What Are the Arts and Sciences?: A Guide for the Curious

Contributors

Preface

This book is meant to be a brief tour through our evolved world of ideas. It is very much inspired by W. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, a wonderful book that I read to my son Alex when he was eight. Gombrich’s book is a friendly, condensed world history meant for young inquisitive minds, but it’s written in that avuncular Victorian-in-the-armchair manner and so is pretty erudite in many ways, perhaps too erudite for most contemporary American eight-year-olds. I didn’t know that, though—and was aware of the many gaps in my own world history knowledge—so we read the book together, chapter by chapter, and enjoyed it and both learned a lot. I am grateful for the opportunity it afforded to sit in the big rocker in his room, to read aloud and chat about big ideas and events like the Big Bang, the Roman Empire, colonialism, World War II, and lots of stuff in between and beyond.

It made me think about how most of us—if not all of us—irrespective of age, don’t really know what the big subjects of inquiry are about, but we want to know! We get some sense through the usual educational trajectory, but even those who choose to go to college and even the academy enter higher education not knowing what kinds of things a professor of x thinks about, and leave only getting a sense of a few. Every year I sit with prospective students, or the children of friends wondering about university, and am asked the question, What do mathematicians do? My colleagues all across the campus have analogous conversations about their own disciplines. These kinds of conversations are hardly limited to those looking for colleges or careers. They happen between adults and even between colleagues. In the best of cases they are driven by a sincere interest in the world of ideas.

With these thoughts in mind, I arrived at the idea of collaboratively writing a book, analogous to Gombrich’s, but explicitly organized according to ideas rather than time. So this collection of essays is the result of that initial rocking chair–inspired idea, which could be viewed—as per the title—as collection of answers to a broader question, What are the arts and sciences? It is by design organized by subjects, written by various of my colleagues, who are in turn, by the nature of the organization of our college and almost any other, sorted into disciplines of which each of us are professors of various ranks and stripes. This organization of the academy (why we have the departments we do) has its own interesting evolutionary story, too long to go into here. On the level of metaphor, I like to think it resembles the universe: ever expanding, replete with beautiful, dynamic, and diverse clusters of coherence, linked across time and space, whose overarching structure is born of simple forces—in this case, the urges to understand, create, and even predict.

This book is in some sense also a brief introduction to the subjects of today’s liberal arts by members of a faculty at a liberal arts college. The liberal arts ethos is built on a curiosity about the world at large and a belief in the importance and necessity of inspiring and fostering that broad-based curiosity. The kinds of flexible minds and critical thinking engendered by such an education have perhaps never been more in need than they are today. While the labeling of subjects might suggest that there are strict disciplinary boundaries, in fact all of the subjects represented here are now frequently pursued in an interdisciplinary fashion, and the present-day organization of the academy and almost every university reflects those porous boundaries too.

Throughout my time at Dartmouth I have always been grateful to have so many colleagues happy to patiently explain their work to me or to answer my naive questions about their discipline. I am lucky to have so many colleagues eager to share the love of their subject with their students and beyond, for without them this idea would have died on the vine. I apologize in advance to those whose disciplines are missed herein. Constraints of space, not of interest or import, make it impossible to explore all the worlds comprised by the universe of any university. Similarly, at the next scale, each essay here is but a doorway opening into a world of fascinating ideas within a given subject, rather than an exhaustive study, shaped (sometimes more, sometimes less) by the interests and expertise of the author.

But of course, this collection is not meant to be an end, but rather a beginning. Suggestions for additional reading and viewing materials appear at the end of the book. The subjects that appear here are only a sampling of those that we study here at Dartmouth and at other institutions of higher learning. The essays are written—again, as per the title—for the curious person of any age, and with that intention, citations have been placed as notes at the back of the book. We hope that you enjoy the collection and that this brief tour starts or continues a lifetime of exploration of ideas.

Dan Rockmore

HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

NOVEMBER, 2016

WHAT IS

African American Studies?

Derrick E. White

What if I told you that most of the great American histories were half-truths and some were outright lies? Many of the great American heroes fell far short of heroism. In the land of the free and home of the brave slavery and cowardice reigned. The American Revolution was not for all.

