The Equity Report #5: What is Black Studies?

Black Studies is an intellectual field created to correct a foundational failure of Western education: the systematic exclusion of Black people as legitimate producers of knowledge. It did not arise organically from disciplinary curiosity or institutional foresight. It was constructed deliberately, through political struggle, intellectual intervention, and community demand, as a response to universities that treated Black life as peripheral, pathological, or invisible. Black Studies exists because Black scholars, students, and activists recognized that existing academic disciplines could not adequately explain Black history, culture, or social conditions without reproducing the very hierarchies they claimed to analyze.

The intellectual roots of Black Studies predate its formal institutionalization by centuries. Enslaved Africans preserved history and theory through oral traditions, spiritual systems, and resistance practices. In the nineteenth century, Black abolitionists produced political philosophy, economic critique, and historical analysis outside formal academic spaces. By the early twentieth century, scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois articulated what would become a cornerstone of Black Studies methodology: that Black experience reveals the contradictions of democracy, capitalism, and citizenship with particular clarity (Du Bois, 1903). Du Bois rejected the idea that objectivity required distance from oppression, instead asserting that lived experience produced analytical insight. This epistemological claim would later define the field.

Carter G. Woodson further laid the groundwork by exposing how historical omission functioned as a form of racial control. Woodson argued that miseducation was not accidental but structural, designed to sustain racial hierarchy by erasing Black contributions and intellectual traditions (Woodson, 1933). His establishment of Negro History Week was not merely commemorative; it was a direct challenge to academic gatekeeping. Together, Du Bois and Woodson established two foundational principles of Black Studies: that Black history must be written by those accountable to Black communities, and that education is inseparable from power.

Mid-twentieth-century global liberation movements sharpened these ideas. Anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon demonstrated that domination operated not only through economics and law but through culture, psychology, and knowledge production itself (Fanon, 1963). Fanon’s work deeply influenced Black intellectuals in the United States, particularly those engaged in Black Power organizing, who increasingly viewed universities as sites of ideological reproduction rather than neutral spaces of inquiry.

The formal creation of Black Studies occurred during the late 1960s, when Black students and community members directly confronted universities over their complicity in racial inequality. At San Francisco State College, the Black Student Union, in coalition with the Third World Liberation Front, led a 136-day strike beginning in November 1968 that demanded institutional recognition of Black knowledge, open admissions, and community control over curriculum (Biondi, 2012). The strike resulted in the establishment of the nation’s first College of Ethnic Studies in 1969, including the first autonomous Black Studies department.

One of the earliest architects of the field was Nathan Hare, who became the first chair of Black Studies at San Francisco State. Hare articulated Black Studies as an explicitly political project, rejecting assimilation into traditional academic norms and insisting that the discipline remain accountable to Black communities rather than institutional prestige (Rojas, 2007). He argued that Black Studies was not an extension of sociology or history but a corrective to disciplines built on exclusion.

As Black Studies spread across the country, it took root through student-led campaigns at institutions such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and the City College of New York (Rojas, 2007). Despite regional differences, these programs shared core commitments: interdisciplinarity, community engagement, and the refusal of neutrality. Black Studies rejected the premise that knowledge could be separated from social conditions, instead positioning scholarship as a tool for liberation.

From its inception, Black feminists fundamentally shaped Black Studies, though their contributions were often marginalized within both academia and male-dominated Black nationalist spaces. Scholars such as Anna Julia Cooper had already articulated an intersectional analysis in the nineteenth century, arguing that Black women’s experiences revealed the interlocking nature of race, gender, and class oppression (Cooper, 1892). Her work prefigured later feminist critiques within the field.

During the institutional formation of Black Studies, Black feminists expanded its analytical scope and challenged its internal limitations. Audre Lorde exposed how ignoring gender and sexuality reproduced systems of domination even within liberation movements (Lorde, 1984). Angela Davis bridged Black Studies, Marxist analysis, and feminist theory, insisting that race, class, gender, and incarceration could not be studied in isolation (Davis, 1981). bell hooks further challenged the academy by naming education itself as a site of domination and possibility, arguing that Black Studies must remain pedagogically radical to avoid institutional cooptation (hooks, 1994).

The Combahee River Collective crystallized Black feminist intervention into Black Studies by articulating the concept of interlocking oppressions, a framework that would later influence intersectionality theory (Combahee River Collective, 1977). Black feminists insisted that Black Studies could not claim liberation while reproducing patriarchy, heteronormativity, or class exclusion. Their work expanded the field’s methodological rigor and ethical accountability.

Today, Black Studies functions as both a discipline and a praxis. It analyzes slavery, colonialism, capitalism, policing, health inequities, environmental racism, and digital surveillance while remaining grounded in community knowledge and political struggle. The field’s persistent marginalization within universities reflects its ongoing refusal to depoliticize its origins or dilute its critique. Unlike traditional disciplines, Black Studies measures its success not solely by publication metrics but by its relevance to Black life.

Ultimately, Black Studies is not an additive project. It does not seek inclusion within existing structures without transformation. It redefines what counts as knowledge, who produces it, and to whom it is accountable. Created through struggle, shaped by Black feminist intervention, and sustained through community engagement, Black Studies remains a living framework for understanding power and imagining liberation. Its existence stands as a reminder that education is never neutral and that justice requires intellectual honesty as much as political will.

References 

Biondi, M. (2012). The Black Revolution on Campus. University of California Press.

Combahee River Collective. (1977). The Combahee River Collective statement.

Cooper, A. J. (1892). A Voice from the South. Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House.

Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, Race, & Class. Random House.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. A. C. McClurg & Co.

Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Routledge.

Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.

Rojas, F. (2007). From Black Power to Black Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Woodson, C. G. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro. Associated Publishers.