Black Women and Engaged Scholarship

University administrations, faculty, and students across the country are reflecting on the need to bring the academy into relationship with communities in ways that are not exploitative, manipulative, or benignly negligent. This is not a new enterprise, but it is one that presently enjoys visibility on prestigious campuses throughout the nation. Community service centers are connecting student interns with nonprofit organizations. In the fall of 2004, students organized themselves to protest aggressive military actions and to influence domestic electoral outcomes. Faculty members teach service-learning courses and offer policy analysis and advice in the media. Administrations invest in neighborhood economic stability, housing, and public safety. Hands are reaching out of every crevice of the nation's ivory towers and are touching the lives of those who are within their proximity. There is plenty to criticize and to celebrate in the specific community agendas of America's universities, but while this posture of engaged scholarship is largely regarded as innovative and unprecedented, it reflects the ordinary experience of black women academics for whom the scholar-activist tradition is long-standing.

When many black women enter doctoral programs in political science, they are prompted both by intellectual curiosity and by engagement with political questions of real consequence. This means that black women often ask questions and produce work that is meant to have relevance beyond the subfield, the discipline, and the academy. Many of these women hope that the expertise and experience they gain as researchers will impact the material circumstances of larger communities. They hope to produce scholarship that speaks to and learns from a broader world. Often, black women political scientists frame their work as a contribution to ongoing struggles against racial and gender oppression.

A review of the work of the discipline's most prestigious black women scholars exemplifies this position. Jewel Prestage initiated an agenda of engaged scholarship with her work on black women officeholders in the early seventies. Having entered the field at a time when political science was more than 97% nonblack and 90% male, Prestage has worked for three decades to stake out a research agenda tracing the contributions of black women in the real political world (Githens and Prestage 1977; Prestage 1975, 1987, 1991). She pursued her work with little financial support or teaching releases from her institutions. Her research agenda both defined and explained black women's positions in the halls of political power and pushed the discipline to recognize these women as legitimate subjects of study. Prestage demands that political science reevaluate notions of political power through the lenses of race and gender. She asserts, “If race makes a difference in the larger society, then it makes a difference among women in terms of life chances and access to power, including political power. This reality must be reflected in what is taught in political science courses … even if the reality is unpleasant” (Prestage 1994, 721).

Two generations of black women scholars have followed Prestage in crafting research that is engaged both with real politics and with traditional lines of academic inquiry. Dianne Pinderhughes (1987) challenged the fundamental assumptions of the pluralist model that had dominated the study of urban politics. Her work forces a reevaluation of the pluralist assumptions by telling the stories of black communities engaged in ongoing political struggle. Paula McClain's (McClain and Stewart 1999) research on black, white, and Latino political coalitions takes on one of the most pressing issues of racial politics facing America today. It is work that both pushes the field toward a more comparative framework and comments on political questions that are relevant to communities of color. Katherine Tate and Claudine Gay (1998) challenge the assumptions that underlie our limited understanding of black women as political actors. Their work both challenges the field to consider intersectional analysis and provides insight into the tough choices made by ordinary black women as they navigate the political world. Cathy Cohen (1999) decisively exploded the myth of the desirability of a single, unified, black agenda as a core value in black politics by demonstrating the failure of the traditional black political establishment to respond to the crisis of AIDS. Her work not only shattered assumptions within the study of black public opinion; it also intervened in one of the most important policy and public health issues of our age. Ange-Marie Hancock's (2004) work on images of black women welfare recipients centers the life experiences of these vulnerable women in order to reveal the failure in America's structures of deliberative democracy. Her work not only questions the assumptions of traditional political theory but also intervenes in the conversation about America's social welfare state.

These scholars are representative of the handful of black women who constitute an elite core within the field of political science. Their research challenges political science because it makes vulnerable communities the object of study and thereby confers academic value and meaning to the experiences of marginalized people. Their work not only pushes academic boundaries but also engages communities. These African-American women judge the quality of their work not only by standards of intellectual inquiry but also by a litmus test of relevancy to broader communities. They engage in work that makes substantial contributions both to the cumulative knowledge in the field and to the lives of the ordinary men and women they study.

