Handbook of Black Studies PDF

Sage Reference Handbook of Black Studies For the most optimal reading experience we recommend using our website. A free-to-view version of this content is available by clicking on this link, which includes an easy-to-navigate-and-sea...

Sage Reference Handbook of Black Studies For the most optimal reading experience we recommend using our website. A free-to-view version of this content is available by clicking on this link, which includes an easy-to-navigate-and-search-entry, and may also include videos, embedded datasets, downloadable datasets, interactive questions, audio content, and downloadable tables and resources. Author: Norman Harris Pub. Date: 2010 Product: Sage Reference DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412982696 Keywords: black studies, Nommo, nationalism, National Council for Black Studies, African Americans, negro, dance Disciplines: Race & Ethnicity, Race, Ethnicity & Migration, Black Studies, Sociology Access Date: July 8, 2024 Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc. City: Thousand Oaks Online ISBN: 9781412982696 © 2010 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. Black to the Future: Black Studies and Network Nommo NormanHarris The nationalist origins of the modern Black Studies movement are a generally accepted interpretation of how that movement came into being, and that interpretation is the premise for some observations I want to make about the current status of Black Studies and the profound opportunities that information technology offers for returning Black Studies to its nationalist origins. Although there are numerous ideas associated with the na- tionalism of that period, the core nationalist concept I use to organize my discussion is the ongoing assump- tion that an identifiable and unique African worldview exists and that that said worldview is the foundation for best practices in all walks of African American life. My discussion is limited to how the African worldview structures cultural and political analysis carried out in the name of Black Studies. As we will see below, the realization and implementation of the African world-view that animated Black Stud- ies confronted both philosophical and practical problems because of the challenges it raised for traditional universities. More broadly, that same worldview structures the way African Americans interact with both the physical and the metaphysical dimensions of reality outside the academy, and as one might expect, African Americans who attempt to operate from an African worldview face problems similar to those we see in Black Studies. From the outset, there were differing views as to the mission of Black Studies. Two of the three Black Studies' missions that Robert Allen identified in 1974 are essentially nationalist—Harold Cruse's assertion that Black Studies be an instrument of cultural nationalism, that through its critique of the “integrationist ethic” provides a “counter-balance to the dominant Anglo Saxon culture” (Allen, 1985, p. 9) and Nathan Hare's assertion that Black Studies be an agent for social change, “with a functioning relationship to the black community, to break down the ‘ebony tower’ syndrome of alienated black intellectuals” (cited in Allen, 1985, p. 9). The other mission Allen identifies is one “concerned with researching black history and illuminating the contributions of blacks to American society” (p. 9). Although this last view has nationalist overtones in that it focuses atten- tion on the accomplishments of African people, it is fundamentally opposed to the African worldview because it does not take the transformative aspects of an African worldview as a point of departure. The goals that Cruse and Hare identify are discussed as expressions of an African worldview precisely because they are concerned with transforming the world. Handbook of Black Studies Page 2 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. I use the term “Network Nommo” to mean the understanding and use of information technology from the per- spective of an African worldview. The Nommo reference acknowledges the high regard in which Africans hold the power of the word (sound and symbols) for transformative communication, and Network acknowledges the global reach of Nommo via both the various information technologies and the spiritual science suggested by the ontology and epistemology of an African worldview. Network Nommo provides a way to accomplish the nationalist goals that Cruse and Hare set for Black Studies at the outset. An African Worldview An African worldview means the characteristic ways that Africans have answered questions of being, know- ing, time, and space. Questions of being have been answered in a manner that asserts that consciousness determines being; knowing is a symbiotic relationship between the right and left hemispheres of the brain and can be understood in terms of intuition (right brain) and historical knowledge or information (left brain); space means hierarchical value or function (Amen, 1996), and time means the order in which phenomena manifest (Amen, 1996). The core belief of an African worldview is that consciousness determines being. For the purposes of this essay, an African worldview is contrasted with a materialist worldview. A materialist worldview is one in which questions of being are answered in a manner that asserts that being determines consciousness; thus, knowing is a left-brain-oriented activity structured by observation and