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THE DISMANTLING OF BLACK STUDIES  
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Jafari Sinclaire Allen
May 12, 2026
The Nation
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_ Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule
of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act. _


, Illustration by Brian Stauffer

 

Everyone I know in the US academy—students, staff, faculty,
university publishers, and cultural-institution workers—is afraid.
But the recent assault
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on higher education is not evenly distributed. Black studies is where
the attack
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has been the most deliberate, the most structural, and the most
revealing of what is at stake. In recent months, university leaders
have dismantled departments and deliberately narrowed the pipeline
producing the next generation of Black scholars. What is happening is
not just a series of isolated bureaucratic decisions; it is a
coordinated assault.

The overall chilling effect on academia of these moves, and what they
reveal about the erosion of democracy and freedom of thought in the
United States, can be enervating, but I have turned to an admonition
from Audre Lorde, in a poem
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that was itself an act of self-preservation:

_it is better to speak__remembering__we were never meant to survive_

For students and scholars of Black studies across the country, the
process of collective speaking began in earnest on March 5, when
Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American
Studies, which I lead, hosted a virtual event titled “What We Stand
to Lose: A National Forum on Black Studies Under Fire.” I counted
780 people in the webinar at the height of the discussion. The cases
presented were specific and damning: The University of Texas at Austin
had folded
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its renowned Department of African and African Diaspora Studies into a
generic Social and Cultural Analysis Studies unit; Florida’s Senate
Bill 266
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had stripped Black-studies courses of their general-education status
and cut the research funding that faculty depend on; Kentucky’s
House Bill 4 [[link removed]]
had suspended
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the University of Louisville’s Pan-African Studies doctoral program
and eliminated all graduate assistantships. What emerged from that
evening was not despair but a shared and pointed diagnosis: that these
were not isolated local crises but nodes in a coordinated
sequence—first rhetorical, then legal, then administrative—and the
field’s most urgent challenge is not only the government’s
relentless crackdown on higher education but also the preemptive
measures that institutions are taking to comply with anticipated
attacks. Given its scale, this assault is not ours alone to fight:
Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of
law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.

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.

A LONG TRADITION: Black scholarsip at, clockwise from top left,
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania; Prairie A&M University in Texas;
Hampton Univeristy in Virginia; and Claflin University in South
Carolina._(Clockwise from top left: Lincoln University via Getty
Images; Prairie View A&M University / Getty Images; Buyenlarge / Getty
Images; Cecil Williams / Claflin University / Getty Images)_

ollowing 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
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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.

The long Black intellectual tradition did not wait for institutional
permission. It built itself in churches and newspapers; in art, music,
and literature; in the margins of Qurans and Bibles; and in the holds
of ships. When it finally won its way into the academy, it built
itself again. While the standard account of how Black studies came to
exist in the American university is accurate and should not be
minimized—strikes at San Francisco State
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1968 and a campus takeover at Cornell
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campus shutdowns, and occupations that spread across the
country—that account does not always acknowledge what happened after
students’ demands were partially met, or how those demands were
channeled into particular institutional forms, or who underwrote those
forms. As Noliwe Rooks argues in _White Money/Black Power_
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philanthropic funding of Black studies did not simply help expand the
field—it shaped it in specific ways. Grants from the Ford Foundation
during the field’s early years favored supplementing the existing
curricula at predominantly white institutions over the autonomous,
self-governing departments that Black student activists had demanded,
producing a field that has been dependent on administrative goodwill
from its inception. The American-studies scholar Roderick Ferguson
extends this analysis: The university’s incorporation of Black
studies was an exercise of power, calibrated to absorb the field’s
critical force precisely by appearing to welcome it.

Black studies, strengthened by the diversity within the field, has
revised, expanded, and corrected history and transformed academic
disciplines and the terms of popular debate. It has provided
generations of students of every racial and ethnic background with the
tools to participate productively in a multiracial democracy. This
success is precisely why it is under attack. But there is a second
reason, inseparable from the first: At the very moment Black studies
became impossible to ignore, its opponents decided they could no
longer tolerate it. Visibility and vulnerability arrived together.

