The Dismantling of Black Studies

"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. For students and scholars of Black studies across the country, the process of collective speaking began in earnest on March 5."

"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."

Black studies in the United States is being targeted through deliberate structural actions that narrow the pipeline for future Black scholars. University leaders have dismantled departments and reduced pathways into the field, creating a chilling effect across academia. The impact is not evenly distributed, with Black studies facing the most deliberate and revealing assault. Examples include folding African and African Diaspora Studies into a broader unit, removing general-education status for Black-studies courses and cutting research funding, and suspending Pan-African Studies doctoral programs while eliminating graduate assistantships. Collective speaking and national forums have brought students and scholars together to diagnose what is at stake and respond with shared clarity rather than despair.

Read at The Nation