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New African-American Studies Program to probe black-Asian interaction By David J. Craig When racial tensions dominated U.S. domestic policy agenda in the 1960s, universities responded in part by launching African-American studies programs that focused on the long-standing social and economic effects of the enslavement and the oppression of blacks. The dynamics of race in this country have changed since then, as the number of Asians and Hispanics living in the U.S. has grown dramatically. Ronald Richardson, a CAS associate professor of history who has directed BU's African-American Studies Program since January, plans to address those changes by implementing a curriculum and series of research projects that focus on the interaction between blacks and other ethnic and racial groups in the United States and around the world.

"We're living in a different era now, and I think that scholars of African-American studies have to be in a position to comment on things other than black-white relations," says Richardson, a scholar of modern European cultural and intellectual history, political theory, and medieval Europe, as well as racial interaction. "I want to build a program that looks at the relationship between black people, including African-Americans, and other populations around the globe, as well as within the United States. Few people have studied the global impact of black people, economically, socially, and culturally. But they've had an impact, and we want to show what it is."

Ronald Richardson, a CAS associate professor of history and new director of the African-American Studies Program, is aiming to promote research on "the global impact of black people, economically, socially, and culturally." Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Within two years, however, the rejuvenated program should offer undergraduate and advanced degrees and feature several full-time faculty members recruited specifically because of their global perspective on African-American studies, Richardson says. The program will be housed at the renovated International Center for African-American Studies at 138 Mountfort St. During the next four years, it will promote research on the relationships between black and Asian people, from antiquity to present, in the United States and in East Asia. It is an area, Richardson says, that has been inadequately studied. "There is an easy assumption that East Asians are uniformly racist against blacks and that blacks don't like Koreans, for instance," he says. "When those assumptions aren't tested, one of the political consequences is that two groups that could be cooperating on behalf of progressive social agendas in inner city neighborhoods, such as L.A. or Brooklyn, are sometimes fighting with each other." Research has shown that some East Asians and African-Americans do have negative attitudes toward one another, Richardson says, but he also points out that the cultures have influenced one another in positive ways. Some African-American leaders considered the Japanese "race heroes" during the 1930s and 1940s, he says, because the nation modernized without having been colonized by a Western nation. And today Japanese youth are heavily influenced by hip-hop culture. "To the extent that negative feelings do exist, we want to find out if they stem from actual interaction between the groups or from media images," Richardson says. "We're interested in the subtle influences that occur because of globalization, as well as locally, and may be so subtle that we don't recognize them." Previously, Richardson held teaching appointments in the history departments of Clark University, Howard University, and the State University of New York at Binghamton. Twice between 1997 and 2000 he was a visiting associate professor at Harvard University's department of Afro-American Studies. He is the author of Moral Imperium (Greenwood Press, 1987), a study of the impact black slave rebellions had on the English anti-slavery movement in the late 18th century, and Winston S. Churchill: Imagining the Racial Self, forthcoming from Prager/Heinemann Publishers. "With his broad range of skills and his impressive, extensive background," says Dennis Berkey, provost and dean of Arts and Sciences, "I'm certain Richardson will usher in a new and exciting period in the African-American studies program." Richardson taught African-American History in Global Perspective this semester, and hopes to teach a course in black-Asian relations next spring. He is traveling to East Asia for six weeks this May to give lectures and meet with faculty of several universities in China, Japan, and Korea, whom he hopes will collaborate with BU researchers on the East Asian project. Recruitment of full-time faculty members for the African-American Studies Program has begun, and Richardson hopes to have several members in place by September 2001. That year, he says, a graduate program should be launched. Richardson also hopes to acquire outside funding for a fellows program, which would enable a visiting professor from an East Asian country to come to BU for each of the next four years. In addition, he aspires to foster faculty and student exchanges with East Asian universities. According to Kimberley Savage, senior assistant director of Corporate and Foundation Relations in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations, the funding environment at present is good for such globally oriented projects. "Foundations are becoming increasingly aware of globalization and its implications," she says. "It follows that grantmaking will reflect this new interest."

1 June 2000
Boston University
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