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(Dr. Janice Collins). On behalf of the
African-American Heritage month committee, Dr. Davenport,
and Mrs. Joycelyn Phillips, faculty development and
Dr. Bradeson, good evening everyone and
welcome to the discussion of the status of Africana studies.
I thank you all for coming.
I am Dr. Janice Collins from the department of Journalism
and Women's studies, and I am your moderator
for this exciting and wonderful event.
I expect we will learn much about Africana studies on many
levels this evening and since we really don't have
a whole lot of time we're going to go
ahead and get started on a couple of things.
How this is going to work, we're going to have the introductions
and then we will have brief introductory statements
by our panelists, then we'll have a few questions that
I will pose to them to kind of get us started.
But then after that we're going to open the floor up so we can
just have really a discussion between the panelists and
each other about Africana studies and all that it entails
as much as we can in the next 50 minutes.
So in light of that when you ask a question or make a
comment or a statement, I'm going to ask that you
hold it between 30 and 60 seconds.
I'm a broadcast journalist so not only can I tell
30 or 60 seconds, I brought my stopwatch.
So hopefully we won't have to do that but just
try that so we can get a lot of diverse voices in here,
let's try to keep it as concise as possible.
So let us begin with the introduction of our panelists.
Our special guests tonight are extremely qualified to speak
on this subject that we are exploring and we are
extremely pleased to have them as our guests tonight.
Gracing our stage we have Dr. Sundiata Cha-Jua,
did I say that right?
(Dr. Sundiata Cha-Jua). Yes, you did.
(Dr. Collins). Okay, from the University
of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, right up the street.
Doctor Cha-Jua teaches in the department of African-American
studies and History at the University and is sitting
President of the National Council for Black studies.
Among his numerous and impressive achievements,
he has authored the award-winning,
"America's First Black Town; Brooklyn, Illinois",
published dozens of articles in the leading academic journals
in Black studies and U.S History including
the Black Scholar and Journal of African-American History.
He recently guest edited a special edition of the
Black Scholar entitled, "Defending Ethnic Studies
in Academic Freedom".
His B.A is from Tugaloo College in Political Science, a Masters
from Sagamon State University in Political Science and his
Doctorate is from U of I Champaign/Urbana in History.
He also has advanced certificates in Black Studies
from Northeastern University and the University of West Virginia.
We also have with us Father Brown from Southern Illinois
University Carbondale joining us tonight.
Father Brown, a native from East Saint Louis, is a Catholic
priest with an extensive academic and pastoral career.
He earned his BA in Philosophy from Saint Louis University.
A Masters degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins
University and a Masters degree in Afro-American studies and a
PhD in American Studies from Yale University.
Father Brown has taught at Creighton University, University
of Virginia, Xavier University in New Orleans
where he was also the director of the Institute
for Black Catholic College Studies.
Presently Father Brown holds the positions of Professor and
Chair in the Africana Studies department at
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
Among his many achievements that are also quite impressive
include two, five booklet series in adult spiritual
development, focusing on Black Catholic spirituality, appointed
congress liturgist for both the seventh and ninth National Black
Catholic Congress, in New Orleans and Chicago.
Father Brown has published many articles in African-American
literary criticism and cultural studies and has authored such
works as Accidental Grace, To stand on the rock: meditation on
Black Catholic identity, and Sweet, Sweet Spirit.
It is also believed that Father Brown is the longest running
chair in any department of African American studies,
holding fast for 15 years.
So, please help me welcome our panelists today, this evening.
[audience clapping].
We will begin with short statements, introductory
statements from each one of our panelists please.
(Father Brown). Before your battery runs out.
(Dr. Cha-Jua). Well, first I would emphasize
this, that Black Africana studies
is a problem-solving discipline.
And that it kind of combines research and teaching and
reparative justice and looks at the past and present social and
historical experiences of people of African descent.
So the big point here is that it's
about solving problems, alright.
The second point that I would make is that there
is an emphasis also on telling the story from
the vantage point of African people.
