"Afro-Am is not political in the sense that we're all being indoctrinated," Smith says. "In Afro-Am, voices and perspectives are political."
Monica A. Coleman '95 says that, although concentrators and faculty do express political views, the department is primarily academic. "Gates has a political stance, and each person in the department has stance," he says. "There's a lot of political discourse at concentrators' meetings."
Smith says that the department's varied perspectives among students and faculty work in its favor. "There's definitely people in the department with different stances. I don't think it's the department's role to carry the banner of one doctrine," she says. "It's fortunate that there's a broad spectrum."
Afro-American Studies professors at Harvard also stress the importance of equal accessibility of the discipline to scholars of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Marc D. Zenlanko '95 also says that being white in the concentration presents no problems. "It's an academic department so they treat me as a scholar, not as a white, Jewish boy," he says.
But some say in the search for diversity of concentrators, the department has lost some focus on Black students in the major.
"A lot of the Black concentrators are very discouraged with the department because in an attempt to make Afro-Am a valid study or concentration they get as many non-African Americans concetrators, which is well and good but in the process they have ignored many of the African American concentrators," Ellis says. "The department heads feel that the only way it would be valid is if non-African-American students were interested in it."
But despite the political and academic conflicts shaped by the pressures in an issue as politicized as Afro-American Studies, the consensus at Harvard that Gates heads a department on the rise is real, and he and his colleagues say they welcome the disagreement and intellectual dispute.
"The idea there's monolithic Black community is ridiculous," says Gates. In his tutorial class he and students "did battle every week."
"That's the way it should be," he says. "It's about constrained disagreement."
The department is political but not polemic or dogmatic. One of the strength of the department is its determination top stay away from racial ideologies;
Ian H. Soloman '94 Afro-American Students Concentrator.
'Our outlooks are very similar... I definitely see the direction shaped by Skip Gates' vision. I also think that's a vision all of us share.'
Phillip Brian Harper assistant professor of English and Afro-American Studies