quantification of reality; time is linear, and space is territory (from ideas to real estate) to be dominated. Whereas an African worldview assumes and values a preexistent order, a materialist worldview makes no such assumption. Given the consistent contrasts I make between the African worldview and a materialist worldview, it is useful to insert that part of Marimbi Ani's (1994) Yurugu discussion concerning epistemology wherein she asserts that within an African worldview a phenomenon can be both A and not A at the same time. She writes, “What is contradictory in Euro-American Aristotelian logic is not contradictory in African thought. The Euro- pean utamwazo [a term that can be understood as world-view] cannot deal with paradox” (pp. 97–98). Ani and others have a great deal to say about how the European worldview (which means the same as materialist worldview) obfuscates its imperializing impulses under the cloak of “universality.” A critique of this misguided tendency is developed in the sections that follow. Handbook of Black Studies Page 3 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. Nationalist Origins of Black Studies Within academia, Black nationalist thought is an unwelcome interloper: it is “dissed” by formalist critics (the cultural dimension of materialist criticism) who want to herd unique African and African American expressions into an illusive pasture of assumed universality; this herding leads predictably to a critical slaughterhouse where authentic African and African American expressions are knocked unconscious by crude analyses (no more than critical sledgehammers) and then systematically dismembered: Form is laid open and meaning is ripped from form and discarded—left to make it on its own. This analytical alienation assumes that dissection is the best way to understand the relationship among the parts. But this dissection cannot reveal meaning because it proceeds without a transcendent purpose; it seeks meaning on its own terms and only for itself. For materialist critics in the social sciences, Black Studies is a veneer of various opacity applied atop an ever- exacting mountain of demographic data that is thought to carry meaning in itself; however, beyond the pre- dictable deductions such data allows about the intractability of racism and its germlike mutations, these ma- terialist critics offer few revelations concerning African and African American empowerment. For some Black Studies organizations, nationalism is a symbolic gesture without enduring programmatic significance, a stiff bow toward Blackness at annual meetings—an uneasy nod toward the ancestors. How else could it be? Although conceived and gestated in the womb of the Black Power Movement, Black Studies was sent to school at White universities that were neither intrinsically interested nor equipped to develop a course of study for a people it has routinely placed in the margins. Questions of legitimacy (“Whose yo' daddy?”), worth (Is there a body of scholarship to support this endeavor?), and appropriateness (Is the academy the place to pursue political agendas?) that went to school with Black Studies also accompany African Americans in most aspects of day-to-day life. The uneasy negotiation that attempts to hold the terms African and American together is often referred to as double consciousness, but I prefer Bernard Bell's (1987) idea of “socialized ambivalence: the dancing of attitudes of Americans of African ancestry between integration and separation, a shifting identification between the values of the dominant white and the subordinate black cultural systems as a result of institutionalized racism” (p. xvi). The dance metaphor signifies much about worldview in America: The ability to dance, to “get funky wit it,” and fundamentally to move with rhythm is associated with an African worldview. Descriptive words and phrases that accompany dance include style, cool, and funk. It is no accident that when Whites want to be thought of as “down,” “hip,” or somehow in the know, they use terms and actions associated with being African in Amer- Handbook of Black Studies Page 4 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. ica. So the ability to dance, as well as the kind of dances that one might do are used here as a metaphorical expression consistent with returning Black Studies to its nationalist origins. From the outset, Black Studies sought to remake universities into institutions that reflected the African dimen- sions of America's pluralism. What happened is that Black Studies opened the academic door of inclusion to women and the various classes and ethnic groups that make America—Black Women's Studies, White Women's Studies, and a variety of ethnic Studies followed (Clark Hine, 1992). In the end, predominantly non- African colleges and universities behaved predictably by building furnaces around the fires the Black Studies movement ignited. Once the energy was appropriately transformed, the Black Studies movement was invited to pull up a chair at the table. Is this not what we wanted? To dance the dance of accommodation by culturally disrobing and using analytical approaches that mollified unique Black forms so they might be labeled univer- sal. How funky can a minuet be? Could it be like Coltrane reinventing “My Favorite Things?” Or would it “sag like a heavy load?” Or maybe “just explode?” The nationalist origins of Black Studies did not seek to construct programs that would imitate Harvard or Yale. Rather, we sought “our