Scholarship
and intellectual communities are only viable
if they are dynamic and contested spaces for
critical thinking and debate. Black studies
began in heated struggle. Here in Chicago,
Malcolm X College was founded with a Black
studies curriculum, and protests at Evanston’s
Northwestern University followed suit. At the
University of Illinois Chicago, then called
Circle Campus, theater and speech professor
Grace Holt became the founding director of
Black studies in 1974. Hundreds of departments
now exist around the country, and the field
has had a powerful impact on higher education.
Today,
Black studies is under assault. Unfounded
criticisms of Black studies and theories and
paradigms emerging from it, like
intersectionality and critical race theory,
have made headlines. For example, Florida’s
governor, Ron DeSantis, with no background or
content expertise in these subjects, famously
and scurrilously targeted so-called “woke”
scholarship and teaching, threatening to ban
academic literature in his state that did not
meet his criteria for legitimacy.
A
number of states have followed suit, imposing
restrictions on the teaching of various
aspects of Black studies curricula. Organized
resistance to DeSantis’ attacks culminated in
a “National Day of Action for the Freedom To
Learn” on May 3, led by prominent Black
studies professors.
As
an interdisciplinary field, it began in 1968
at San Francisco State University, with
rumblings at other schools around the country
resulting in similar programs soon after.
During the tumultuous social movements of that
era, students demanded inclusion, correctives
to racist and exclusionary narratives and
syllabi, and a rethinking of how Black people
had been distorted and/or erased from larger
histories and canons.
Why
Black studies? Any serious student of U.S.
history knows our country’s long and violent
history when it comes to race. Slavery, Jim
Crow segregation, political disenfranchisement
are all hallmarks of our racial past. Mass
incarceration, unequal access to healthcare,
housing and education, the racial wealth gap
and racial profiling are all continued
evidence of persistent racism. Higher
education is a part of that history. For most
of this nation’s history, Black scholars and
students were either excluded, openly
discriminated against or tokenized. The Black
freedom movement of the 1950s and ’60s forced
open the doors of public education and higher
education for Black scholars and students. And
so, with them came the demand for more
inclusive curricula and research
opportunities. This was the impetus for Black
studies.
Black
studies as a field did more than meet the
demands of Black faculty and students. The
creation of Black studies was an impactful
intervention in the writing and teaching of
American history, culture and politics in
general. The New York Times' highly touted
“1619 Project” created a stir because it
challenged the dominant and sugar-coated
narrative of the U.S. past.
As
Northwestern University historian Martha
Biondi points out in her book, “The Black
Revolution on Campus,” the establishment of
Black studies challenged universities to
critically rethink fundamental questions,
insisting “that public universities should
reflect and serve the people of their
communities, that private universities should
rethink the mission of elite education, and
that historically Black colleges should
survive the era of integration.” All of those
goals have certainly not been fully achieved,
but Black studies’ initiatives have changed
the way we think of new knowledge production,
meritocracy, pedagogy, university governance
and even epistemology (our theories of
knowledge).
Black
studies as a field has done a lot of
intellectual heavy lifting in the past 50-plus
years, producing award-winning scholarship, a
generation of critical thinking students and
models of institutional change. Still, there
is so much more ground-breaking work to do
over the next 50 years.
This
commentary is also posted on ChicagoBusiness.com.
