Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

and that prepares them to deal effectively
with that world, is a basic
fact to people in every black community
in this land . Parochial
programs of Black Studies based on
uncritical concepts of Black Identity
will not help either our students
or these desperately hungry communities
. Such narrowly conceived
programs may help some professors
and politicians (and not a few
students) talk about helping "oppressed
people . . . get `in' . . . by
any means necessary to do it right
now!!" ls But such violent discourse
only helps the ego of the
speaker . For that is not political
language . That is the language of
insurrection, and it is both misleading
and dishonest unless such
spokesmen have both the readiness
and the capacity to carry forward
the action implied .
If the black university is truly to
become the "service-oriented" center
of research and action that Vincent
Harding desires ; if it is, to
use his words, to "set up skills
banks for developing nations and
. . . urge those students who do not
return to the black American communities
to offer their skills to Africa,
Latin America and wherever
else they are needed" 16 , then it will
clearly have to give the non-humanistic
sciences of mathematics,
statistics, accounting, engineering,
physics, et . al., a very great deal of
support . Such a university would
not be able to afford to invest all
or even the majority of its resources
NEGRO DIGEST March 1969
in humanistic programs . There is
no reason why such disciplines
cannot be construed as within the
programs of black studies . It is the
purpose and strategy of a unnversity
which defines its being . Black
Studies can be taught for the purpose
of condescending to or patronizing
black people, as Darwin
Turner observed in his article . By
the same token, non-black courses
can be taught for the purpose of
helping black people, both at home
and abroad .
A functional Black University
will strive to engage in the kind of
teaching and research and public
service which provides people with
the disciplines of thought and action
by which they can mature as
persons and help shape the world
into a more human place of habitation.
The irremediable blackness
of Afro-Americans would be accepted
both as a fact of life and
as a positive value . But, it would
not restrict the experience of black
identity to the immediacies of skinassociated
cultural values . The
black experience is one crucible in
which we work our way to a vision
of and a connection with the human
potential in all men.
A final word by way of illustration
: Ralph Ellison has complained
that his award-winning novel, Invisible
Man, is often mis-read to
imply that it was the blackness of
skin of the hero which made him
invisible to white Americans . Instead,
says Ellison,
"The hero's invisibility is not a
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