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The Dismantling of Black Studies

Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.

Everyone I know in the US academy—students, staff, faculty, university publishers, and cultural-institution workers—is afraid. But the recent assault on higher education is not evenly distributed. Black studies is where the attack has been the most deliberate, the most structural, and the most revealing of what is at stake. In recent months, university leaders have dismantled departments and deliberately narrowed the pipeline producing the next generation of Black scholars. What is happening is not just a series of isolated bureaucratic decisions; it is a coordinated assault.

The overall chilling effect on academia of these moves, and what they reveal about the erosion of democracy and freedom of thought in the United States, can be enervating, but I have turned to an admonition from Audre Lorde, in a poem that was itself an act of self-preservation:

it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive

it is better to speakrememberingwe were never meant to survive

For students and scholars of Black studies across the country, the process of collective speaking began in earnest on March 5, when Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, which I lead, hosted a virtual event titled “What We Stand to Lose: A National Forum on Black Studies Under Fire.” I counted 780 people in the webinar at the height of the discussion. The cases presented were specific and damning: The University of Texas at Austin had folded its renowned Department of African and African Diaspora Studies into a generic Social and Cultural Analysis Studies unit; Florida’s Senate Bill 266 had stripped Black-studies courses of their general-education status and cut the research funding that faculty depend on; Kentucky’s House Bill 4 had suspended the University of Louisville’s Pan-African Studies doctoral program and eliminated all graduate assistantships. What emerged from that evening was not despair but a shared and pointed diagnosis: that these were not isolated local crises but nodes in a coordinated sequence—first rhetorical, then legal, then administrative—and the field’s most urgent challenge is not only the government’s relentless crackdown on higher education but also the preemptive measures that institutions are taking to comply with anticipated attacks. Given its scale, this assault is not ours alone to fight: Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.

The attacks on Black studies are not only connected to the tectonic rightward shifts we are experiencing in every terrain of public life in the United States, but fundamental to them. It is at the nexus of a project funded by a network of conservative foundations that aims to reverse generations of hard-won progress. The government has waged this war on behalf of those interests to restore an order in which certain kinds of knowledge, certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of life are returned to the margins—where, in this worldview, they belong. What is happening is the product of a sequence that is familiar to students of American history.

Following the rapid progress that took place during the Reconstruction era, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled the legal architecture of Black citizenship, and the country settled back into an arrangement that white citizens apparently found more comfortable. This reneging on the promise of Reconstruction happened in a short period—after the Civil War amendments had been ratified, after Black men had served in Congress and held office across the South, and after the Freedmen’s Bureau had built more than a thousand schools in a decade. Everything that had been won was reversed—not in spite of the law but through it. We are watching that sequence again. What is being unmade this time is not only the right to vote or the right to citizenship—both of which are being whittled away—but also the right to know, the right to make knowledge, and the right to tell the truth.

Black studies is not merely a container for scholarship. It is the set of practices and habits of mind developed over the long intellectual tradition that began before Black people were permitted to attend any educational institution in the United States. Learning to read was itself an act of resistance, routinely punished with violence and sometimes death. South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740, or “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province,” made it a criminal offense to teach enslaved people to write, among the other ways it redefined the enslaved as chattel. Every state in the Deep South followed suit. These new laws targeted writing because writing is the technology of legal personhood—contracts, passes, manumission papers, and official testimony. The logic was clear: Writing is a tool with which to make claims of personhood and belonging.

The long Black intellectual tradition did not wait for institutional permission. It built itself in churches and newspapers; in art, music, and literature; in the margins of Qurans and Bibles; and in the holds of ships. When it finally won its way into the academy, it built itself again. While the standard account of how Black studies came to exist in the American university is accurate and should not be minimized—strikes at San Francisco State in 1968 and a campus takeover at Cornell in 1969, campus shutdowns, and occupations that spread across the country—that account does not always acknowledge what happened after students’ demands were partially met, or how those demands were channeled into particular institutional forms, or who underwrote those forms. As Noliwe Rooks argues in White Money/Black Power, the philanthropic funding of Black studies did not simply help expand the field—it shaped it in specific ways. Grants from the Ford Foundation during the field’s early years favored supplementing the........

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