Black History Month offers a special opportunity for Duquesne faculty to teach about the intersection, significance and parallel universes of black and white lives, according to Dr. George Yancy and Dr. Moni McIntyre, both of the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts.
Dr. George Yancy
Black History Month, both agree, is an important learning tool for both black and white Americans.
“Black History Month gives black people a human face to speak to white people, not only as agents of history but as a way to create history in our own image,” said Yancy, the first African-American tenured philosophy professor at Duquesne, whose work has been cited by scholars as far away as South Africa, Turkey, Sweden and Australia.
The month provides a way to bring what has been a missing part of history to the forefront, said McIntyre, a white assistant professor in the Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy. “Much of black history has not been taught. In many cases, it has not been valued or known,” she said.
“Blacks have been featured as minorities, and only the majority’s history has seemed relevant,” McIntyre continued. “The majority’s history is incomplete, however, without the minorities.”
Dr. Moni McIntyre
Teachable moments, McIntyre said, are at their best when faculty “take a long view of Black history and a short view of Black History Month.” Both she and Yancy include topics relevant to Black History Month in their classes year-round, incorporating writings by authors of color, including multiple gender and racial perspectives in reading lists and films, and discussing the complicated racial topics that are part of life 365 days a year.
“Black History Month is obviously significant,” Yancy said. “I think about this month as thematically relevant across all of my courses, inasmuch as I attempt to integrate black voices into my classes across the year. The themes that come out of Black History Month are, more generally, something to talk about all the time. Black History Month is writ large across the entire year in my classes. It is very disheartening to ask white students to name one or two important texts by Black thinkers and they look back with blank stares. I recently asked the white students in one of my classes about The Autobiography of Malcolm X and not a single student had read that text. This is unacceptable.”
McIntyre, who explores the systematic exclusion of African-Americans from clinical trials and the “medical apartheid” that occurred in health care from after the Civil War through World War II in healthcare ethics courses, includes the work of African-American activists in labor movement studies as well.
“As I see it, Black History Month highlights the need for all Americans to learn more about the serious struggles of African-Americans not only here in the United States but all over the world,” McIntyre said. “We must, however, go beyond mere ‘highlights’ by sharing this knowledge in our classes each and every semester.”
Yet, this is what makes Black History Month a teaching moment. “White people could not be who they are without the presence and contributions of black people,” Yancy said. “It speaks to the fact that we can’t disentangle our identities. We share a larger existential, social and political fabric of American history. Yet, we are like brothers and sisters who are estranged from each other. The real question is: who is my neighbor?”