My colleague Farah Jasmine Griffin captured what this moment of
“Blacklash” revealed. “Movements are long in the making,” she
wrote. “Activists, organizers, artists, and thinkers invest time, do
the work, preparing, imagining new possibilities, and identifying the
way. Finally, an ember ignited by a myriad of factors takes flame and
becomes incandescent.” This is precisely what Black studies has been
for more than 50 years—the long preparation, the imagining of new
possibilities, the identifying of the way. After George Floyd was
murdered by police on May 25, 2020, and protests erupted in all 50
states and more than 60 countries, that preparation became visible on
a scale its opponents could not ignore. In June 2020, all of the
top-10 nonfiction titles on the _New York Times_ bestseller list were
by Black authors or about race, a milestone in the world of
publishing. The prevalence of PhDs and faculty members on the
bestseller lists was a unique feature of the era. Strands of the long
Black intellectual tradition became visible, legible, and highly
marketable in unprecedented numbers, even as the backlash was being
organized. The same summer that saw a record-breaking surge in sales
of anti-racist books and protests for systemic reform also saw a rapid
legislative and judicial reaction. The incandescence that cleared
ground for transformation became another sort of beacon for those who
feared transformation: a call to arms.

Christopher Rufo’s campaign to pervert and weaponize the term
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_critical race theory_—a campaign triggered by the College Board’s
proposed Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum—bore
direct legislative fruit. By 2022, more than 40 states had introduced
bills restricting the teaching of “divisive concepts”—a phrase
lifted from the vocabulary of the first Trump administration.
Texas’s House Bill 3979
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Kentucky’s House Bill 4
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and Florida’s Stop WOKE Act
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and Senate Bill 266 were among the most sweeping. The laws were
immediately contested in federal court—Andrea Queeley, one of the
scholars who spoke at the March 5 Black-studies forum, is a plaintiff
in the ongoing federal lawsuit against Florida’s SB 266—but the
litigation did not halt their effect, especially after the hard right
secured a series of crucial wins.

In the culmination of a generations-long legal battle, in June 2023,
the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions
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in _Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard_. The logic that had long
treated Black studies as a demographic concession, a diversity
mechanism, and a recruitment tool—rather than as a scholarly
discipline with its own intellectual authority and reason for
being—now had a legal warrant. This conflation with affirmation
action and DEI made Black studies acutely vulnerable to whatever fate
might befall affirmative action itself. Simply put, the terms of entry
contained the terms of eviction.

After Trump’s second inauguration, his administration wasted no time
in launching probes into institutions of higher education. His
executive orders targeting diversity initiatives bear Orwellian titles
like “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based
Opportunity,” which invoke the language of civil rights to dismantle
civil-rights infrastructure, and directed civil-rights divisions to
investigate and penalize the very programs designed to make
civil-rights law meaningful.

In March 2025, the Department of Education opened civil-rights
investigations
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against 45 universities for their participation in the PhD Project
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helped more than 1,700 Black, Indigenous, and Latino students earn
doctoral degrees. Thirty-one of those universities, including Yale,
Duke, MIT, Ohio State, and Michigan, have since signed agreements
cutting ties with the organization. Education Secretary Linda McMahon
called this “the Trump effect in action.”

REARGUARD ACTION: Students at Harvard protested in 2018 in response to
a lawsuit attacking affirmative action._(Adam Glanzman / Bloomberg /
Getty Images)_

Iunderstand the situation not only from my vantage as the director of
Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies and a
professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, but also
as a student. In the late 1990s, I returned to college after a long
stint away. I was a work-study student in the Africana Studies program
at New York University, which comprised a beautiful suite of offices,
a seminar room, and a library filled with African art. Writers,
musicians, artists, filmmakers, and actors regularly dropped by for
what felt like an ongoing extracurricular graduate seminar. Across the
hall was the Asian/Pacific/American Studies program, which had its own
resources and intellectual agenda. The connections that
formed—scholars thinking together about diaspora, colonialism, and
belonging—were possible because each program could show up as
itself. We were intellectual neighbors not because an administrator
had decided that all the subalterns should be housed together to feed
at the same shallow resource trough, but because each formation had
been built into something that could stand on its own.

