When I was 18, my first encounter with Black studies was W. E. B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” which he describes as Black people’s sense of “always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.” I felt something click. My whole life I had been seeing myself through my own eyes and the eyes of a dominant white order, chafing in the friction of these visions: the English I spoke at school and the Chinese I spoke at home; how white people were “normal” but I was supposed to be a math whiz and have tiger parents; how everyone knew of the Great Famine in Ireland but no one knew of the Great Famine in China, which almost killed my grandparents. I began to examine the white order I live in and asked why it is this way. I felt I was allowed to know what I knew about myself.
Black studies has given me the language and love to try to understand my Chinese family’s marginalization and my own — and to explain how they are connected to systemic violence against Black people. Black studies has helped me understand that loving political work starts at home, within the specifics of our relationships. It’s not just being nice to one another and not saying racist things; it is trying to carefully bring one another into more real knowledge of the world, and helping create the ability to change it.
In the past few months, conservatives have attacked Black studies, the newest front in their war on teaching critical thinking in schools. Since the racial reckonings in 2020 generated new interest in an AP African American studies course, the College Board has been developing a course and piloting it in 60 schools during the 2022-23 school year. On February 1, the College Board released a new version of the course that, unlike the pilot, does not require the teaching of Black feminism, structural racism, and intersectionality, which prompted a national outcry from scholars and students.
The new “official framework” was released after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rejected the originally proposed course, criticizing it as “woke indoctrination” that “lacks educational value.” On April 24, the College Board announced it will revise the course again in the coming months. College Board officials have said they weren’t responding to DeSantis and justified the absence of theory-heavy secondary sources by saying it is prioritizing primary sources about Black people’s experiences.
In doing so, the group is mirroring liberal media narratives that argue the importance of Black studies is how it teaches the experiences of Black people and their contributions to society — elements that have been missing from traditional curricula. The College Board frames it as building cultural understanding, as non-Black students should also know about important Black figures and cultural practices.
But some scholars have long argued that Black studies goes beyond facts or content about Black people to include critiquing the power structures that govern our everyday lives. Black studies isn’t just about teaching Black students about themselves; it comprises the inherently political project of knowing yourself and the world around you.
Black intellectual Cedric Robinson said that Black studies is a radical “critique of Western civilization,” something everyone who is a part of Western civilization should engage with in order to know and participate in their world. And it’s not for Black people only. Others can benefit from this project, too, whether that means white people or me and my Chinese immigrant parents.
When the College Board reduces Black studies to facts and figures, it removes its orientation toward improving our world, toward caring for one another. Black poet and scholar June Jordan calls Black studies “life studies.”
In my first ethnic studies class, we learned that race isn’t an inherent biological reality, but a social formation with political purposes. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant wrote that Africans whose specific identity was Igbo, Yoruba, or Fulani in Africa were grouped under the umbrella term “Black” when they were enslaved in America. “Black” was created as a racial category that meant being less than human, justifying their treatment as such.
James Baldwin wrote that when Europeans whose specific identity was, say, Norwegian, Dutch, or French moved to America, they became “white” against the friction of “Black” through a process of “denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation.” Race has been a process of creating difference, loading it with political meaning, and entrenching it in material reality.
Oh, okay, I thought to myself: In my own hometown, for instance, there are longstanding reasons why East Austin is the Blacker and poorer part of town, and why most of the people I encounter who are experiencing homelessness are Black.
I then learned to trace the formation of “Asian American” in an anti-Black world. There are reasons I often felt so uncomfortable in grades K-12. The “model minority myth” upholds a core belief in white society: Hard work alone makes success. It keeps me and my peers fighting to be included in a white order that disparages us as foreign and keeps us at arm’s length, away from any power. It is also used to divert attention from the structural reasons for, say, Black poverty, blaming it on the “laziness” of Black people.
