Our early 21st-century epistemologies are radically different from those of the middle of the last century. And we have not been fair about according much of the credit for that to those very programs, curricula and new disciplines that have been maligned, contested and starved for resources for so long. Still, they rose and evolved new vistas from which to comprehend and make sense of our world. We can only hope these kinds of intellectual interventions also will point up the urgency for us to be sure our institutions take seriously the responsibility to diversify their faculty and student populations. For while the biological significance of race has been thoroughly disqualified, I would hate to see the proverbial baby of representational politics thrown out with the bath water. Because while the particular racial markings of bodies may not theoretically matter, the narratives, the experiences, the social, political and economic dramas that animate our realities, the stories we tell and produce, and the intellectual questions we pose are as vital as ever. Therefore, we need to be ever vigilant and attentive to the status of race in our work as well as in our lives.

Building our African American studies departments and programs, according them the same respect and autonomy that we accord traditional disciplines, and making the hiring of minority faculty a priority across disciplines is not just good for Black faculty, it is good business. If knowledge continues to develop in the way it has over the last few decades, our scholarly communities, our curricula, and our institutional standings will rise and fall, at least in part, on our success in recruiting and retaining African American faculty, and on the building of strong African American studies departments.

— Dr. Dwight A. McBride is chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.