances to drive oneâs scholarship?â I spoke with hesitation, surprised that people were still talking about such issues but cognizant of the fact that I hadnât a clue as to what transpired over the course of the past century.
âI beg to differ, my brother. Youâre either with us or against us. If you donât work on some aspect of black life then youâre selling out.â
âIâm not too sure,â I interjected. âI recall seeing something John Hope Franklin wrote a long time ago. An article titled âThe Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar.â I read it in a collection of his essays published a couple years after I finished grad school, but itâs olderâindeed, it predates Harold Cruseâs Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.â
âNow youâre digging into some old school shit!â blurted Dr. Legend, whose loss of composure surprised all of us. âIâm sorry gentlemen. I donât know what came . . ., uh. Anyway, please continue.â
âThank you. Franklin was pointing out how difficult it was for black scholars to carry the burden of the entire race on their shoulders and how that kept many from pursuing important work in the fields in which they were trained. Do you have a copy of that book around here?â
âSure, we have everything online or on the ECD system. ECD stands for Extremely Compact Disc. Let me pull it up real quick.â The new technology was fascinating. One subway token-sized disc had the capacity to hold an entire university library. In addition to the printed words, we had the benefit of hearing the text read aloud in the authorâs voice, which had been digitally reconstructed through technology developed by a company called Da Lench Mob Electronics. Dr. Musa highlighted the text in question and pressed the return key. Magically, I was back in my own day listening to the eloquent voice of the dean of black history:
Imagine, if you can, what it meant to a competent Negro student of Greek literature, W. H. Crogman, to desert his chosen field and write a book entitled The Progress of a Race. Think of the frustration of the distinguished Negro physician C. V. Roman, who abandoned his medical research and practice, temporarily at least, to write The Negro in American Civilization. What must have been the feeling of the Negro student of English literature, Benjamin Brawley, who forsook his field to write The Negro Genius and other works that underscored the intellectual powers of the Negro? How much poorer is the field of the biological sciences because an extremely able and well-trained Negro scientist, Julian Lewis, felt compelled to spend years of his productive life writing a book entitled The Biology of the Negro.1
âI see your point, Dr. Kelley, but you completely misunderstand why these scholars made the decisions they did. Nobody held a gun to Benjamin Brawleyâs head and told him to abandon English lit. He was committed to black freedom and made the proper sacrifice. Besides, where could he have studied Black Studies? Harvard? Howard? Come on, man! He had to invent it first.â
âYes,â I retorted, âbut donât you think we ought to work in all fields? Perhaps our collective experience gives us a different perspective on science, technology, European literature and art, and so forth? Or maybe our experience does not give us any unique perspective on issues related to black people in the United States. After all, youâre not suggesting that Africological insights are something we are born with or learn in our families and communities, right? If that were the case, why offer college classes and degrees?â
Dr. Musa, who looked visibly agitated, started to tug on his kente watchband. âYou obviously missed a lot while you were sleeping. Weâre not the naive essentialists weâve been made out to be. We insist that culture is learned, it isnât biological. If it were, weâd be out of business. We believe that the best culture, the most liberating culture, existed before the European invasion. Weâre trying to recover that and reconstruct it for the present generation. That has been our project over the past century plus. And you should know better than anyone that the work we do grows out of real, deep historical scholarship, not guessing games or abstract theorizing. Go back and read the works of William Leo Hansberry or Cheikh Anta Diop or Frank Snowden.â
I should have left it alone, but I couldnât. One hundred years is a long time without an argument. âBut Dr. Musa,â I interjected, âwhy does every useful thing have to always come out of Africa? What about the important contributions by black nationalist scholars who looked to the black experience in the United States, or the Americas more generally, for resistive and community-sustaining cultural values? Iâm thinking about V. P. Franklinâs book Black Self-Determination or John Langston Gwaltneyâs Drylongso.2 Where do they fit in the paradigm youâre constructing?â
