I agree. And if there are African-American studies, there should also be White-American studies too, because fair is fair. But we all know that will never happen.
I think it is a fair question. If Black students benefit from focused learning on what the Black experience and Black contributions are to our history, wouldn't white students possibly get the same thing?
My issue with race based courses is that ultimatley they become hot beds for indoctrinating students in a separate way of seeing themselves in our society. I don't believe that gets society to a better place. Most of these race history classes merely sow the seeds of hatred. The embolden Black students to see themselves as victims, and Whites as oppressors.
Yeah, no. This post is demonstrating no awareness of the fields of history.
The reason why there are subject matter specific survey courses (in this case, demographic-specific survey level courses) is because while references to them may be found here or there in the vanilla survey courses, they are nevertheless not able to provide a concrete narrative on that subject. American history survey courses may have African American narratives scattered in it, but the primary focus is on something different: namely, the narrative of how the United States sees itself as a nation state. But that narrative is also by default about the white male experience, with *pockets* of other people scattered throughout the literature, often unevenly.
When you’re able to take a course on African American history, you may be treated to the history of the United States as a nation state, but it would be through the prism of the Black populations that inhabited the colonies and the country. And given the unique historical context of African Americans, the central focus will be on what it is like to be them, to be an oppressed minority who had few to no rights at any point in time prior to the mid-1960s. And that’s also when you are going to get that very unique look at how, given that, how do Black Americans interact with American citizenship and patriotism. And those debates can share similarities with white Americans, but even those who said “yes, I am an American, I love my country, etc etc.” will say so with a different rationale than you normally hear from other peoples.
On the contrary, African American history or studies courses have led to a revisionism toward reminding people that Black people were not mere passive recipients, but were active participants in history. That’s why there is a conscious effort to look at slave revolts, the internal debates in the Black community about how to pursue freedom, how to act politically, what sort of education should they aspire to having, why many of them continued to actively serve in the military, etc. As a result of that focus, defenders of more traditional narratives can be found debating African American-centric scholars on the extent to which Black people were able to shape their own destinies without being just victims of oppression.