A central reason for the falsity of many great American histories has been the minimization or exclusion of African Americans (and other ethnic minorities) from this history. Many Americans can recall the deeds of the Founding Fathers in the country’s rebellion from British colonial rule. But few Americans remember that the first person killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre, which sparked the American Revolution, was Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American descent. The United States’ political, economic, and cultural expansion was not solely the province of white Americans, but was intertwined with the institutions of slavery, segregation, and racism. When one considers the legal impact of the civil rights movement, true American democracy is barely five decades old. America looked and looks different with African Americans at the center of the story.

The great abolitionist, statesman, and former slave Frederick Douglass declared in 1857, If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightening . . . This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both . . . but it must be struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. Unlike many academic disciplines that trace their origins to the early reaches of the Western tradition, African American Studies was born from the struggle for African American civil and human rights in the late 1960s.

After America’s founding, its government, courts, and majority-white population treated African Americans (and other ethnic minorities) as either noncitizens or second-class citizens. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney encapsulated the majority of white American thought when he declared in 1857 that African Americans had been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race and they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. The institutions of slavery and later Jim Crow segregation denied African Americans citizenship rights. Emboldened by the antifascism of World War II, however, black reformers were determined to make the United States live up to its all men are created equal credo. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made African Americans equal, legally. Through a combination of the legal victories, protests, and political agitation African Americans slowly ended their unequal legal status.

However, many activists realized that each legal and political success revealed additional layers of American racial thinking and ideology. Frustrated by the slow pace of change, the stubbornness of the American public, and the revelation of the pervasiveness of American racism, both interpersonally and institutionally, some reformers advocated for Black Power, which was a declaration of black humanity in the face of white supremacy and a demand for African Americans to take immediate control of their lives and destiny. When civil rights and Black Power crusaders turned their attention to changing America’s racist culture, they knew that education, especially higher education, was a central issue.

The modern American university is the product of the convergence of several socioeconomic forces that were in play after the end of World War II. First, the US government’s GI Bill (officially the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944) provided monies that allowed more than 2 million men to attend college or gain additional training. Take, for example, the student population at the Ohio State University (OSU) before and after the war. OSU was already one of the largest universities in the country, with more than 15,000 students attending in the 1930s. In 1943 the loss of men to military service reduced OSU’s student body to 8,000, the lowest number since 1926. Three years later enrollment soared to more than 26,000. Colleges nationwide had similar stories of rapid growth. Second, the civil rights movement opened doors for more African American to attend predominately white colleges. Southern white colleges, which had barred African Americans before the 1950s, started to enroll small numbers of African American students. Other universities in the North and the West, which had a variety of racial policies ranging from exclusion to integration, expanded their black student population. Finally, in the 1960s students of all races questioned college policies on dress, curfew, and politics. A generation of student activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, used the tactics of the movement to create new university practices.

The first African American Studies program emerged in this changing university context. Former civil rights activist Jimmy Garrett led the San Francisco State University Black Student Union, which joined with the Latin American Students Organization, the Filipino-American Student Organization, and El Renacimiento (an organization for Mexican students) to form the Third World Liberation Front in March 1968. The student leaders organized a series of protests, including a general strike from classes that in 1969 led to the first Black Studies Department and the first Ethnic Studies Department. By the early 1970s Black Studies departments and programs were appearing on campuses nationwide. The field has many names in the modern university—Black Studies, African and African American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Africana Studies—but despite the variety of department and program titles, the goal is the same: the understanding of the black experience. African American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, meaning it uses a variety disciplinary analytical methods from the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

The field of study puts race and racism at the center of its analysis. Broadly speaking, this occurs in three interrelated ways. First, African American Studies attempts to understand how the belief in black inferiority emerged and infected American social, political, and cultural institutions. African American Studies analyzes how exclusionary policies became law and custom, how these legal and extralegal practices colored interracial interactions, and how racism shaped cultural norms. African American Studies suggests that no American institution has been unaffected by racism, racist policy, or racial discrimination. Most social, political, economic, and cultural institutions have been influenced by all three. Thus, African American Studies scholars see racism as ideological, interpersonal, and institutional.

