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 #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 #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.