Black memoirists such as Harriet Jacobs and Jacqueline Woodson have taught me how to understand my own life through my ancestors and communities, rather than narrating my life as a collection of individual accomplishments. I’m not alone in trying to work hard and make my parents’ immigration worth it. Instead, I’m in interdependent relationships with my piano teacher, my little brother, the woman who cleans my dorm’s bathrooms, the tree in front of my house, and my aunts in Hunan, China. It’s not that they’ve propelled me to individual success (at the expense of others), but my new conception of “success” involves freedom and development for all of us.
Ntozake Shange's theater piece for colored girls and Audre Lorde's essay "The Uses of the Erotic" have taught me to think about embodied knowledge. How do I respect and love my body from the core of my deepest feelings when I go to bed, walk to class, dance at a frat, and make post-grad decisions? What does it mean to do so against a white patriarchal system that taught me to trust my brain and not my gut — and has viewed my body as an exotic, anonymous thing rather than a deep personal resource?
Ella Baker’s civil rights organizing model has taught me to root my political work in love and faith. She believed that every person has the capacity for and the right to development, and her organizing was based on “having people understand their position and understand their potential power and how to use it.”
After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, my mom and I were eating lunch at our round kitchen table, where she complained about the riots, saying that Black people who live in poor neighborhoods are responsible for improving their own conditions. I asked her questions, which turned into hourslong conversations. I learned more about her perspective as a Chinese immigrant who believes in hard work, and she learned more about the analyses of structural racism I’ve been studying, motivated by a desire to find coherency as an Asian American raised in a white world. In addition to any of my activism on the streets or online, this felt like real political work.
These lessons aren’t just for ethnic studies majors in college. There’s a long legacy of elders, children, low-wage workers, and unemployed people coming together to engage in Black studies, including the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964 and the Black women’s liberation group of Mount Vernon, New York. School is one site of study and relationship-building that equips me for others: A friend and I have an ongoing book club on faith, love, and freedom; there are poetry gatherings with friends, modeled off of June Jordan’s, where we journal, write, and share; I bring ideas from my formal studies to share with my mom, pushing us to articulate the roots of our oppression.
The aim of Black studies is a free world. As Baldwin, Paulo Freire, and countless others have argued, the foundation of this work is love. The Black studies scholar Robin D.G. Kelley keeps a slip of paper above his desk that reads “Love, Study, Struggle,” reminding him of the daily work of bringing about that world. “If we are committed to genuine freedom, we have no choice but to love all,” he wrote. “To love all is to fight relentlessly to end exploitation and oppression everywhere, even on behalf of those who think they hate us.”
The insights and orientations of Black studies can’t be limited to any one AP African American studies class. Around the country, anti-racist teachers in all subjects are revamping curricula and pedagogy to avoid teaching ideas that uphold white supremacy, and to equip students with the critical thinking skills to hold dominant and counternarratives against each other’s light.
In Connecticut, where I now attend college, Nataliya Braginsky’s African and Latinx studies class has researched the significance of local sites in Black and Latinx history — including a park where Frederick Douglass spoke to Black soldiers preparing for the Civil War — and created a virtual walking tour to help students connect their surroundings with histories of fighting for justice. Through the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective, an organization I work with, teachers in Connecticut are thinking through how to teach ballet in a way that affirms all bodies, not just thin white ones; jazz in a way that highlights the political implications of improvisation in addition to developing technique; agriculture in a way that respects plants as beings and not just as objects of human consumption.
In Texas, Luke Amphlett cofounded PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources), the social justice caucus of the San Antonio teachers’ union. He begins his AP US History course by peeling back a painting of Thomas Jefferson to reveal Sally Hemings, whom Jefferson enslaved and who bore six children he fathered — and discusses with his students why it is that they know of Jefferson but not Hemings.
Black studies has given me — and countless other Asian Americans, people of color, and white people — the ability to inhabit ourselves, understand this world, and to imagine and make new worlds. Rather than “indoctrinating” me, Black studies has done the exact opposite by helping me to think and love as a real person with real agency. Supporting not just AP African American studies, but also anti-racist teachings across disciplines is foundational to love, study, and struggle.
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