just portion of the educational resources of the country [in order to] make it over in our own image” (Thelwell, 1969, p. 701). The original intent was to build academic structures based on an African worldview, and to this end Negro Digest (1968–69) focused two issues on creating a Black university, not the often-apologetic institutions that populate the member list of the United Negro College Fund, but a university that self-consciously fashioned itself from the humus of the best traditions of African world culture. Contemporaneous to the Negro Digest articles, a variety of African-centered institutions were developed. The Institute of the Black World in Atlanta (founded in 1968) stands as a paradigmatic institution in this regard, as it sought to research, publish, and effect change on its own terms (Ward, 2001, p. 42). Similar organizations interested in doing work from an African worldview were developed in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, De- troit, Chicago, New Orleans, Oakland, and other cities. The concern was not only to tell our story on its own terms, and to interpret the world on our own terms, but to create the structures necessary to control the products of our imaginations from conception through pro- duction and distribution. And it is here that Network Nommo holds such extraordinary opportunity for Black Studies' return to its nationalist origins. However, before elaborating on that point, I want to return to the na- tionalist origins of the discipline and say some things about its current status. The first Department of Black Studies was launched in 1968 at San Francisco State University, and it is sig- nificant that the first course offered was one in Black nationalism. At the very least, African American students Handbook of Black Studies Page 5 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. wanted to connect with an African past. Cultural nationalists certainly operated from this perspective as they, like the bebop musicians of an earlier generation and some of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance (see Langston Hughes's, 1926, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) reached back to the African past and to Black folk traditions for systems capable of rendering the world meaningful in Black terms. Addison Gayle (1971) edited the definitional The Black Aesthetic, wherein an attempt was made to define Blackness as an essence. Later came Black Fire, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal (Neal & Jones, 1968), and it, like The New Negro (Locke, 1986) a generation before, featured voices not commonly heard among the various literati, voices speaking in a language that left some befuddled, and others raising the same questions of le- gitimacy, worth, and appropriateness that characterized the questions raised around Black Studies. Like the sage Tehuti, Stephen Henderson (1973) unfurled his papyri in the form of the definitional Understanding The New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, and among the terms he used to describe that poetry were structure, tone, and saturation. As a kind of cumulative term, saturation spoke to the idea of essence. Black speech and Black music were cast as references to understanding Black life. The distance between art and life in African America has always been right across the “screet,” and this “new Black poetry,” and Henderson's discussion of it, narrowed the “screet” even further. The worldview commu- nicated in the new Black poetry was being lived by many Africans in the world. Cool, funk, style, and soul were descriptors of a Black ontology. Mother wit, common sense, and intuition were descriptors of a Black episte-mology. It is significant to note in passing that certain kinds of rap music follow paths similar to the new Black poetry in that in drawing its diction, syntax, and style from the “screet,” it mirrors the life of significant numbers of African Americans (and other Americans) who are alienated from the mainstream institutions that socialize us all to embrace a materialist worldview. Part of the significance of Henderson's (1973) contribution rests in the fact that the references he chose are authentic and unique contributions made by African Americans to both classical and popular culture—such is the basis for narrowing the “screet.” Classical culture includes blues, jazz, rhythm and blues—and I would label hip-hop as neoclassical, a designation earned because of its “sampling” of the “classics” while extend- ing and deepening the many fluid forms that Black music and life assume. These classical and neoclassical cultural products are not primarily contributions to music and entertainment per se; rather, they are ontological contributions that suggest alternative ways of being in the world. From the outset, the attempts by Black Studies scholar-activists to define and apply an African worldview with- in the parameters of accepted scholarly discourse meant that the discourse would have to be fundamentally altered or Black Studies would have to be less Black. Debates between African-centered scholars and non- Handbook of Black Studies Page 6 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. African-centered scholars are essentially centered on this issue: Asante and other African-centered scholars assert that there is an identifiable and lived African worldview that is a basis for putting Africans in the center of discourse, and those who are non-African-centered argue that