Many Departments of African American Studies, for example, remain split between faculty members who defend a philosophically liberal vision for the United States, like Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., and those who prefer a more identitarian vision, like Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi. But despite these important areas of difference, the dominant set of views in these disciplines did come to cohere in key ways. In all of them, the prevalent paradigm was deeply shaped by the triple influence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory.
