Black Studies and Black Scholars: Keeping the Faith
By Dr. Dwight A. McBride

I want to take this occasion to give institutionally marginal programs and departments a much-deserved moment of recognition. I specifically want to do so for African American studies programs and departments. Though African American scholars are not always synonymous with African American studies, the two do have much in common with each other in the dominant logic of institutions of higher learning. Both are ever in the process of having to prove to others that they belong there, a fact that consumes a great deal of energy and time that surely would be better spent on one's work.

I am delighted to be a part of this special issue profiling emerging Black scholars. The colleagues featured here, and the many others they represent, have not only had to achieve intellectually at a very high level under circumstances often far less than ideal, but they also have had to manage the mentoring, advising, committee work, political institutional work, and the constant race education work of students and faculty and administrative colleagues. The demands on those unfortunate enough to be in situations where there are too few of them to share the burdensome load of being an African American faculty member often can be crippling and detrimental to otherwise successful career trajectories.

But none of this is new. Indeed, those of us conversant in the institutional discourse of diversity have learned to spout off such realities with the same ease that people rehearse the quartet of race, gender, sexuality and class when we talk about cutting-edge scholarship today. Indeed, the reason race, gender, class and sexuality can be taken as seriously as they are and be so central to how we now produce knowledge even in traditional disciplines is a direct result of the intellectual and institutional work that has for so long proceeded at the margins of the academy in departments such as African American studies. The margin forced the center to change, indeed, to alter the very ways in which we produce knowledge itself.