Second, African American Studies examines the sociopolitical terrain of black struggle. As Frederick Douglass suggests, African Americans refused to accept America’s racist prescriptions. As individuals and as communities, African Americans resisted interpersonal violence, challenged legal proscriptions, and produced alternative democratic visions of America. The field looks at individual acts of struggle, ranging from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman in the nineteenth century, to W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston in the twentieth, to Barack Obama and Bree Newsome in the twenty-first. In addition, African American Studies looks closely at the black institutions created to launch deep challenges to America’s racist democracy. The sociopolitical nature of black struggle reflected various interdependent political ideologies and philosophies, including black liberalism, black nationalism, black Marxism, black conservatism, and black feminism. Scholars pay attention to diversity in ideology and strategy, noting that African American communities were often contradictory and divided on the best ways to oppose American racism.

Finally, African American Studies explores the cultural creations that have maintained black communities in an often inhumane world. Black literature, music, humor, religion, and art are not separate from the sociopolitical struggle, but also reflect black humanity. At times African American cultural production is explicitly political, critiquing white artistic assumptions of beauty and culture. At other times, African American artists translate love, hate, passion, and other feelings common to humanity. In the end, African American Studies analyzes the lived experience of blackness. Let’s examine these three points a little deeper.

The Origins and Path of Racism in America

Race is not real, but racism shapes life opportunities. Scientists have concluded that the minor genetic differences that account for the varieties of skin tone do not mean that the races are different subspecies of Homo sapiens. This scientific conclusion, however, is a recent one. For more than five hundred years leaders of Western nations and cultures espoused an evolving philosophy in which racial distinctions signaled a racial hierarchy. The creation of a racial order forms a core belief behind racism.

Modern racism’s roots stem from the religious hierarchies of the Middle Ages (approximately 476 to 1499). Medieval European Christian leaders divided the world between Christians and non-Christians, which primarily consisted of Jews, Muslims, Greeks, and Romans. Religious status, rather than skin color, organized the Christian Europe. Yet the Middle Ages wrote the first draft for modern racism. Christianity’s extreme discrimination toward European Jews went further than the faith’s opposition to heretics. The bigotry took the form of expulsion, demonization, and murder. The Black Death pandemic in the fourteenth century fueled the worst aspects of this protoracism. Still, the medieval Christian hierarchy wasn’t racist in the modern sense, for it ostracized numerous groups—lepers, African Muslims (Moors), and Slavic peoples. This religious hierarchy was not only the province of Christianity. Medieval Islam discriminated against nonfollowers as well. Christian authorities mapped the division between believers and nonbelievers onto concepts of good and evil.

The late Middle Ages provided the closest relation to modern racism. Spain discriminated against Jewish converts to Christianity, called Conversos, based on the belief that their blood was impure. Until the late fifteenth century, Christians, Muslims, and Jews had coexisted in Spain, but the relative tolerance devolved into riots. Anti-Semitic violence, laws, and the threat of expulsion led to waves of Jewish conversion to Christianity in the fifteenth century. Unable or unwilling to assimilate hundred of thousands Conversos and Moriscos (the name for Muslims forced to convert to Christianity), Spanish authorities introduced the concept of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) to create new racialized hierarchies. The racial order was policed by the Spanish Inquisition, which persecuted Conversos and Moriscos and ultimately succeeded in effectively removing all Jews from Spain (either through expulsion, forced conversion, or execution). For over one hundred years, the category of pure blood increasingly linked Christians lacking nobility with those of noble birth into a new class. Common Christians, trapped in a feudal economic system, now had a means for upward mobility based on their pure-blood status. New jobs, such as conquistador, were available only to pure-blooded Christians.

Simultaneously, Spain and Portugal led explorations to sub-Saharan African (1442) and the New World (1492). These Iberian explorers encountered human populations whose presence, in the case of sub-Saharan Africans, had been rumored, or in the case of the New World Native Americans, mislabeled as Indians. Iberian explorers, the nobility of Portugal and Spain, and the Catholic Church developed theories to incorporate these—from the European perspective—newly discovered peoples. Using the existing categories, sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans were classified using a combination of bloodlines and religion as racialized nonbelievers. Christian religious leaders defined the newfound territories as terra nullius, no-man’s-land. By slotting African Americans and Native Americas into the racial and religious hierarchy of the late Middle Ages, these people of color, from the European perspective, were, as non-Christians, inferior and exploitable in terms of the period’s emerging political economy.