Role Models and Good Citizens

Black women political scientists contribute to a more just world not only through their research agendas but also through their commitment to serve the students, departments, and communities where they work. This commitment translates into a significant additional burden as they seek to be respected scholars and to be role models and good citizens. Black women in political science engage beyond their research through student contact, administrative service, and community work. Citing two decades of research on black women academics, Gregory (1999) concludes, “African American women faculty typically engaged in more teaching, advised greater numbers of students and participated in more committee work than white men” (p. 24). The pattern of extra-scholarly burdens is visible in a review of the professional lives of the black women scholars discussed here.

Prestage is a recipient of the Frank Goodnow Award and is described by the American Political Science Association as “a beloved mentor of many students and a role model for a generation of African Americans who will always remain in her debt for the example she set as a scholar and good citizen in the profession…. [S]he has spent untold hours strengthening the profession through her work on committees, task forces, and executive councils of numerous local, regional and national organizations” (APSA 1994).

Prestage's example is one that subsequent generations of black women in the discipline have followed. Because they are such a tiny fraction of the discipline, particularly in elite institutions, each black woman carries a disproportionate share of extra-scholarly work as compared to her white male colleagues. Pinderhughes served as the director of the Afro-American Studies Research Program at her institution for a decade. She was vice president of APSA and president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS). McClain is also a past vice president of APSA and past president of NCOBPS. She serves as director of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, which is the single most important conduit for students of color into the field of political science. Tate is chair of the department at the University of California-Irvine. Cohen is director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. Even as untenured professors, both Gay at Stanford and Hancock at Yale serve as undergraduate advisors for their departments. Many of these women are also active in political organizing and community volunteerism outside the academy. Cohen is a respected activist in urban communities. Tate is deeply involved in the work of her church. Hancock was active in founding the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA)!

In their service, as in their engaged scholarship, these black women political scientists reflect the way that many African-American women navigate the field. Taking on enormous responsibility for mentoring students of color, service to the discipline, administrative roles, and committee work, these women do far more than their fair share in political science. In many ways, the careers of these women also reflect their commitment to serving as role models and support for black women students. Reflecting on this role, Anita Allen (1996) writes: “Black female students have much to learn from black female teachers. We know what it is to experience insecurity about the stereotypes of black women as fit only for sex and servitude, or as having faces that belong on cookie jars or syrup bottles rather than on the pages of bar journals” (p. 82).

These are the many roles that African-American women political scientists assume in their positions in the academy. While working to produce relevant and innovative political research, they serve students in unique ways that allow them to meet the intellectual as well as the personal, emotional, and psychological needs of their students. Many black women political scientists can be understood as engaged scholars both in the content of their scholarship and in their approach to holding academic positions. In these forms of engaged scholarship they actively contribute to a more just world. Because black women professors can provide a vital link to relevant communities and serve as support systems to students of color, they ensure that a more diverse array of voices and experiences contributes to political science. This diversity leads to more accurate understandings of power, vulnerability, and privilege and therefore allows political science to actively contribute to meaningful conceptions of justice.

The Challenges

The position of black women political scientists as both scholars and citizens is fraught with tensions. In their intellectual inquiry, black women are committed to approaching research as rigorous social scientists. Like their colleagues, they are engaged for pure intellectual curiosity with the questions that animate the field. But black women are often drawn to political science from traditions of activism, involvement, and commitment to real politics. Because of these prior commitments, these political scientists often challenge the epistemological frameworks of political science by scrutinizing established norms of sciencificism and scholarly distance. It is important not to conflate research done by black women with black feminist research. The latter has established multiple approaches to challenging norms of social science research. It is beyond the reach of this brief essay to fully consider how feminist scholarship has been central to questioning notions of agency and revealing the role of hidden privileges. But it is important to note that feminist epistemology interrogates dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge and reveals the ways that these systems disadvantage subordinate groups. Work that is explicitly feminist strives to challenge dominant epistemologies by including women and other marginal groups as agents of inquiry and by producing knowledge that centers groups normally relegated to the margins. Not all political science scholarship by black women is feminist in this sense, but much of it produces a similar effect of challenging unquestioned hierarchies.

