African American Studies Summary

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According to A Debate on Activism in Black Studies, by Manning Marable, African American studies was seen as a rebellion in the eyes of white academics. Although it has been seen like that, African American studies has established its own roots and is available in nearly all major universities. To obtain an undergraduates degree, there is a requirement of taking one to two of the courses from the department. There has been much success with the establishment of the department in schools across the country but the success was not easy to obtain. There were key ideas that helped with the development of black studies. Key ideas such as black intellectual tradition which according to Marable is the scholarship in the social sciences and humanities …show more content…
Arthur Schomburg wrote about how propaganda often masked itself for scholarship. In his writings, W.E.B DuBois warned other black scholars about “whitewashing” their content or “translating wish into fact”. More recently sociologist Orlando Pattern wrote about black studies and warned about certain black studies that utilize the “three P’s approach.” The three P’s he warned about were princes, pyramids, and pageantry. Scholars in todays fields often struggle on the most simple parts of black history. Gates talked about how he reached out to historically black colleges to try and establish sophomore and junior-year summer internships for community development (from organizations such as the NAACP and the Children’s Defense Fund). These programs would help in reducing teenage pregnancy, transferring of STDS such as HIV, and “black-on-black” homicide. Gates makes great points about how activism needs to confront the political views of academics and how they can be more “regimented than their scholarly opinions”. Gates concludes that public policy can be a forerunner for concern within African-American studies, because they raise challgenes. Universities such as Columbia, UCLA, Harvard, etc all have public policy as a central concern within their departments. Universities must have their public policy scholars raise the issues that affect black Americans till this day. As Gates stated, 30 years ago, no one could have guessed that the current class divide in black America. With the help of these public policy scholars recommendations can be provided and help in aiding this