we are all fundamentally Americans and that, in any case, if an African worldview existed, it has been rendered moot by various forms of cultural, so- cial, and material integration. In dismissing an African worldview, materialist critics become pragmatists and as such define truth and value in terms of practical consequences. It is impractical for the materialist to explore nationalist approaches that by their very nature raise questions about the philosophical and moral legitimacy of Western thought. Of course, impracticality, or more positively put, idealism, is the basis for all change. At every turn in African American history, we see women and men who refuse to be what they have been socialized to be. From Har- riet Tubman and Ida B. Wells to Daniel Hale Williams and Ben Carson we see individuals who tap into the best traditions of their history and culture to transform themselves and thereby defy the odds. In denying the transformative dimension of an African worldview to Black Studies, materialist critics make the study of Black people dependent on external validation—essentially the same questions of legitimacy, worth, and appropri- ateness noted earlier. Here is a Black Studies scholar operating from a materialist approach: Gerald Early, director of the African and African-American Studies program at Washington University, has de- scribed the goal of black studies and higher education generally as, not therapy for the sick, nor fair play for the historically abused and misinterpreted, not power for the “subversives” to oust the white man and give blacks an alternate world, but rather the quest for truth and understanding, undertaken… by passionate be- lievers in liberty, in the right of the individual conscience, in the need for the coming together of groups, and in responsibility for the society in which we work. (Bunzel & Grossman, 1997, p. 81) Early's perspective is possible because he does not confront the normative assumptions that are the applied foundation of American education. His view is consistent with Henry Louis Gates's call for “disinterested scholarship of a pluralist nature.” Early, Gates, and others seem unaware that all educational institutions exist to realize the dominant worldview of the culture of which they are a part. A culture's worldview directs its institutions to pass on what those in power and their various custodians consider the appropriate theories and frameworks for understanding the world. In itself, this cultural prerogative is neither good nor bad. It is what cultures do. The process of people Handbook of Black Studies Page 7 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. preserving, documenting, teaching, and embellishing what they consider the best traditions of their history and culture only becomes problematic when that process prevents other cultures from doing the same thing. Such prevention usually proceeds as cultural or military imperialism or both, and it requires of its non-native participants a mechanical waltz of acceptance. Viewed within my dance metaphor and its extensions, Early and Gates are academic Cinderellas who cannot tell cultural time and consequently do not know that it is already “Round Midnight”—the “Ball” is damn near over, and an authentic Black set is riding in on tenor sax- ophone. The nationalist approaches were animated by a concern to keep the form and content of African world culture equally yoked so that sociopolitical and cultural analyses would not be deformed by analytical dismember- ments that would create the illusion that the myriad expressions of African genius existed solely on their own terms. It is within this framework that Diop's (1989) Cultural Unity of Black Africa can be understood. Part of what can be deduced from his argument is that ancient Kemet is the classical African civilization that provides a framework for understanding connections between the numerous specific expressions that framework has taken among both continental Africans and diasporic Africans. He asserts that just as Greece plays a central role in understanding European history, so too must classical African civilizations, particularly Kemet, be seen as a unifying spiritual, philosophical, and practical set of expressions that other Africans used as a basis for improvisation. So where is Black Studies now? Current Status of Black Studies The discipline of Black Studies enjoys the same ambiguous status that Black America enjoys. I use Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to make my point, for within African American communities they are both a source of pride and a source of disappointment—even shame. We see a man and a woman of African de- scent who now reside at the center of a foreign policy that makes the 1885 Berlin Conference look like a dis- cussion to embrace the necessity of affirmative action and Black power. The optimistic and naive assumption that being Black confers a humanistic view of the world (an implicit deduction from my assertions above) is shattered by the cold logic and calculating brutality of these key players in the emerging Bush Empire—that frightening new world order about which Papa Bush pontificated. Powell and Rice are not the first to have operated contrary to the way most Black folk would operate—indeed, our role in our own enslavement as well as the pedestrian brutality we casually visit on each other daily is, sadly, no new thing. Nonetheless, the Rice Handbook of Black Studies Page 8 