Aren’t the center and its services primarily for African Americans?
No. While the center focuses on African/African American heritage, history, and culture, it is open to all members of the IUP and local community and assists both minority and majority students. Furthermore, African/African American cultural centers, like African American studies, are essentially humanizing, multidimensional, and multidisciplinary entities that “focus upon Black thought and behavior in their multidimensionality” (Okafor, 1996, p. 698). Being inclusive only to blacks is, therefore, counterproductive and incongruent with the underlying reasoning for the existence of African American studies, i.e., the predecessor to African/African American cultural centers.
