For many college students, an introductory survey course may be their only exposure to a discipline — and in many courses, a textbook may serve as the guide. With that in mind, a committee of political scientists set out to see how how black people are portrayed in the introductory textbooks used in their discipline — and the results left them concerned.

The textbooks reviewed do feature discussion of black people and issues that affected them, but the most in-depth coverage is typically in a chapter on the civil rights movement, or sometimes civil liberties generally, found a study by the American Political Science Association’s Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession. The study appears in the new issue of PS: Political Science & Politics.