The Equity Report #6: The Liberation of Black Studies: A Quest for Identity in Africana Studies
This Equity Report examines the intellectual and institutional evolution from Black Studies to Africana Studies, tracing the field’s expansion from a U.S.-centered academic intervention to a diasporic framework of global analysis. Building on the insurgent origins of Black Studies in the late 1960s, the essay explores how scholars confronted the limitations of national boundaries in understanding Black identity and racial capitalism. Drawing from Pan-African thought, diaspora theory, Afrocentric scholarship, and Black feminist critique, the report analyzes how Africana Studies emerged as a broader epistemological project that situates African-descended peoples within transnational histories of colonialism, migration, resistance, and cultural production. The essay argues that this shift was not a departure from Black Studies but its theoretical maturation. Africana Studies functions as both archive and horizon, preserving the political accountability of its origins while expanding its analytical scale to examine global anti-Blackness and diasporic identity formation. Ultimately, the report positions Africana Studies as a living discipline that continues to redefine knowledge production, institutional responsibility, and the global contours of Black self-determination.
—Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.
The Equity Report #5: What is Black Studies?
Black Studies emerged as a corrective intervention within Western higher education, addressing the systematic exclusion of Black people as legitimate producers of knowledge. This essay traces the intellectual, political, and institutional foundations of Black Studies, situating its origins within long-standing Black intellectual traditions and the liberation struggles that culminated in its formal establishment during the late 1960s. Drawing on the work of foundational scholars including W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Nathan Hare, the essay examines how Black Studies developed as an interdisciplinary and explicitly political field accountable to Black communities rather than institutional norms of neutrality. Central attention is given to the role of Black feminists—such as Anna Julia Cooper, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and the Combahee River Collective—in expanding the field’s analytic frameworks through critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, and heteronormativity. The essay further analyzes the creation of Black Studies through student-led movements, particularly the 1968–1969 San Francisco State strike, highlighting how institutional recognition was achieved through collective resistance rather than administrative reform. Ultimately, the essay argues that Black Studies functions as both a discipline and a praxis, redefining knowledge production, challenging dominant epistemologies, and sustaining an ongoing commitment to justice, community accountability, and intellectual self-determination.
—Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.
The Equity Report #4: The 100th Anniversary of Black History Month: From Negro History Week to a Global Framework for Historical Justice
This equity report essay examines the 100-year evolution of Black History Month, tracing its origins from Negro History Week in 1926 to its contemporary global observance. Founded by Carter G. Woodson as a corrective to the systematic erasure of Black people from dominant historical narratives, Negro History Week functioned as a political and educational intervention rather than a symbolic celebration. The essay analyzes how the expansion to Black History Month in 1976 marked both increased institutional recognition and the risk of containment, wherein historical inclusion substitutes for structural transformation. Drawing on equity frameworks, the essay distinguishes between representation and redistribution, arguing that visibility without shifts in power, resources, and curricular authority reproduces historical inequities. It further situates Black History Month within a transnational context shaped by colonialism and racial capitalism, while addressing contemporary backlash against Ethnic Studies and historical truth. The essay concludes that the centennial of Black History Month underscores unfinished work, calling for an equity-centered approach that embeds Black history as foundational to education, policy, and cultural production rather than confined to a designated timeframe.
—Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.
The Equity Report #3: The Canon of Ethnicity, Race, Class & Nation Formation in the United States
This essay traces the intellectual architecture of Ethnic Studies through the intertwined analyses of race, class, gender, and nation. Beginning with Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States (2015), it situates race as a social construct shaped through historical struggle and institutional power, then expands outward to encompass the broader canon that defines Ethnic Studies as a field of liberation. Drawing on the decolonial consciousness of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the pedagogical radicalism of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and the intersectional analyses of Davis’s Women, Race & Class (1981) and Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983), the essay articulates Ethnic Studies as both a political movement and a knowledge system. It further integrates the cultural theories of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Moraga and Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981), Said’s Orientalism (1978), Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1996), and Takaki’s A Different Mirror (1993) to demonstrate how the field redefines representation, labor, and belonging across diasporas. Through a reflective synthesis, the essay asks what culture might become if not born in reaction to domination—arguing that Ethnic Studies, at its core, is a discipline of becoming, one that envisions liberation not as reaction but as creation.
— Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.
The Equity Report #2: Rest in Power, Assata Shakur
“I believe in living. I believe in the power of the people.” — Assata Shakur (1987)
This essay, Rest in Power, Assata Shakur, examines the political and intellectual legacy of Assata Shakur (1947–2025), whose life epitomized the convergence of scholarship, struggle, and sacrifice within Black liberation movements. Situating Shakur within the historical emergence of Black Studies, the essay traces her evolution from student activist at Howard University to member of the Black Liberation Army, emphasizing how her lived experience embodied the praxis of revolutionary knowledge. It interrogates the state repression that criminalized her activism, culminating in her 1977 conviction and 1979 prison escape—an act that redefined the parameters of resistance and exile. Shakur’s decades of asylum in Cuba are analyzed as both a political sanctuary and a site of transnational solidarity that linked African-diasporic and Third World liberation struggles. Through her seminal text Assata: An Autobiography (1987), she articulated a pedagogy of survival that continues to inform abolitionist education, feminist thought, and racial-justice movements. Her death in 2025 while still listed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists roster underscores the enduring fear of radical Black womanhood in the U.S. national imagination. Ultimately, the essay contends that Shakur’s life and legacy demand a redefinition of freedom—not as peace, but as perpetual vigilance, memory, and collective transformation.
— Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.
The Equity Report #1: How did Ethnic Studies come to be?
How did Ethnic Studies come to be? traces the historical emergence of Ethnic Studies as both an intellectual and political project rooted in the social upheavals of the late 1960s. It situates the field’s origins within the broader struggle for racial justice that followed the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, when the unfulfilled promises of legal equality gave rise to new forms of resistance and community self-determination. Drawing on key uprisings across U.S. cities—from Watts to Detroit—the essay argues that Ethnic Studies was born from the convergence of grassroots activism, educational inequity, and systemic neglect, culminating in the 1968–69 San Francisco State College Strike led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front. That 136-day strike, the longest in U.S. history, established the nation’s first and only independent College of Ethnic Studies, setting a precedent for similar movements at universities nationwide. By linking this history to contemporary frameworks of racial equity, community-based research, and culturally responsive grantmaking, the essay illuminates Ethnic Studies as a living architecture of equity—one that bridges activism, academia, and applied practice. Its enduring legacy demonstrates that the pursuit of justice within education and public institutions is not a single event but a continuous, evolving process grounded in collective struggle and cultural knowledge.
— Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.