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. and Powell success stories are instructive to the point I want to make about socialized ambivalence. It is their “shifting identification between the values of the dominant white and the subordinate black cultural systems as a result of institutionalized racism” (Bell, 1987, p. xvi). As individuals, they seem to identify with “black cultural systems,” but as professionals they seem to identify with the “values of the dominant white” cultural system. Thus, the Rice-Powell dance is one popularized by the melanin challenged King of Pop, Michael Jackson, the “moon-walk.” To “moonwalk” you face forward while your feet rhythmically propel you backward, and, most important, your face must convey an animated detachment from the contradictory nature of what you are do- ing. Sound familiar? This too is the dance of a growing number of Black Studies scholars and organizations. Having positioned himself as the custodian of Black culture, a kind of guru of formalistic correctness, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is an easy target in the mock soul train line of moonwalkers. This is clearest in his elaborate misreading of Mumbo Jumbo and, more fundamentally, of Yoruba religion (Gates, 1988). In the former he dis- cusses the structure of Ishmael Reed's (1972) Mumbo Jumbo without consideration of its meaning. Thus, the multilayered storytelling that is Mumbo Jumbo—the skillful collapsing of epistemologies (“both/and” supplants “either/or” by mocking its formalistic traditions of documentation and other gestures toward an objective truth), the cyclical as opposed to linear uses of time, and, of course, an ontology in which the past, present, and future are one—these elements are not merely stylistic choices rendered for artistic purposes. Rather, they are the elements of an elaborate necromancy intended to recast our understanding of the past so that our future is not that past. But Gates's reading is a dismemberment because it rips form from the womb of meanings that nurture it. Once he separates form from her mother of meanings, he dresses her up in incoherent patterns and styles that allude to an African past. But the sensitive onlooker intuits the odd nature of this child made homeless by skilful ignorance: She is an alluring, nonthreatening exotic who can, because she does not know her origins and purpose, be invited in. But the child wants atonement; she wants to remember the disparate pieces of her dismembered past. Until she is able to do this, her actions will be like the falling star that Du Bois (1903/ 2003) pontificated about in Souls of Black Folk: “The powers of single black men [and women] flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness” (p. 5). The episodic and uneven nature of African achievement that Du Bois writes about has to do with struggles coming out of enslavement, but I think his point can be more broadly applied to describe the episodic and heroic self- and cultural development efforts of a people who as a consequence of the dismemberment of their culture through racism and ignorance cannot always find the appropriate forms to carry meanings. Handbook of Black Studies Page 9 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. The search for the appropriate forms to carry the fluid meanings of Jes Grew is a central conflict in Mumbo Jumbo. Jes Grew is a metaphor for the affective component of an African worldview and wishes to reconnect with its dismembered text authored by Tehuti—thus, the actions it elicits will make sense. Jes Grew's mis- sion is a metaphor for the global African quest to remember the multitudinous expressions of our spirit to an operational worldview that values, nurtures, protects, embellishes, institutionalizes, and passes on the best traditions of our history and culture. Gates's separation of form from content prevents this. Gates's misreading of Yoruba occurs because he pulls Esu-Elegba out of the set of complementary relation- ships of which he is a part. His designation of Esu-Elegba as a trickster is akin to limiting the definition of what a woman is to that span of time in which she experiences premenstrual syndrome. Actually, in Mumbo Jumbo, when Moses gets “The Work” from Isis (Auset), she is in her “bad aspect,” so the version of the work she provides to Moses is not in its complete or purest form. Esu-Elegba as trickster is in his “bad aspect,” call it his pre-intuition sensing syndrome-PISS for short. But what would make him PISSed? The answer requires knowing the Kemetic antecedents of Yoruba and, more important, the relationships between the various ex- pressions (orishas in Yoruba and neteru in the Kemetic) of a single God. I want to explain these relationships via an aspect of the Paut Neteru, the Kemetic Tree of Life, and I make this explanatory choice as an applied demonstration of the “cultural unity of Africa.” The law of duality in which 10 of the 11 branches of the Tree of Life are paired as complementary or dual expressions of a single phenomenon is relevant to this discussion (Amen, 1996). In the Paut Netreu, Sebek (who is the progenitor of Esu-Elegba and all trickster figures) is paired with Tehuti (he/she is the wisdom factor who is a precursor of Ifa). It is significant to note the complimentary relationship between Jes-Grew (an aspect of Sebek and of Het-Heru) and the dismembered, Tehuti-authored text it seeks. The two (Jes Grew and the dismembered Tehuti-authored text, as well as Tehuti and Sebek) need each other