As European nations outside the Iberian peninsula—Great Britain, France, the Netherlands—sent expeditions to the Western Hemisphere, Indians and then Africans were the sources of exploited labor. While these sixteenth-century Caribbean colonies initially employed white indentured servants, over time racial slavery replaced indenture. Native Americans (including the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and South America) supplied the original sources of slave labor, but the introduction of new diseases by Europeans and Africans and colonial violence quickly reduced the native population. Enslaved Africans replaced the Native American labor force. Between 1526 and 1867 approximately 10.5 million Africans were transported to the New World. An additional 2 million died in transport. Europeans capitalized on a system of slavery already in existence in Africa as a part of the intracontinental conflicts. The sudden appearance of new European slave buyers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exacerbated local rivalries, leading to wars between African ethnic groups, sometimes to provide the human cargo for the Europeans.

As the transatlantic slave trade increased from 277,500 people in the sixteenth century to a high of 6.6 million people in the eighteenth century and 3.8 million people in the nineteenth, blackness and slave status became associated in European and American thought. The rampant disregard for human life that was New World slavery required intellectual justifications that needed constant revision. In the fifteenth century the religious claim of heresy defended Native American and African slavery. When word got back to Spain about the horrifying acts of the conquistadors, heresy gave way to the Aristotelian concept of natural slaves. The Renaissance’s valuation of man as opposed to Christian man introduced new nonreligious explanations for the continuation of African slavery. Economic competition between nations, specious rationales that incorporated both arbitrary aesthetics and pseudo-scientific reasoning, and religious and philosophical arguments were all used to support the same conclusion: people of African descent are inferior.

Thomas Jefferson encapsulated the range of discourses justifying black inferiority in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). In the chapter on laws Jefferson muses about slavery. In considering the possibility of emancipation after the American Revolution, he argues that immediate freedom for slaves is not an ideal solution. He states that gradual emancipation, the freeing of slaves after they turn a certain age, and colonization (the removal of African Americans from the United States), are the best courses of action. After outlining the political reasons for the removal of African Americans, Jefferson turns to the the real distinctions which nature has made. Demonstrating his command of racial discourses, Jefferson proceeds to catalogue the justifications for black inferiority.

Science: Whether the black of negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile . . . the difference is fixed in nature.

Aesthetics: The circumstances of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in man? Besides those of color, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race.

Environment: This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites.

Seriousness: They seem to require less sleep. A black after hard labor through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight.

Reason: Comparing them by the faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to whites; in reason much inferior . . . and in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous.

Conclusion: I advise it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distance by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.

Jefferson laid bare the various components of modern racism. The roots were European and the future was quintessentially American.

The Founding Father’s cold, analytic description of the various justifications for black inferiority served as a model for future American race relations. Even after abolitionists like Douglass pushed for immediate emancipation and the Civil War finally ended the barbaric practice of slavery, American leaders could replicate Jefferson’s racial calculations. In the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, Justice Henry Brown spoke for the majority of the court and the nation when he wrote, If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane. Plessy legalized late nineteenth-century segregation laws and revealed that racism was as American as apple pie.

In addition to racism’s notions of black inferiority, Jim Crow segregation, which began within a decade of the final shots of the Civil War, permitted whites to affirm their dominance through a series of humiliating reminders of African Americans’ second-class citizenship. In the absence of slavery, Jim Crow segregation introduced a complex pattern of racial etiquette that governed daily affairs. Blacks could not shake hands with whites or look them in the eye, because that signaled equality. Blacks were expected to go to the back door of any white home or business. Whites did not use titles of respect, such as Mr. or Mrs.; instead they referred to black adults as boy, girl, or nigger. As with the concept of pure blood in medieval Europe, racism allowed poor whites to align socially with wealthy whites in their assumptions of racial superiority. If African Americans failed to adhere to the rules of racial etiquette, whites used violence to ensure compliance. White racial violence took the form of lynchings, beatings, incarceration, and other vile forms of control. Sadistic lynchings exemplified the kind of violence African Americans were subjected to, leading antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett to conclude, A Negro’s life is a very cheap thing.

