Looking in the Mirror?

It loomed so large in Harvard’s memory that, in the decade that followed, it was known only as the Strike. This six-day student boycott of classes in April of 1969—a reaction to the administration’s brutal put-down of a University Hall sit-in—soon solidified its goals into three major points. One was the creation of an Afro-American Studies Department, an objective that was affirmed by a majority of 6,000 voters at a mass meeting in Harvard Stadium. By the end of the month, the University had agreed to set up an independent department for the study of African-American culture.

But the students who were willing to miss class in the name of a race-based department might not have foreseen that, thirty years later, minority students would still find themselves questioning their right to study their own ethnicity. It’s no secret that ethnic fields of study are generally the domain of heritage

students—that is, students who want to study their roots. But students in fields ranging from African-American to Jewish Studies find themselves wondering: is it legitimate to study one’s ethnicity in an academic setting?

By the People, for the People

Andrew C. Coles ’09 was first attracted to the African and African-American Studies department—the post-2003 title for the former Afro-American Studies department—because it combined a broad base in the humanities with a narrower focus on African-American culture. He initially worried, however, that his ethnicity would affect the way people perceived his academic choices. “I was afraid that I would be, quote unquote, that black kid doing that black stuff,” he says.

Historically, movements for ethnic departments have been led by students like Coles in minority communities who want a place for themselves within a university that they feel is taking a limited approach to the humanities. “So-called mainstream departments, which seem theoretically not to be ethnically-based, were thought to exclude faculty and students who were not white,” explains Professor of African and African-American Studies Biodun Jeyifo. The African and Afro-American Association of Harvard-Radcliffe Students fought for an Afro-American Studies Department in the 60s expressly so that African-American students could do exactly what Coles is doing now.

The 1969 Strike may have had the support of a multi-ethnic constituency at Harvard, but many of the affirmative voters were motivated by the other issues in question, particularly the elimination of the ROTC program in order to demonstrate the University’s opposition to the Vietnam War. Ten years later, when the Coalition for Awareness and Action included strengthening the Afro-American Studies Department in a list of objectives for a second student strike, the response was underwhelming. “Afro-Am?” one sophomore said in a 1979 article published in the Crimson. “For most of us, it’s just not our fight.” The perception on both sides of the racial line was that the Afro-American Studies Department was created by African-Americans, for African-Americans.

Unsurprisingly, ethnic departments attracted—and continue to attract—a large proportion of heritage students. The popularity of heritage studies within ethnic disciplines is not only the result of historical precedent, however, but also owes much to personal inclinations. “Sometimes it’s a case where somebody else comes to you and says, ‘Who are you?’—and you don’t know how to answer,” explains Hancock Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental Languages Peter B. Machinist. “In other cases it’s a strong family sense, particularly if your family originated from another country and speaks another language.”

Get Out!

The idea that heritage studies is simply navel-gazing by another name has plagued ethnic departments since the 1960s. “Some reactions were that there’s a hopeless compromise here—you cannot have a rigorous program of study if the people are only in it to find their roots,” says Machinist. Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies Jennifer L. Hochschild explains that a liberal arts education must “get you outside of yourself” so that you learn to think about a wide range of topics in a variety of ways.

Students who are drawn to a field of study by their ethnic background may also find themselves limited by their lack of objectivity. Erika L. Solomon ’08 comes from a Jewish family—an ethnic tie to the Middle East that drew her to the study of Arabic culture. “A lot of Jewish people study the Middle East and Arabic as a kind of counterbalance to their ethnic identity,” she says. “They want to understand this culture they see themselves in conflict with.”

Solomon believes that such an opposition-oriented interest in the Middle East can be extremely limiting. “I sometimes worry that they go to these great lengths to study Arabic and the Middle East without making the effort to change their built-in perceptions,” she says of Jewish students at Harvard. “It’s the kind of thing that Arabic students talk about—there are the people who study Arabic because they want to be in the CIA, and there are the people who study it because they feel sympathetic.”

A “white-normative” Experience

Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Rachel L. Greenblatt is skeptical of the suggestion that having an ethnicity-based interest in a certain department precludes meaningful study of that field. “For the majority of heritage students, is the concentration really so close to their background?” she says. “For example, there are very few Jewish families in America speaking Hebrew and Yiddish at home today—so I don’t think that Jewish students focusing on Jewish Studies are repeating things that they learned at home.”

Minority students may even be less well-versed in the culture of their ethnic group than they are in the study of the Western canon. “During high school, I wasn’t exposed to African-American history to the extent that I would have liked,” says Welton E. Blount ’09, an African-American Linguistics concentrator with a focus on African-American studies. Coles notes that, while he was taught Charles Dickens and Emily Bronte in his high school English class, classic works by African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Weldon Johnson were missing from the curriculum.

Coles disputes the notion that ethnic departments are more racially charged than other fields in the humanities. “The majority of students here are white, the majority of professors here are white, so what we have here is a very white-normative experience,” he says. He notes that minority students at Harvard are often accused of being preoccupied with their race for acting in a way that, in Caucasian students, would not incite the same response.

“I’d like to ask a history concentrator studying American history, why are you here? Why are you studying yourself?”

The Search for “Truth”

Caucasian students are arguably more likely to encounter questions of academic purpose when they choose to focus on ethnic disciplines. Solomon, who identifies herself as Latin American and German, often encounters the accusation, “Oh, you want to date Arab guys—is that why you’re studying the Middle East?”

But the process by which non-heritage students become interested in their respective fields of study is, Solomon says, “not so different from people who grow up with [them].” Self-professed WASP Mollie M. Kirk ’08 remembers that her interest in Chinese culture developed from an early exposure to the Chinese language. “When I was in 6th grade, my mom took my brother and me to a museum exhibit in Philadelphia,” she remembers. “They had a girl there who was translating, and she was white—so I thought, ‘Not only is Chinese such a melodic-sounding language, but if she can do it, so can I!’”

Now a concentrator in East Asian Studies, Kirk finds that her cultural distance from her field of choice can actually be an intellectual advantage. “A lot of the difficulty in working with heritage students is breaking down the preconceived notions that they have, whereas if you’re not Chinese, you’re not entering it with all these cultural notions that you don’t even know you have,” she says.

In fact, the variety of viewpoints that non-heritage students inject into ethnic disciplines may be the stepping stone to their recognition as legitimate fields of study. “If you’re trying to get a better understanding of any issue, the more voices you have, the better,” says Blount. “What’s the worst that could happen—that two people disagree? But I guess that would get you closer to the truth.”