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.