to be whole. Epistemology is the concept that each approaches in a complimentary fashion: Tehuti is wisdom, and Sebek is information. Wisdom means knowing without going through a logical process—a form of know- ing associated with elders and peace and intuition and being in tune with the moment. In this sense, wisdom is the ability to experience the gravitational weight of ideas in a manner that connects you with the creative and peace-giving forces in the world. Being informed means to know the definitions of things, and it is often misleading because information does not reveal essence; only wisdom can do that. In Black folk/urban cul- ture, those who speak from a Sebekian perspective are said to be “talkin' out dey neck,” or from the Native American perspective, “speaking with a forked tongue.” And so, where is the fulcrum point between wisdom and being informed? Ideally, information is an application tool guided by goals that wisdom sets. Handbook of Black Studies Page 10 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. Part of what Gates misses is the fact that when appropriately yoked, Sebek's words correspond to the essence of the appearance being described. When not appropriately yoked, Sebek's words trick the speaker into assuming that he (the speaker) knows what he is talking about. So as the custodian fastidiously sweeps essential Blackness into a trash heap of universalism, it is worth noting that Esu-Elegba, Papa LaBas, Leg- bas, Bro Rabbit, Marie Laveau, Anansi the spider, plus that signifying Negro who used to live down the “screet” from my mother's house in the projects are all “crackin' up,” “It's off the hook.” An exhalation of breath, and then the slow intake of the same, this time in a manner deep enough to draw air to say, “Negro please!!” and the guffaw resumes. In the current state of Black Studies affairs, Gates and company are not the only materialist critics in town. And, of course, there are old school nationalists like Asante, Karenga, and Marimbi Ani. But I want to talk a bit more about materialist Black Studies critics who do social analysis. As noted, Black Studies critics who work from a materialist perspective implicitly accept and explicitly operate from a Western ontological and epistemological perspective. This leads them to look at the African world as outsiders, surveying its exterior with ever more exacting demographic detail. Significantly, such data seldom lead to analyses that are a critique of “the integrationist ethic” and therefore provides a “counter-balance to the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture” (Allen, 1985, p. 9). I use Manning Marable's seemingly irrefutable obser- vation about public education to make my point. He writes, “A vigorous defense of public education is directly connected with the struggle for black community empowerment” (Marable, 2001). Nothing could be further from the truth. Black community empowerment exists on its own terms and so must approach all potential resources from a perspective consistent with its own best interests. Black materialist critics, the NAACP, the Urban League, and a variety of other Black organizations, leaders, and politicians sing in one voice that charter schools and vouchers will resegregate public education and drain the “public school system” of funds needed to educate the “least of these.” It is worth noting that many advocates of this posi- tion—White and Black—do their very best to make sure that their children do not attend public schools. Marable (2001) turns to data to support his contention that vouchers and charter schools have not produced learning outcomes to support changing the current system, but he does not seem to grasp the relationship between the goals of public education and the performance of its students. For public education may well be doing exactly what it was set up to do: creating a group of underachievers who are socialized to do the grunt work for the new world order. “Be an Army of one.” Or “Welcome to McDonald's! May I take your order?” The engineered failure of the public education practiced on Black communities seems to slip beneath Marable's Handbook of Black Studies Page 11 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. analytical radar because he writes from a set of philosophical assumptions that are not capable of going be- yond the obvious and multitudinous appearances of racism. A defense of what passes for public education is functionally a defense of current events: the messy and con- tradictory alliance of politicians who use low-performing schools to talk bad about and punish teachers, the of- ten myopic concerns of teacher's unions, the bottom-line concerns of school administrators who almost daily champion some new initiative (really slogans) to improve school performance, the parents who oscillate be- tween involvement and indifference, and the suffering students who intuitively know that the education being done to them is wrong. Teacher-centered, test-based curriculums that allow limited flexibility in how learning is acquired or demonstrated deracinate our youth, pulling them down spiral staircases of underdevelopment. The Black community empowerment that Marable calls for ought not to tie itself to a system determined to fail; rather, Black community empowerment should concentrate on creating schools that educate Black children in ways consistent with the best traditions in our history and culture. Sitting next to White children does not confer