Has African American Studies Strayed Off Course?
Last year, Kanye West was embroiled in controversy over statements deemed antisemitic. Then he was written off as another anti-intellectual celebrity. Still and all, West made his most controversial remarks on the Lex Fridman podcast. It’s understandable why no one paid those remarks any attention, but they’re repeated here for argument’s sake.
West told Fridman, “We don’t need to teach history. We don’t need to teach anything that is subjective. Any forced, subjective information is just to weaken and indoctrinate our species, and that’s what schools do now.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, teachers who agreed with Churchill’s saying that “history is written by the victors” were against what West called “indoctrination.” At the same time, those educators would have been disappointed that West’s solution was to stop teaching history instead of launching a movement to create alternative academic disciplines.
That movement in the 1960s and 1970s led to an explosion of new fields: Asian Studies, Black Studies, Gender Studies, Latino Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Native American Studies, etc. The idea that the traditional social sciences and humanities, like anthropology, cultural studies, history, literature, political science, psychology, and sociology, were Eurocentric led to the creation of these new academic disciplines.