Word: afro
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...longer know what they mean. Indeed, our definitions have become distorted, twisted around. Once we spoke of assimilation and a "melting pot;" now, a new breed of scholarship emphasizes a curious form of academic segregation. Where once we studied and learned American history, now we study Afro-American, Asian-American and other ethnically-defined histories. And we do it in the name of multiculturalism...
Even at Harvard, no academic department, however renowned, can hope to be a positive force in the community if it is ethnic-based. Take our much-acclaimed Department of Afro-American Studies, for example...
Harvard's Afro-American Studies program is without doubt among the best --if not the best--in the nation. Through a string of faculty recruitments in recent years, the program has amassed an impressive array of academic all-stars. The department's chair, W. E. B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr., is widely regarded as a top scholar in his field. And Gates deserves the lion's share of credit for the success of the program, using Harvard's resources and his own reputation to lure well-established professor from other universities to Cambridge. In light...
...recent successes of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department do not change our view that the department should be disbanded and its members integrated into other fields taught at the university. For it is as wrong to have an ethnocentric Afro-American Studies Department as it would be to have an ethnocentric European-American Studies Department...
...feathers. After all, as proponents of ethnic studies often argue--quite properly, in our view--for too long scholars have ignored the role of African-Americans and other ethnic groups in history. From this indisputable basis, however, they go on to reach a flawed conclusion. Programs like Harvard's Afro-Am Department are needed, they argue because they promote the multicultural perspective we have long lacked...