Agency and Activism

White Americans’ racism was the belief in black inferiority and the associated violence to keep African Americans in their place as second-class citizens. American racism was ideological, institutional, and interpersonal. African Americans, however, did not simply accept this racist reality; they resisted individually and collectively.

As Frederick Douglass suggested, African Americans struggled against American racism. They never accepted Western racism and its associated violence. They challenged racism’s logic, organized against its perpetuation, and fought for their survival in a hostile world. African Americans contested their second-class status. The second component of African American Studies highlights the resistance strategies of individuals, organizations, and communities. In addition to outlining the nature of American racism, it focuses on how African Americans challenged systemic inequality. This is described in Black Studies as agency. African Americans have not simply been the passive victims of racism; they have actively worked to change American democracy.

Ever since the United States’ independence, African Americans, as individuals and on behalf of the larger community, challenged its racist logics. For instance, Benjamin Banneker, a free African American from Maryland and a mathematician, had helped to survey Washington, DC. Banneker also authored six almanacs, using the volumes’ calculations to refute Thomas Jefferson’s assumptions of black inferiority. In 1791 he wrote to Jefferson asking him to recall the time in which the arms and tyranny of the British crown were exerted . . . in order to reduce you to servitude. Banneker continued, This, Sir, was a time when you clearly saw into the injustice of a state of slavery, and in which you had just apprehensions of the horror of its conditions. The mathematician and astronomer chastised Jefferson and the other founders for detaining by fraud and violent so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves. He told the founders to wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices. Banneker’s deliberate refutation of Jefferson, through the presentation of the almanac and by exposing the Founding Fathers’ hypocrisy represented an individual’s attempt to alter the life chances of African Americans.

While Banneker chose a restrained tone, four decades later David Walker lacked patience for those using the cold, analytical descriptions like Jefferson. Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1796 or 1797 to a free black woman and an enslaved father. As a young adult, Walker moved to Boston. He documented the effects of racism in the North and in the South and 1829 he published his Appeal. In the forty years between Banneker and Walker, the number of African Americans enslaved had grown from nearly 700,000 to more than 2 million. Walker asserted black humanity. The expansion of slavery, Walker sarcastically noted, was punishment for enriching them and their country. His righteous discontent was aimed squarely at Jefferson and those who swallowed his racist logic in support of slavery. Walker extolled blacks, free and enslaved, to overthrow the institution, by violence if necessary.

Walker’s urgency spurred abolitionists to move away from supporting gradual emancipation, and some scholars believe that Walker influenced Nat Turner’s revolt in Southhampton, Virginia. Turner, a slave preacher, organized a slave rebellion in 1831 that killed more than fifty people in an attempt gain freedom. Turner’s crusade, captured in the 2016 film Birth of a Nation, was ultimately unsuccessful, but it reflected African Americans’ desire for freedom and the willingness to risk their lives for the liberty promised. Later, Douglass’s call for the acceptance of physical struggle echoes Walker’s demands. Individual pleas, however, were not enough to transform African Americans’ status in slavery or in freedom. Collective action was needed.

Blacks created a network of organizations. During slavery, African Americans collectively fought to end the institution. Men like Frederick Douglass and David Walker and women like Frances Ellen Harper and Sojourner Truth joined these organizations, which debated a variety of strategies to end slavery. They supported escaping slaves by maintaining key locations on the Underground Railroad. Black and white abolitionists engaged in spirited debate, broke unjust laws, and, in the case of John Brown, waged war against slaveholders. Organizations were often rooted in black churches and schools. After the Civil War, churches and schools took on added significance, continuing to push for equal rights. By the twentieth century, African Americans create a host of associations designed to challenge racism, such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Given the rampant segregation, some developed organizations that helped (and in some cases continue to help) African Americans survive American racism. Religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Black Baptist Church founded churches that tended to African Americans’ spiritual, political, and economic needs. Organizations like National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, the Urban League, the National Negro Business League, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and black fraternities and sororities all functioned to help African Americans socially, economically, and culturally. While many of these organizations attracted members of the black middle class, labor unions, like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and fraternal societies, such as the Colored Knights of Pythias, relied on black working-class membership. The array of organizations served a multitude of black community needs.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a large-scale, public representation of the kind of political and grassroots work that had been happening in black communities for decades. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. was a member of several of political and community organizations. He was an alumnus of Morehouse College, a historically black college; a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the first black college fraternity; and a preacher in the Baptist church, the largest denomination among African American churchgoers. These interlocking affiliations were key in generating support for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other civil rights organizations and campaigns. These relationships and others served as the sinew that connected the national civil rights movement.