Patricia Hill Collins (1990) argues that “one distinguishing feature of Black feminist thought is its insistence that both the changed consciousness of individuals and the social transformation of political and economic institutions constitute essential ingredients for social change. New knowledge is important for both dimensions of change” (p. 221). Many black women political scientists are engaged in feminist epistemological challenges to the field to the extent that their research agendas meet these criteria. Their work often tells the stories of those who are rendered silent in the works of their white male colleagues. By giving voice to these subjects, black women challenge epistemologies in political science. Their work often insists that power is more than an abstract concept for political scientists to use when introducing undergraduate students to the study of politics. For black women power is reflected in the realities of racial, gender, class, and sexual exploitation that mark their lives and the lives of those in communities to which they are attached. The standards for engaged scholarship are high because work that is engaged with communities must meet both the standards of the academy and the needs of the community. Black women political scientists are among the vanguard for doing work that meets this standard. In this way, black women push the epistemological boundaries of the discipline.

In addition to the challenges of engaged scholarship, black women are further challenged to navigate their professional lives while crafting a way of being in the academy that honors their commitment to students, to universities, and to communities. While embracing student mentoring, they must worry about being reduced to the position of role model. While Allen emphasizes the role that these professors can play as models for students of color, she also challenges the notion that black women professors are primarily important to the academy in the position of role model: “We are smarter and more valuable even than our status as role models implies. Black women are valuable to students of all races and to our institutions generally. We teach classes, write, and serve on committees … at some institutions we publish more and get better teaching evaluations than do our average white colleagues…. [T]he role model argument is thus a damning understatement” (1996, 85).

While building institutions within their universities that serve the interest of black students and black communities, black women political scientists must bear the cost of substantially reduced capacity for pursuing independent research agendas. When serving on important decision-making bodies within the university, they must be wary of tokenism. Their personal willingness to take on these challenges and resist these roles contributes to the creation of a more just academy for all scholars. Black women political scientists are daughters, mothers, wives, and sorority members. They are the chairs of community nonprofits and coaches of Little League. Their personal lives present challenges similar to those of their white women colleagues, but are often heightened by a number of structural barriers. For example, in the competitive academic job market, few scholars are able to choose jobs that meet their personal geographic preferences. While this is a hardship for all scholars, it can be particularly difficult for black women, who often find themselves in communities that have no choices for places to worship or locations for personal grooming. Black women with families can find it difficult to establish lives in communities with no schools that affirm their children's racial identities or with activities that support their partners' legitimate professional and social needs. Black women professors assist their students in navigating these barriers, even as they bear these burdens themselves. These challenges can exact an enormous cost on each individual black woman political scientist. Thus, even as these women craft a more just world through their scholarship and professional duties, they find themselves paying the cost of that justice.

Condoleezza Rice and the Challenge to Essentialism

It might be easy to conclude that black women are an inherently progressive voice in political science and that their presence is essentially a contribution to a more just field and a more just world. But it would be incorrect to assume such a narrow stance. The most famous black woman political scientist in the country is the new secretary of state and former national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. Like the research agenda of many black women political scientists, Rice's research agenda engaged with real politics. Her books and articles grappled with some of the most important world events of our time, including the fall of communism and the changing shape of Europe in the post-Soviet era. Like many other black women in the field, she worked to have both a scholarly and a popular voice on issues of great concern to the communities she studied. Like other black women political scientists, Rice served her university in extraordinary ways. She served six years as Stanford University's provost. As professor of political science, she won two of the highest teaching honors at the university in both 1984 and again in 1993. In many ways, Rice's professional commitments were consistent with that of other black women in political science. Unquestionably, her work falls within a category of engaged scholarship, and her commitments as a teacher and university citizen were unparalleled (Felix 2002).

It is important to consider Rice in a review of black women in political science both because of her obvious fame and visibility and because she challenges essentialized assumptions about black women in the field. Her work is not in American politics. It is not concerned with African-American communities. It is not feminist in its epistemology. Rice complicates any simple conclusions we might be tempted to draw about the contributions of black women in political science. Rather than working as an activist in underserved communities, she served on the boards of the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the Hewlett Foundation, the International Advisory Council of J. P. Morgan, and the Rand Corporation (Felix 2002). Through her roles in the Bush administration, Rice has become arguably the most politically influential African-American woman in the world, but she cannot be categorized as progressive or feminist in a way that might pervade our understanding of other black women political scientists. She reminds us that there is no simple way of understanding the contributions of black women in political science to a more just world.