RESPONSE TO NASSAU COMMUNITY COLLEGE (NCC) PLAN TO MERGE
 AFRICANA STUDIES WITH THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
 

An attempt to merge Africana Studies with any other discipline would not only seem counter-intuitive in America’s present cultural context of banned books and Affirmative Action reversals, but also appear absent of the historical context and reason for the existence of Africana Studies in the Western academy.

NCC has had an Africana Studies Department since 1972. Along with Monroe Community College, it is one of only two State University of New York (SUNY) two-year colleges to offer a degree in the area, although the BA is also offered at seven other SUNY schools. The Africana Studies Department serves an important function at the college.  In addition to the 500 students who take the department’s courses every semester, the Department is important to NCC faculty and to the surrounding community.  Parents, community constituents and leaders have traditionally and continue to look to the African Studies Department when they need information, cultural protocol and/or help for students.  Every year, Africana Studies collaborates with the Theatre Department to put on a show that is well-attended by members of both the NCC and area communities.  Africana Studies coordinates with other campus entities to support events for Black Heritage Month, and helps support speakers and cultural presentations throughout the year.  From its inception the Africana Studies Department has been “courses” and more!  In addition to providing scholarships, it has served as a support system for campus-wide student activities, cultural programming, counseling and advising students who are often the first in their families to attend college.  Further evidence of the Department’s community collaboration is the current partnership with the Roosevelt Public Library, which houses and creates workshops around topics selected from the personal collection of the Africana Studies Department’s former longtime chair and esteemed ancestor, Professor Kenneth Jenkins.

The Africana Studies discipline’s innate existential call is to expand the traditional Western higher education curriculum with creative course offerings that further introduce students to the often-forgotten contributions that Black/African people have made to human progress, and to broaden higher education’s (the college’s) traditional curriculum beyond the prisms of traditional Eurocentric cannons and epistemologies.  Hence, as a discipline/department the Africana Studies curricula objectives are in perfect alignment with the present SUNY system’s prioritizing of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mandates.  As an educational institution and a constituent college within the SUNY system, NCC should prioritize to fulfill such mandates by supporting the traditional status of Africana Studies as an independent department at NCC. 

Founded in 1968 at a heightened point in the continuous American milieu of inter-racial strife experienced for over 400 years by people of African ancestry, Africana/Black Studies was created as a forthright assertion for a meaningful autonomous space of curricular sovereignty to address the Black historical and cultural heritage traditionally absent in the Eurocentric cannon and paradigms at historically White colleges and universities.  Most essential to the 1960s demands for Black Studies was that higher education could have a relevance for students of African ancestry in providing a curriculum designed to prepare students to focus redresses to the myriad of problematics plaguing a people after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow White institutional racism. 

Africana Studies has been an African American reparations harbinger that should be further supported and enhanced for its intrinsic redemptive qualities in the steady movement for African American freedom, justice, equality and power.  In the spirit of the former longtime-devoted chair, Professor Jenkins, it has been the sought objective to advance the Department’s service to the college and broader community of African ancestry and cohorts with the goal to preserve and sincerely present the heritage of Africa and her influence in the world, before and after her forced enslaved and colonized diaspora. The Department is creating a strategic plan to increase enrollment that includes meetings with recruitment, admissions, guidance counselors and superintendents of districts with large numbers of students of the African diaspora.  Moreover, Africana Studies is an important component in a comprehensive and progressive college catalog serving the entire community with the heritage of humanity and civilization’s founding Black peoples and cultures. 

However, present circumstances at NCC require this brief explanation of Africana Studies’ raison d etre signed by faculty, staff, the broader Black community and its supporters to dissuade the plan to merge Africana Studies with the English department, which would mark an ending of the autonomous academic space and functioning budget that Africana Studies has secured for over 50 years in the Western academy and, with great community reception and applause, at NCC. The NCC administration should re-evaluate and reverse the planned merger and support Africana Studies’ historical status at NCC as an independent Department!

Sincerely,

R.A. Patterson-Shabazz, Chair