So Far,

thedisgruntledgradstudent:

haggers:

thecoastisclear:

There is not one person of color in my Master’s.

Welcome to the Dutch academe/academy/academia.

We suck.

Here’s the thing, though, some fields don’t attract minorities. I’m not sure I can think of a single person of African descent in my FIELD. There are two women of Hispanic descent in my department, and we have one Vietnamese woman who emigrated to Italy, then to the US many years later.

BUT, before you go accusing my field (Italian Studies) of being racist, let me remind you that it is also a field that relies heavily on cultural connection. At least half, and probably far more than half of the people who are in my field are of Italian ancestry or origin, and there aren’t too many Africans or Asians in Italy.

Most of the ones that are there are poor immigrants and have only arrived in the last 20 years or less. Italy has an immigrant population of less than 5%.

So anyways, my point is, don’t get bent out of shape ALL the time when there are no minorities. Because sometimes it’s NOT racism.

I don’t know much about Italian Studies, but I think there’s a more fundamental question at stake here about the way that disciplines and fields are formed, and what histories and political dynamics fields acknowledge as part of their own genealogy. I think those questions impact who does and doesn’t show up in the classroom as well. You can make the point that there aren’t a lot of Africans or Asians in Italy, but I think it gets more complicated when the question becomes, why? And why has the field relied on ancestry/cultural connection in ways that other fields haven’t?

In most fields focusing on Western European countries that have some sort of colonial history, there has emerged at very least a group of people working on the former colony’s colonial history. Just given the fact that Italy spent a good half a century attempting to colonize East Africa, don’t you think it’s a little bit surprising that you can’t identify a scholar of African descent in the field? This of course has to do with historical conditions, but it also has to do with a racist/colonialist historical context. Where we work and study today is the outcome of that context; I don’t see a way how you can really bracket that off.

I think the “cultural connection” argument is pretty shoddy. If you go to a conference on African Studies in the U.S., the great majority of the people there will be white. Even though this has been a point of concern for a long time, it still isn’t quite controversial. This despite the fact that African Studies in the U.S. was actually initially modeled on the contributions, methodologies and theoretical frameworks of African American scholars, but taken away from them because the fact that they were interested in African culture and black at the same time was taken to mean that they couldn’t be “objective.” In many cases, historically, black people have been actively prohibited from having a scholarly or intellectual connection to their African heritage.

All of this is really to say that at least the way I see it, it really doesn’t even matter that much if the field’s present day practitioners are individually racist or not. The way that fields are arranged in the present day academy is the consequence of a racist world. There are reasons that the academy has stayed as white as it has in the places it has. Again, I don’t know much about Italian studies, but I think it helps to place it into the university context as a whole.