Culture

While organizational membership linked communities together, black culture sustained it. In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal (and a team of researchers) published a massive fifteen-hundred-page study on American racial relations titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The tome detailed the nature of American racism and argued that the central dilemma facing the United States was the huge discrepancy between its liberal, democratic creed and its treatment of African Americans. In his review of this book, African American novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "But can a people (its faith in an idealized American Creed not-withstanding) live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them? Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs; why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?" Behind Ellison’s devastating critique of Myrdal’s social science was the book’s failure to take black culture seriously.

African American Studies, unlike Myrdal’s race relations model, considers black cultural expressions as essential to the community’s lived experience. Black culture has several functions. At one level, African Americans have used artistic culture—literature, music, art—to counter the assumption that a lack of culture was evidence of black inferiority. On another, black artists have captured the range of human experiences. As Ellison states, blacks have created a life. African Americans have composed spirituals that expressed sorrow and praise. They have developed a sense of humor that enables them to laugh at life and death. They have told stories that stirred the soul. They have painted, sculpted, and designed their humanity on the horns of the white man’s dilemma. African American Studies does not evaluate black cultural production based on its relation to white American or European cultural production. The field of study seeks to understand art as it relates to individuals and black communities.

Langston Hughes’s 1925 poem I, Too, for example, beautifully captures the complexity of black artistic endeavors.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

Eat in the kitchen,

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

In three stanzas Hughes is able to speak to the realities of segregation, celebrate blacks’ ability to laugh at the absurdity of racism, and envision a future of equality.

Conclusion

African American Studies matters because it reveals how racism has influenced society, how African Americans have organized against its pernicious effects, and how black communities have maintained their humanity against all odds. The field continues to grow. Black feminism has pushed African American Studies to embrace intersectionality, modes of analysis that consider race, class, gender, and sexuality simultaneously. As a result, African American Studies has challenged racism and classism, misogyny, and homophobia, in theory and in practice. The Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2011, has been at the forefront of applying intersectional analysis. Another area of growing scholarship in African American Studies has been critical race theory and the analysis of mass incarceration. African American Studies has led the push for scholarly research regarding racialized policing and racism in the criminal justice system. In terms of cultural analysis, African American Studies has begun to critically examine hip-hop culture, including the technology of sampling, the intricate wordplay, and the tradition of misogyny. African American Studies is a necessary component of a twenty-first-century liberal arts education.

WHAT IS

Anthropology?

Sienna R. Craig

When I tell people that I am an anthropologist, sometimes they smile politely and say, That’s nice!, not knowing what to make of that five-syllable word. Some people ask, Doesn’t that have something to do with dinosaurs? Other people respond, "How cool! Like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark?" On a few occasions, people have asked me what tribe I study and if I’ve ever lived in an igloo or a tepee.

What is anthropology? None of these answers is exactly right, but they all contain little bits of truth about what anthropology is, or can be. In order to answer this question, we actually need to begin with another question: What makes us human? Is it our brain size? Our use of language? Is it our ability to build complex civilizations across Earth’s many environments, as we have done for millennia? Is it how we think up rituals to mark the passage from one stage of life to another? Is it how we decide what it means to be a girl or a boy, a doctor or a shaman, a student or a teacher?

Anthropology is all of this. Anthropo- comes from the ancient Greek word anthropos, meaning humanity or humankind. And as you probably know, any word with an -ology at the end of it means the study of. Anthropologists study the human condition: past, present, and—as much as possible—future. We are curious about where humans came from and how we learned to create complex social worlds. We are interested in language and culture: what makes people different from each other as well as the things that we share. We want to know how human communities have changed over time, how we create meaning in our lives, and how we adapt to new social, political, or environmental circumstances.

