In my last blog on minority orientations, I wrote about how the separatism espoused by these programs finds a scholarly rationale in the emerging academic discipline of Afrocentrism, which, for all its kooky claims and grandiose mythography, has pretty much taken American education by storm: if it remains a fairly minor and dubious scholarly field, it has nonetheless captured the curricular imaginations of a great number of teachers, counselors, diversity programmers, and administrators nationwide.

Dinesh D'Souza has the goods on Afrocentrism's impact on American education if you want to read more; this piece is adapted from his book, The End of Racism, and is well worth reading. Basically, D'Souza's point is that Afrocentrism shortchanges blacks by shortcircuiting the route to self-esteem:

The tragedy of Afrocentrism for blacks is that, in the name of promoting group pride, it provides young people with falsehoods that undercut the accumulation of real knowledge -- and the achievement and self- respect that real knowledge brings. Rather than preparing black students for the challenges of living in modern civilization, Anthony Appiah points out, Afrocentrists instead teach them languages that are hardly spoken anywhere and concepts that are "a composite of truth and error, insight and illusion, moral generosity and meanness."

Despite their interest in the ancient world, Afrocentrists appear to have missed one of the most important lessons we can learn from the ancients -- the acknowledgment of civilizational differences combined with a refusal to reduce these to biological characteristics. "The ancient Egyptian lack of color prejudice should serve as a salutary lesson for us today," Frank Yurco says. "They would have considered this Afrocentric argument absurd, and this is something we could really learn from." Instead, Afro-centrists insist upon projecting their own racial nomenclature and obsession onto the ancients, invoking them to justify contemporary assertions of black militancy.

Afrocentrism is thus both pathetic and formidable. Pathetic because it offers young blacks nothing in the way of knowledge and skills that are required by modern life; formidable, because it offers them racial dynamite instead: a fortified chauvinism, a hardened conspiratorial mindset, and a robotic dedication to ideologies of blackness. The "revolutionary commitment" to which Molefi Asante refers is evident in the hardened gleam in many Afrocentric eyes. Afrocentrists exhibit a virtually cultic pattern of lockstep behavior: everyone dresses alike, and when the leader laughs, everyone laughs. Gradually but unmistakably, Afrocentrists are severing the bonds of empathy and understanding that are the basis for coexistence and cooperation in a multiracial society. Meanwhile, the real needs of blacks -- and the hard work of meeting them -- are being neglected.

D'Souza's perspective has been echoed by a few dissenting black scholars, among them Gerald Early, Professor of English and African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University. Early has famously described Afrocentrism and its attendant cultural rituals as "therapy." Of Kwanzaa, Afrocentrism's version of Christmas, he writes that it is a "therapy that is related to being American or, rather, to being denied what blacks feels is their true status as Americans." That therapy gets is power from its separatist mentality: Kwanzaa's meaning, according to Early, lies "in its cultural statement, its refutation of the whiteness of Christmas."

Early means his comments to be critical of Afrocentric thought. By calling the movement therapeutic, he is saying that it is without intellectual content, that it is a movement of and for the emotions, rather than the mind. It ought to be a discrediting move--and it would be, if the language of therapeutic separatism had not already been embraced by campus diversity mavens. For them, the link between self-esteem and celebratory separatism is elementary. Indeed, it is the basis for a highly successful and influential field: black educational psychology.

One of the best known black educational psychologists is the new Spelman College President, Beverly Daniel Tatum. Formerly a dean at Mount Holyoke, Tatum is the author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Alone in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, a 1997 book that has become a staple of diversity workshops and separatist curricular planning throughout the American educational system.

For Tatum, self-segregation is a crucial stage in black identity development. Defining "racial identity" as "the meaning each of us has constructed or is constructing about what it means to be a White person or a person of color in a race-conscious society," Tatum argues that "racial grouping is a developmental process in response to an environmental stressor, racism. Joining with one's peers for support in the face of stress is a positive coping strategy." Noting that colleges and schools are beginning to serve that need by facilitating self-segregation (think: black dorms, black yearbooks, black student centers, black graduations, and, of course, minority orientations), Tatum exhorts colleges "to take seriously the psychological toll extracted from students of color in inhospitable environments and the critical role that cultural space can play. Having a place to be rejuvenated and to feel anchored in one's cultural community increases the possibility that one will have the energy to achieve academically as well as participate in the cross-group dialogue and interaction many colleges want to encourage."