knowledge. The issue is that all children—Black, White, Asian, Latino, and so on—should have access to the same tools and opportunities. Access to those tools and opportunities is what Black communities ought to be struggling for. The motto of the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) is “Academic Excellence and Social Responsi- bility,” so we might associate the goals and programs of this organization with the kind of nationalism that Hare (1969) proposes—breaking down the “ebony tower” syndrome. The motto also implies concurrence with Cruse's position that Black Studies ought to provide a critical counterbalance to the “dominant Anglo-Sax- on culture.” Over its almost 30-year history, some NCBS conferences have clearly sought to build a bridge between the campus and the community; there is less evidence to support the organization's providing a crit- ical counterbalance to “Anglo Saxon” culture. To be sure, Perry Hall (1999) is accurate when he writes that “Nowhere has the ascendancy of Afrocentrism been more evident than in its repeated incorporation in the theme of the National Council for Black Studies conferences since the late 1980s” (p. 44). But the thematic incorporation into national conferences of an approach capable of providing a “counterbalance to the domi- nant Anglo-Saxon culture” appears in retrospect to have been a choice intended to hitch the fortunes of this organization to a perceived winner. NCBS now seems in retreat from any identification with the nationalist origins of Black Studies. In 1996, NCBS changed the name of its journal from The Afro centric Scholar to the International Journal of Africana Studies. During that same year, NCBS invited Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to its conference (Jones, 1996). A professional organization is free to invite whomever it wishes to its conference, so such invitations indicate that those invited have something useful to say about key issues Handbook of Black Studies Page 12 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. shaping the direction and interests of the professional organization extending the invitation. Part of what both Gates and West have to say is that African-centered thought lacks legitimacy, worth, and is not an appropriate method to explore African world culture (Jones, 1996). It is significant to note that at the time these invitations were extended, Gates and West were enjoying the affirmations of the “dominant Anglo-Saxon culture”—that constellation of materialist perspectives and institutions for which Black Studies was to have provided a coun- terbalance. NCBS has taken the path of a traditional professional organization, focusing on questions of the legitimacy, worth, and appropriateness of the discipline in a manner that asserts that, “hey, we're really just like any other academic discipline.” This traditional focus has meant the predictable march away from the nationalist goals posed by Cruse and Hare and the embrace of an uncritical show-and-tell nationalism that seeks to correct the historic record by documenting African and African American contributions to American society. This minimal- ist goal is not capable of providing a critical counterbalance to prevailing ideologies, and must, of necessity content itself with the goals of inclusion. The goals of inclusion consistent with the “integrationist ethic” are apparent in “Africana Studies: Past, Pre- sent, and Future” (Hare, Stewart, Young, & Aldridge, 2000), a tightly written essay by the Task Force of the National Council for Black Studies. Although the essay provides an excellent overview of Black Studies as an academic discipline, it says nothing about its nationalist origins and its initial trajectory, which critically target- ed the philosophical underpinnings of the disciplines and institutions that the NCBS Task Force now takes as points of reference. The NCBS dance is a heavily choreographed “waltz for acceptance,” a dance perceived as the only way to ensure that one's dance card is full, an assumed prerequisite for career advancement. Ultimately, this sad set is an indication of the distance we have traveled from the nationalist origins of Black Studies toward cultural dismemberment—the baseless beat of pragmatism reigns. Network Nommo My Network Nommo concept is preceded by Abdul Alkalimat's (2003) concept of eBlack, and I build on some of his work while critically discharging other parts. He defines eBlack as “a call for the transformation of Black Studies, a move from ideology to information.” Cyberdemocracy, collective intelligence, and information free- dom are the theoretical principles of eBlack, providing a blueprint for transformation. Cyberdemocracy “de- pends on everyone having access and becoming users of cyber technology.” Collective intelligence “depends upon all intellectual production being collected, analyzed, and utilized.” Information freedom “depends upon Handbook of Black Studies Page 13 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. intellectual production being freely available to everyone.” Alkalimat contradicts this last principle when cau- tioning that distance learning can be used to “seize ownership of course materials.” Putting aside his exemp- tion of course materials from other “intellectual production [that is] freely available,” there is the more funda- mental problem of his not engaging the worldview that determines the meanings and purposes of informa- tion. This nonengagement means that eBlack is