The truth is, too many people still regard African-American studies primarily as a way to rediscover a lost cultural identity-or invent one that never quite existed. And while we can understand these impulses, those in our field must remember that we are scholars first, not polemicists. For our field to survive, we need to encourage a true proliferation of rigorous methodologies, rather than to seek ideological conformity. AfricanAmerican studies should be the home of free inquiry into the very complexity of being of African descent in the world, rather than a place where critical inquiry is drowned out by ethnic fundamentalism.
We need to explore the hyphen in African-American, on both sides of the Atlantic. We must chart the porous relations between an “American” culture that officially pretends that an Anglo-American regional culture is the true, universal culture, and the black cultures it so long stigmatized. We must also document both the continuities and discontinuities between African and African-American cultures, rather than to reduce the astonishing diversity of African cultures to a few simple-minded shibboleths. But we should not lay claim to the idea of “blackness” as an ideology or religion. Surely all scholars of Africa and its diaspora are, by definition, “Afrocentric,” if the term signals the recognition that Africa is centrally in the world, as much as the world is in Africa. But this is a source of the problem: all Afrocentrists, alas, do not look alike.
In short, African-American studies is not just for blacks; our subject is open to all-to study or to teach. The fundamental premise of the academy is that all things ultimately are knowable; all are therefore teachable. What would we say to a person who said that to teach Milton, you had to be Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, male … and blind! We do nothing to help our discipline by attempting to make of it a closed shop, where only blacks need apply. On the other hand, to say that ethnic identity is the product of history and culture is not to say that it is any less real. Nor is it to deny our own personal histories, to pretend that these are not differences that make a difference.
Nobody comes into the world as a “black” person or a “white” person: these identities are conferred on us by a complex history, by patterns of social acculturation that are both surprisingly labile and persistent. Social identities are never as rigid as we like to pretend: they’re constantly being contested and negotiated.
For a scholar, “Afrocentrism” should mean more than wearing Kente cloth and celebrating Kwanzaa instead of Christmas. (Kwanzaa, by the way, was invented in Los Angeles, not Lagos.) Bogus theories of “sun” and “ice” people, and the invidious scapegoating of other ethnic groups, only resurrects the worst of 19th-century racist pseudoscience-which too many of the pharaohs of “Afrocentrism” have accepted without realizing.
We must not succumb to the temptation to resurrect our own version of the thought police, who would determine who, and what, is “black.” “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the blackest one of all?” is a question best left behind in the ’60s.