Dr. Musa simply shrugged his shoulders and said, âIâm not familiar with those texts.â
âYea,â Dr. Legend added, âthey ought to be foundation texts but your predecessors couldnât see the sand for the pyramids. The lefties were no better, though. As soon as black folk start talking about âus,â âour people,â âblack aesthetic,â any of that, they start crying essentialism.â
âDonât get me wrong,â I added, trying to move our discussion to more institutional concerns, âIâm not arguing that the work Africologists do isnât important, politically or otherwise. There are obvious benefits to your approach; in the past black leaders have been able to mobilize folks by invoking a sense of community, a sense of nationhood, and in so doing they have made tremendous strides toward improving their condition and transforming America. But judging from the current situation, you all obviously didnât win. Why do you have such a small office, small staff, and from what I gather, an abysmal enrollment?â
âI admit, weâve made mistakes in the past. A century ago we were aware of declining enrollments and the assault on affirmative action, but we didnât have a very good strategy to deal with it. We thought building independent schools and independent institutions within established universities would create a base of support. But not many of our people responded; see, theyâre brainwashed and we need to set them straight. They need a trip to the East to see our heritage, to understand that we have a long tradition of learning dating back from Egyptian scientists to the Muslim clerics of West Africa. Modern Negroes are justââ
âNow hold on just a second, brother Musa,â chimed Dr. Legend. âDonât forget that black enrollment declined because they could no longer get into college; they dismantled all efforts to recruit people of color; used test scores against us; and cut out all financial aid. Now college is the preserve of the white minority.â
âWhat happened to the black colleges?â I inquired, âlike Morehouse and Spelman and Morgan State?â
âYou really want to know? Some became racially integrated colleges, the rest are behavior adjustment centers.â
âBehavior adjustment?â The words struck me as both familiar and absurd. âYes,â Dr. Legend responded, âweâll talk about that later. At any rate, for the past three decades there have been fewer and fewer options for black high school grads. Even trade and technical schools have all but been abolished since there are no more trades to learn. Dr. Musa is right to say that the Africologists tried to establish independent schools for black folks, and it was a good strategy given the circumstances, but few could afford the tuition, and those who could usually got their children into mainstream colleges.â
âRunning a school costs, you know,â added Dr. Musa. âSo does running a programâand time is money. I must bid you good day, sirs. Thanks for stopping by.â Dr. Musa turned from us and stared coldly out the window. âYou are quite fascinating,â he murmured, âeven if you are possessed with a limited late twentieth-century understanding of the world. I wish you the best of luck readjusting to our society. Tuta o nana.â
Dr. Legend gathered me up and together we walked next door to Stuart Hall, where the Program in Antiessentialist Black World Studies was housed. The program was run by committee instead of a single chairâeach member representing a different voice, though the faculty was so small that certain individuals had to speak for multiple constituencies. Yet everyone in the family of blackness was represented: Africans, West Indians, black Europeans, Afro-Canadians, black Pacific Islanders, women, men, gays, lesbians, ethnic and cultural hybrids, mulattoes, intellectuals, poor people, middle-class Negroesâyou name it. Unfortunately, their vast and inclusive definition of blackness was not accompanied by vast office space. The program had one main office, four tiny faculty offices, and a copying machine that they shared with Africology. The walls were adorned with beautiful artwork and strikingly original posters. My favorite was from a conference titled ââSheâs a Bricolage Houseâ: Art, Desire, and Black Female Sexuality.â
âDr. Kelley, allow me to introduce you to Dr. Patricia Post; sheâs on faculty here in the program and holds the RuPaul Chair in Black Culture/Gender Studies.â Dr. Post was pleasant, though she looked tired and disheveled. As she explained to us, because of budget cuts, she and her colleagues had to teach overloads in order to cover the range of identities represented by the program. When I asked her whether Dr. Musaâs program offered some of these courses, she scoffed. âThe Africologists have written off the majority of black folk, and they certainly have no interest in the less flattering and more complicated aspects of black life. Do you know their story? Let me tell you.â She leaned toward me and began speaking in...