White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education

Rooks, N. White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. (2006). 177 pp. The Ford Foundation, and its president McGeorge Bundy, and the white student movement influenced the discipline of African American Studies during its formative years in the American academy, a history that, among other things, is chronicled in Noliwe M. Rooks' White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Misguidedly though, Rooks, an associate chair of African American Studies at Princeton University, exaggerates and misrepresents these effects. In a sense, Rooks in White Money/Black Power, attempts to smear a sizeable amount of white paint on the practically all-black evolutionary portrait of Black Studies. Rooks centers the book on the flawed arguments that the Ford Foundation, as an organization, and Bundy were the discipline's saviors and that the protest movements that fought for Black Studies were vastly integrated with whites, and to a lesser extent Asians, Latinos and Native Americans. This certainly was the case at San Francisco State College (now University), but Rooks over-generalized non-Black students participation across the country. Therefore, due to the author's flawed perspective, this work is not valuable to the disciplinary discourse. The book is divided into two parts, a historical element as well as one that addresses the legacy of that founding period. The former will primarily be analyzed in this review. White Money/Black Power contained a narrative about the beginning of Black Studies that included white students in particular, and Asians, Latinos and Native Americans in the protest movement. In reference to San Francisco State University (SFSU), Rooks claimed: "Although the familiar narrative chronicling the beginning of Black Studies generally centers on Black student protest and violence, in reality, at San Francisco State, Black, white, Native American, Asian, and Latino students rose up together, joined forces, and made or supported unequivocal demands" (Rooks 2006: 4). The reader evidently gets the impression that all the white students were striking for Black Studies. But in fact, one scholar found otherwise. Karagueuzian (1971) noted: PL (Progressive Labor Party) was not interested in the issue of Black Studies or in Nathan Hare. Nor was PL interested in an autonomous Black Studies Department. The Marxist-Leninist organization wanted to use the strike to convert students to its doctrine, by first getting them to admit that the system, which includes every institution in this country, serves the interests of only a handful of Americans. (61) Even worse though, Rooks crafted the Ford Foundation and Bundy's role and relationship to the newly formed discipline as being positively paternal. Rooks concluded: "If McGeorge Bundy and The Ford Foundation had not crafted a strategy to address such concerns and offer solutions to the problem of campus administrators, the field might never have survived beyond that initial rush" (Rooks 2006: 59). Rooks' line of reasoning had essentially two parts. First, she claims that the "integrationist rationale" won out over the other competing rationales "jockeying" for the blessings of "program officers" and "Board of Trustee members" and it would come "to dominate the field of Black Studies as it assumed its position in academic institutions" (Rooks 2006: 22 & 65). Rooks wrote, and it is true, that this rationale was concerned with using Black Studies to only integrate the faculty, student body and curricula of American higher education, and it was totally against autonomous departments of Black Studies that were determined to use their scholarship to liberate the African community. Rooks assertion that this integrationist rationale came to dominate the discipline is not correct. …