CHICAGO — Shawn Alexander can recognize the look immediately. It's one of surprise when a student enters his African American studies class and finds, standing at the front, a white guy.
"Years ago, it happened more," said Alexander, 38, who teaches at the University of Kansas. "I'd see the kids walk into my room, look down at their registration cards and up at me, and then walk out to make sure they had the right classroom."
Around the country this year, college campuses are celebrating the 40th anniversary of African American studies programs. Although blacks make up the majority of the faculty, white scholars increasingly are making their mark.
It may be the ultimate in inclusion, as well as irony, in a discipline that emerged out of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s to challenge the white status quo.
White scholars have pursued doctorates in African American history in relatively large numbers. But whites with doctorates in black studies -- as well as those who teach in the field -- remain fairly rare.
Martha Biondi, an associate professor of African American studies and history at Northwestern University, said she thought her racially mixed group of students placed far more stock in her passion for her craft than in the fact that she's white.
"There probably are students who wouldn't enroll in a black studies course with a white professor," said Biondi, 44, whose doctorate is in African American history. "But it's my view that students are incredibly open-minded. They may at first say, 'I wonder if this person is qualified,' but students want a teacher who performs well, and, at the end of the day, that's how they'll judge you."
Biondi was raised in a predominantly white town in Connecticut. She remembers being against President Nixon when she was in the third grade, watching black news affairs programs on television and reading her baby-sitter's copies of "The Nation." As a teen, she aspired to become a civil rights lawyer.
"Early on, I found the 1960s movements to be very vibrant, particularly the ideas of democracy and equality and freedom," Biondi said.
African American studies programs emerged as more black students arrived on college campuses in the 1960s and encountered racism. They believed universities could help by adding more black professors along with courses that reflected their experiences and sensibilities.
The first program began in 1969 at San Francisco State.