What Makes Us Human

Some anthropologists study human evolution, nonhuman primates, and our Paleolithic past. They use scientific methods like genetics and the study of body movements and measurements as well as the fossil record to document and explain how we came to be and how we are still changing. These folks are called biological anthropologists. For example, you might think it is normal for people to keep getting taller through the generations. (Is your mother taller than your grandmother? Do you think you will be taller than her?) But that isn’t always the case. One of my colleagues is really interested in how people who live in tropical rain forests have evolved to be shorter in stature and to be expert tree climbers. This is, in part, how they have learned to survive and even thrive in places where you might have a really tough time just walking along a trail. Such adaptations reflect not only our biology but also our shared and learned behaviors, our culture.

I asked my friend Jerry, a biological anthropologist, to explain a bit about what he does and why he thinks it is important. This is what he said:

Biological anthropologists like to think about really big questions—questions like Who are we?, Where did we come from?, and Why are we the way we are? These are tough questions to answer and so we rely on many different methods for studying humans today and humans in the past. Some of the more interesting questions for me are: Why do humans walk on two legs instead of four? Why do we have such gigantic brains? And what did our ancestors look and act like?

Biological anthropologists use evolution to frame our questions. Evolution proposes that every living thing on Earth is ultimately related and shares a distant ancestor, and that life and its expressions have changed over time. This doesn’t mean that we came from fish or monkeys. Instead, it means that we share ancient common ancestors—sort of like great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers—with these other living things. We can use similarities and differences in DNA, the universal building blocks for all life on Earth, to determine which species are most closely related to one another.

So, who is our closest relative? That would be the chimpanzee. Again, this doesn’t mean we evolved from chimpanzees, but instead that we share a common ancestor with a chimp. This animal—the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees—lived about 7 million years ago. We can hypothesize the existence of this common ancestor by studying the differences in the DNA of humans and chimpanzees.

But if that is true, if humans actually did share an ancestor with chimpanzees, then we should be able to find fossils of things that are neither human nor chimpanzee, but that are ancestral to both, buried in ancient sediments millions of years old. And in fact these fossils, called hominins, now number in the thousands, and they are terrifically interesting. There were many different kinds of hominins through time, eating different things, living in different environments, and moving in different ways. I have been involved in studying hominins in South Africa, among other places. Recently the team of scientists that I work with discovered a brand new species of hominin, which we have named Homo naledi. In one of the languages of South Africa, naledi means star. We discovered this new species—an extinct species that also belongs, like modern humans, to the genus Homo—in a network of caves that is called rising star. That is how this new species got its name. (And if you want to learn more about this, you can check out This Face Changes the Human Story. But How?, a 2015 National Geographic article by Jamie Shreeve.)

You might be wondering about the difference between a genus and a species. A genus is a more inclusive category than a species. It can be a difficult and intriguing task to draw the line between genus and species (which generally means beings who can reproduce and have fertile offspring). This work is sometimes like being a detective, solving a mystery whose subject is the origin of human life. In studying hominins, we use the fossils themselves, DNA markers, and other methods to figure out when these beings lived and what the environment was like at that time. While DNA can tell us how living things are related to one another, fossils can tell us what our ancestors looked like, how they changed over time, and how we got to be the way we are today. Unfortunately, we cannot go back in time to study the behavior of our ancient ancestors. So biological anthropologists also study the behavior of our closest living relatives—monkeys and apes—to understand how primates survive. By studying monkeys and apes, we can better understand how large-brained, social animals figure out how to get food, how to get along with one another, and how to avoid becoming leopard food! These studies of living primates help us better understand how human ancestors survived and eventually evolved into modern, living people.

Finally, it is important to realize that biological anthropology is not some dusty old study of bones and rocks. Biological anthropology also can give us insight into human variation today. Biological anthropologists wonder why some of us digest milk, but others cannot; why humans around the world have different skin tones; and why childbirth can be so difficult for women.

As Jerry explained to me, while biological anthropology can provide some answers to these questions, it cannot answer all of them, or even answer any of them completely. Humans are very complicated animals, and understanding our biology and our evolutionary history is just one piece of a much larger anthropological puzzle.

Why Study the Past?

Other anthropologists study the material remains of past human societies, from those without written histories to those with complex written records and monuments. Think about cuneiform tablets from Egypt, Mayan temples, Mesopotamian irrigation canals, ancient rock art, and southwestern pueblos. These folks are archaeologists. (Yes, like Dora the Explorer’s