a digitization of Allen's (1985) third goal noted above—the researching of Black history and illuminating the contributions of Blacks to American society. Noting the con- flicts among Black Studies scholars holding differing ideological positions (“old Marxist-Nationalist debate,” and “Post Modernist-Afrocentric debate”), Alkalimat (2003) asserts that information is the appropriate next stage of struggle—for him it is an implicit synthesis between the thesis/antithesis conflicts between Marxist and nationalist at one stage and postmodernist and Afrocentric at another stage. Network Nommo differs from eBlack in that information is viewed as lifeless until it is animated through inter- pretive filters derived from an African worldview. Information in itself does not confer perspective, for it is but half the complimentary epistemological duality noted above between Tehuti and Sebek. Left on its own, infor- mation (the domain of Sebek) can only trick its user. Through its adherence to an African worldview, Network Nommo keeps Tehuti and Sebek appropriately yoked so that resulting analyses, projects, and products are not dismemberments of the culture. I agree with Alkalimat's (2003) assertion that an “elite runs Black Studies, usually in a very undemocratic manner” wherein a handful of people “dominate the activities of each ideological network,” resulting in the “same names in texts, anthologies, journals, academic programs, professional organizations, invitational con- ferences as well as annual meetings, and as editors of reprints.” Network Nommo can be used to create new venues and audiences that are not dependent on the Black Studies elite. Electronic documents, as well as traditional print documents made affordable for independent publication via inexpensive software programs and printers expand the opportunity for Black Studies to offer cultural critiques unencumbered by both the conformist infrastructure of Western higher education and the Black Studies elite that Alkalimat notes. Network Nommo suggests a range of research and programmatic activities in which Black Studies ought to be involved. The examples listed below are in various stages of development. Each addresses the nationalist goals that Cruse (1967) and Hare (1969) indicate. 1. African world issues-based curriculum: Members of African communities anywhere in the world would contribute issues they wished to have resolved to a central database. A template would be used to structure Handbook of Black Studies Page 14 of 18 Sage Sage Reference © 2006 by Sage Publications, Inc. and organize the contribution. The database would be used to help organize the issues into a curriculum. The curriculum would be the foundation for an African World University. This is a project I began when our com- munity group founded and operated the African American Academy—an African-centered school (preschool through sixth grade) in Cincinnati, Ohio. For a history of that school see http://www.oneworldarchives.com. 2. African World Academic Journals: Network Nommo allows the expansion of the concept of an academic journal. And I mean not only electronic journals published online but also journals that take advantage of mul- timedia capabilities. Some of these journals could be published online, some on CD, and still others on DVD. They would feature not only the printed word but also minilectures, interviews, mpeg videos to demonstrate certain points, and music. A hallmark of African American culture is its causal defiance of genre: Network Nommo embraces this defiance and makes it feel right at home. We are transforming Word: A Black Culture Journal into a prototype shaped by the perspective of Network Nommo. 3. African American Academy Online: This would be an African-centered virtual K-12 school. This is work that I have begun based on the curriculum we developed at the African American Academy. Some of that work is available at http://www.oneworldarchives.com. 4. Black Studies electronic “texts”: To date, Mualana Karenga's (1993) Introduction to Black Studies is the only “textbook” that deals with Black Studies proper. Although his work is a cornerstone, other ideas and per- spectives are needed. I should note here, too, that Abdul Alkalimat's (1998) People's College Introduction to Afro-American Studies is freely available online at http://www.murchisoncenter.org/rahul/introbook. Although it is a needed and a useful resource, the People's College online publication does not take advantage of mul- timedia capabilities. I have begun the process of creating a Black Studies e-book that will take advantage of the full range of technologies available through Network Nommo. I have shared aspects of my e-book at the Ohio Learning Network Conference and at the National Council for Black Studies Conference, both held in 2003. A Web cast of my Ohio Learning Network presentation is available at http://dmc.ohiolink.edu:8080/ ramgen/OLN/2003/harris.rm. These are ambitious projects, and their development will suggest other projects. These projects attempt to rescue Black Studies from the mainstream of academia wherein its unique potential to contribute to world civilization is lost. For it is when we fully and unabashedly embrace what is unique in our experience that we make the most profound contributions to humanity. “Love is our passport to the perfectibility of humanity / Work and study, / Study and victory” (Baraka, 1973, “Afrikan Revolution”). 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