3 professors leading UMD’s African American studies department
Classes based on Black films and television shows like “Get Out: The Sunken Place of Race Relations in the Post-Racial Era,” “‘Through the Wire’: The Politics and Policies of a Chocolate City” and “Monsters and Racism: Black Horror and Speculative Fiction,” are all highlights of the University of Maryland’s African American Studies Department.
Founded in 1969, the department has several major, minor and certificate programs like African American Studies, Anti-Black Racism and Black Women’s Studies.
From an introduction to the department’s field of study, to how the field interacts with film, politics, poverty and more, students are able to delve into learning about those descended from Africa.
The department is also full of educators teaching and researching topics from health, to childhood development, African and Black immigrants and education.
Here is a look into some of the professors leading the department.
Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer Ashley Newby
Ashley Newby didn’t know she could study Black people and their culture for a career until she took a class her freshman year at Michigan State University and was assigned the autobiography of Malcolm X.
The budding scholar then participated in the McNair Scholars Program for two summers, where she delved into Black language.
“I was really interested in the reason and the way that language was used in schools to track students and to determine a label or a level of intelligence,” Newby said.
This interest led her to another experience as a research assistant for a semester to further look into the topic.
Now she teaches students about racial health disparities and Black culture in the United States. The lecturer doesn’t just have interests in those fields, however. Newby completed her dissertation on a hip-hop program for children, looking into how different literacies can be acknowledged in the classroom.
Especially during today’s political environment that is often hostile to the study of under-represented populations, Black studies are crucial, she said.
“It’s really important for students to be able to acknowledge and think critically about the things that are happening, the laws and policies that are being put into place, even when the rhetoric and the language around them appears to be race-neutral,” Newby said. “Black Studies helps you see that. It provides you with the lenses and the frameworks to think more critically about what you’re being told.”
Associate Professor Angel Dunbar
Angel Dunbar was inspired to study the development of Black children when she noticed her graduate program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro wasn’t teaching enough on the topic.
Now she’s researching attachment theory in Black children as an associate professor at this university.
“One of my areas is really thinking about how attachment and the things that predict attachment may look different for people of color, specifically for Black people,” Dunbar said.
The field of studying attachment theory is predominantly white, she said.
The associate professor, who currently teaches classes about methods and Black culture and history, said it’s important for all students to take classes in the field of African American/Africana studies.
“We live in a society that is inherently racist, and that’s all societies,” Dunbar said. “So, taking these courses allows you to learn just the foundation of where that comes from, the history of it.”
Assistant Professor Beka Guluma
Beka Guluma’s family immigrated to the United States from Ethiopia before his first birthday. He recounted to The Black Explosion that the Michigan town in which he grew up was not particularly diverse in terms of Black people. When Guluma went to college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that changed.
“I wasn’t prompted too much to think about my Blackness and, in particular, my immigrant Blackness [where I grew up], but it was once I got to college and was in spaces where it was more Black-centric, where I started to think about Blackness more,” Guluma said.
It was an awakening for Guluma, he said, and it fired up his interest in researching the differences between Black immigrants and Black people who’ve lived in the United States for generations.
His dissertation looked into Oromo immigrants from Ethiopia, who moved to the United States, and their perceptions of a common Black identity. Now the assistant professor is teaching an introductory course to the department’s field as well as a course on Black immigrants. A course on politics and sports is potentially in the works for the spring semester, he said.
Like Dunbar, Guluma said it’s important to learn about the past, especially in relation to Black history.
“It is really hard to build a better future when you’re ignorant about your past,” Guluma said. “I think it is a great shame that we are a less historically, sociologically and civically literate society.”
Associate Professor Chinyere Osuji
Chinyere Osuji was surprised when she discovered that Black people lived in Central and South America during her time as a student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
That realization led her to study Blackness in Brazil, specifically interracial marriages. Her research looked into how couples see each other and how society sees them.
Even in Brazil, people still had problems with mixed couples, disputing the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy, she said.
Now at the university, she’s currently teaching students about public policy and its effects in the Black community, as well as the role of race in the Korean wave (the increasing global popularity of Korean culture), which she is currently writing a book on.
Osuji is also writing a book on African immigrant nurses in the United States and how they learn about how this country views race.
The department’s field is important to learn about because, to understand the United States, you need to understand Black studies, she said, for both immigrants and those born here.
“I think it’s really helpful for people to understand the world that they’re migrating to, or that they’re growing up in, because anti-Blackness is so central to so many of our social institutions, [it’s] embedded in our educational system, in our healthcare system, in our tax system, in our criminal justice system.”
The issue is structural, she said, and that’s important to understand. Learning about Black studies is even important to understanding the wider world, with things like warfare, a country’s wealth or poverty and more.
Students interested in taking classes in the department next semester can look forward to classes about activist Angela Davis, the movie “Get Out” and how mass incarceration relates to Jim Crow laws.