The assumptions underlying Tatum's "supportive" philosophy are deeply destructive: that one is defined (and implicitly delimited) by one's race; that whites and "white cultur"e are by definition racist; that one's learning environment--if integrated--is as a result automatically hostile to people of color; that there is no need to assess the environment for oneself, or to adjust to situations that may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable--because by definition any environment or situation that causes someone who is not white discomfort or a sense of dislocation is racist. Not buying Tatum's argument is also racist.

If you are white and Tatum's separatist apologia sounds like crap to you, it's not because you have a good shit detector. It's not even because you have a right to your opinion. It's because you belong to America's dominant group. You are therefore always already within your group, and have no need to be conscious of your racial identity or to spend special time developing it. That privileged unselfconsciousness is itself a form of racism, according to Tatum, who pointedly challenges her white reader to prove her progressive credentials: "Racism is a system of advantage based on race. And you have to ask yourself, who is advantaged by this system, and who is disadvantaged? In the U.S., it's the white people who are advantaged. I'm not saying that all white people are actively racist. The question is, are you actively anti-racist? There's no such thing as being passively anti-racist." Tatum goes on to suggest that whites who confront their own racism can experience "a euphoria perhaps akin to religious rebirth." Ah... I was a bigot. But now I see.

Such emotional blackmail is one of Tatum's preferred techniques of persuasion. As Heather MacDonald shows in her article "The Prep School PC Plague," school administrators read Tatum's message loud and clear, and have responded by developing separate disciplinary standards for black students. Black identity formation involves a need to act out, it seems. And so administrators should cut delinquent black students some slack. Not to do so would be--you guessed it--an imposition of the dominant culture's values on one who is oppressed, and therefore an instance of oppression in its own right, insensitive, racist. (We can speculate that such warped logic may be one reason why black, Hispanic, and Muslim student groups get away with so much rabid anti-Semitism. It's easy to see how expressions of hatred toward groups that are perceived as historically dominant and empowered could be excused as therapeutic, like primal scream therapy, only with epithets.)

And yet Tatum's book was a terrific success. She has been on Oprah, and was one of three authors to appear with President Clinton at his national town meeting on race. Her book is required reading for educators in many NYC schools, administrators and diversity programmers across the country are assiduously adopting and applying her ideas. Her book is being assigned to high school and college students (in a neat twist of fate, this book that has been so important to the creation of minority orientations and other separatist campus programming has even been the chosen text for freshman orientation at such institutions as Colby College and the College of New Jersey). All the while, her own career continues to soar--she has just moved from being a dean at an all-women's college to being president of an all black women's college.

The reason why Tatum's ideas have found such purchase, and have garnered her such respect, is that she is at the front of the civil rights movement as it is being fought--and lauded--today. In her recent book Race Experts (see sidebar), Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn eloquently explains how it was that the civil rights movement got hijacked by a therapeutic movement centered on the social etiquette of racial sensitivity and the tireless quest for that ever elusive and over-rated commodity, self-esteem. A number of commentators and pundits have observed lately that there are no new black leaders, that the civil rights movement does not seem to be quite the cause that it was in the past. Some lament this as a sign of political malaise on the part of blacks; others celebrate it as a sign of arrival, evidence that the fighting phase of the movement is over, replaced by the quiet work of assimilation into the mainstream. Certainly there is truth to both arguments. But both, too, fail to see that the civil rights movement is, in fact, alive and well, if transformed beyond recognition. It's centered on empowerment now instead of rights, on self-actualization rather than on equal opportunity, on sensitivity rather then equity. It has many followers, and--contrary to popular belief--it also has some influential leaders. Tatum is one of them. She isn't any Martin Luther King. But in the socially engineered world of the multicultural school, where educators are free to indoctrinate and where politics thus continues by other, more quiet means, she is powerful indeed.