Now here's where it gets a little bit tricky right,
the first thing we have to understand is the
diversity of people of African descent.
But within that diversity there's very clear unity right,
so on the one hand we're looking at a diverse population and
we're looking at people of African descent across
nationality or region, across class, gender, sexuality,
ideological locations, but we're also focusing on them
as a group and those things that unite them.
So I'll stop there.
(Father Brown). I could too.
I like that, it solves problems academically and culturally.
I believe that the starting point is always a very simple
sentence, who defines the terms by which we live?
I write that on the board at the beginning of every class I teach
and share it at many lectures and workshops
like this, who defines the terms?
A lot of different people talk about who writes history, who
controls the meta-narrative, all these big terms, I just want to
know when we're telling the stories, who told the story,
what was left out, and who benefited from the way it was
told and the way it was edited?
That to me is one of the problems that Africana,
African-American Black studies is supposed to be solving.
Getting the stories told with all the complexity but not
saying that absolutely everybody on the boat
was a King or a Queen or a Prince or a Princess.
Let me just know the whole story, if I'm smart enough I can
figure out what conclusions I'm supposed to draw
but when you either deny or suppress part of the story,
none of us are the richer.
At one talk I gave to a couple thousand people in Los Angeles
one day, I said to them, "I want everybody in this room who has
descended from a slave to raise your hands".
Oh lots of Mulatto, chocolate and cinnamon colored hands
raised, I said "Now everybody in this room who was descended from
a slave owner, raise your hands", you know a few very
courageous Caucasian hands went up in the air.
I said "some of y'all lying, some of y'all should have had
your hands up the whole time".
The black folks and the white folks got the same parents,
a lot of times, but we only tell half that story.
When you talk about gender oppression there is
also *** oppression, tell all of it and if
we're smart we'll deal with it.
The other thing I think is crucial to this field is
understanding that it is a direct challenge
to Western European Philosophical concepts.
We are not in binary opposition, we are a blended
multiple-rhythmed culture, both and, and, and, never either or.
Once we can break down these false categories, which really
oppress and sustain denials, then we're on to an exciting
journey and everything fits everything else.
(Dr. Collins). Okay great.
(Dr. Cha-Jua). Let me add that you
know, one of the things we have to be very,
very clear on is that people's social and
historical experiences, identify and define the
terms by which they should be analyzed.
So classic kind of example, if you take the African-American
people and you look at their social and historical
experiences and then you compare that to the experiences of White
Americans, U.S history, then it becomes clear that the Black
experience is so fundamentally different right,
than the U.S historical experience.
And it poses certain challenges that we can't use the same
periodization scheme, we can't use the same concepts.
Example, at the end of the Civil War, say the period from the
late 1870s through the early 1920s, it's a period that in
American history is generally called the
Industrializing Era, sometimes or at least a part of it
is called the Progressive Era.
Mark Twain called the period, he said this is the age
where everything glittered right, but it wasn't gold,
and what he's trying to get at is that this is a period
in which the robber bearers emerged and the emphasis is
on the disparities in wealth right.
And so he tried to talk about it as a period
in which there is a kind of falsity.
Well for African Americans, and African American historian
Rayford Logan called this period the Nadir,
which means the lowest point.
Because what he focused on was that for African-Americans, this
is a moment when say the decade of 1890s between January 1, 1890
and December 31, 1899, every two-and-a-half days a Black man,
woman or child is lynched somewhere in America.
This is a period where Black people move from slavery to
sharecropping and we kind of have to flip the coin
to say which was worse right, in some ways.
It's a period in which Black people are denied
the right to vote, it's the period in which apartheid,
which we call segregation emerges.
So that those experiences are so fundamentally worse than
anything that White Americans went through that we can't use
the same periodization scheme and we can't use the same
concepts and at the end of the day the concepts that we use,
fundamentally challenge the essence of America because
what they do, and what our experiences does is
that it exposes the fact that America has
never been a democracy right.
Up through 1830 only five percent of the people
could vote, black people couldn't vote then
Black men could vote, so you get the point.