The Dismantling of Black Studies

Jafari Sinclaire Allen, The Nation

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 speak
remembering
we 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.

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