By: Madeleine Scypinski
For the first time since its introduction to the curriculum in 1995, African American Studies (AFAM) is now offered as a major at the University of Puget Sound.
The history of the African American Studies discipline began much earlier.
Black people in America fought for their right to learn “alongside of the struggle to end their enslavement,” said Dr. Dexter Gordon, department chair and professor of African American Studies and Communication Studies.
“African Americans represent one group; [they’re the] most striking example of a group that put its life on the line to be able to learn,” Gordon said.
The study of black culture has long been neglected in predominantly white academia.
In the past, “white institutions have perpetuated a fiction about black lives that African Americans have made no contribution to civilization, so their histories [and] their culture had no place in the academy,” Gordon said.
Black activists and historians like Carter G. Woodson organized the study of African American history, because otherwise, Gordon said, “it wouldn’t be studied, and it would be lost.”
The University’s AFAM program began as one “developed in defiance,” and without funding, in response to pressure from outside the university to better represent Tacoma as one of the cities in the Pacific Northwest with the highest African American population.
Professors added a series of courses already offered at Puget Sound into the African American Studies minor, but it wasn’t until 2002 that Dr. Gordon was hired as the first dedicated professor of African American Studies.
The program still maintains a firm belief in cross-departmental synthesis: “In African American Studies we embrace the assignment of teaching across the university . . . because we believe that all students should engage in African American Studies, notwithstanding [their] primary discipline,” Gordon said.
In reference to noted scholar and Columbia University professor Manning Marable, Gordon claims that “no American should identify as an educated person with a college degree if that college degree did not include the study…of African American life.”
This piece of American history is essential to understanding how this country has evolved “from its duplicity of the promotion of equality and the practice of insubordination,” Gordon said.
African American Studies is an integral part of the university’s curriculum. “Because of its orientation as focusing on a people’s struggle for recognition, [it] prepares its students to think, write, articulate their views, work collaboratively with others, [and] be nimble in their abilities to adjust to changing circumstances,” Gordon said.
The program allows African American students to “see a positive image” of their culture and gives them an “opportunity to learn their background,” said Shannon Woods, president of the Black Student Union and an African American Studies minor. “[AFAM] lets them know there is a presence of support.”
The development of this new major “represents added value to the university as a whole,” said Gordon. He feels it indicates Puget Sound’s dedication to the diversity of its student body and being “responsive to the demographic realities of the age.” In the United States, more than half of students in public schools are students of color.
“Rather than lagging behind,” Gordon said, “the university is interested in being part of the new reality of what higher ed and liberal arts offerings should be.”