In 2005, NYU quietly folded its Africana Studies program into a broad
administrative umbrella called the Department of Social and Cultural
Analysis, without meaningful consultation with the faculty and
students who would be affected. One day there was a program and an
intellectually rich and generative space. The next day there was an
announcement and a reorganization. At the time, this move was called
“prudent.” We should have paid more attention.

Dissolving into “Social and Cultural Analysis” what took 50 years
to build was a ruthless redistribution—a wresting away—of earned
power. What remains of a distinct scholarly project is being subjected
to a process whose outcome has not merely already been determined but
has been decided off-campus, in what I can only imagine are dank,
smoke-filled bunkers at the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan
Institute, which coauthored the model anti-DEI legislation that Texas
enacted and then praised the Texas campaign—calling on the federal
government to defund universities that do not comply. Their work is
financed by the same groups that have spent decades building the legal
and legislative infrastructure now being deployed against public
universities.

 
On February 12, 2026, the news arrived the way bad news often does
now: colleagues pinging one another across time zones about the latest
development in what had become a litany of academic catastrophes that
had been mounting since _Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard_, but
which took on head-spinning velocity with Trump’s second
inauguration and the crackdowns by universities on students protesting
in solidarity with Gaza. The leaders of the Black-studies program at
UT Austin learned, in a 30-minute Zoom call, that the department would
be folded—along with American studies, Mexican American and Latina/o
studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies—into yet
another Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the blandly
efficient label that’s shaping up to be the preferred nomenclature.
More than 800 students are currently enrolled in the departments being
dismantled.

One week after UT Austin announced the consolidation, the
university’s governor-appointed regents voted unanimously to limit
what they called “unnecessary controversial subjects
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in the curriculum. This purposefully vague language is part and parcel
of the moves by the Trump administration to censor Smithsonian museum
exhibits and limit the “guilt” white people might feel when
confronting US history, for example. Undefined “controversy” as an
administrative criterion is a mandate to be afraid. And the mandate is
being issued everywhere at once.

On February 20, NYU canceled
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13 culture-, identity-, and faith-based graduation
celebrations—including for Black, Latine, LGBTQ+, and
first-generation students—citing “the current political climate”
without elaboration. NYU is not a public university in a red state; it
is a private research university in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
The false dichotomy of red state/blue state, public/private,
flagship/Ivy has become not only debilitating but dangerous. The
assault on the academy does not recognize those distinctions. Neither
should our resistance.

CONFRONTING HISTORY: High school students protested after the teaching
of critical race theory was banned in Southern California’s Temecula
Valley school district._(Watchara Phomicinda / The Press-Enterprise /
Getty Images)_

keep returning to an image that heather McGhee gives us in her book
_The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper
Together_
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the city of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959, filling its public swimming
pools with cement rather than allow Black children to swim in them.
And it wasn’t just the pools: The parks, the zoo, the community
center—all public spaces were shuttered for more than a decade.
McGhee documents this pattern throughout American public life: the
willingness to destroy the commons rather than share them. Pools
around the country were not drained because they were expensive or
dangerous or posed any harm. They were drained because white citizens
found Black presence in those pools intolerable. And as white children
sweltered in the heat—believing that something had been taken from
them that was rightfully theirs—their parents continued to insist
that the pools had been closed for everyone’s benefit.

Black studies is the pool. All over the country, you can hear cement
trucks rumbling down the streets.

The political theorist Juliet Hooker gives us the analytical frame
this moment requires. In _Black Grief/White Grievance_
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Hooker argues that American democracy is structured by a fundamental
asymmetry: Black citizens are expected to absorb political loss
without breathing a word of grief, while white citizens are permitted
to experience and bemoan losses that have not yet occurred—and in
many cases never will—as legitimate political wounds demanding
remedies. What the current moment calls a restoration, a return to
some undivided and uncontested American knowledge before things became
“unnecessarily controversial,” is a grievance projected from a
past that never existed.

“Those were the days,” sang Archie and Edith Bunker. “Make
America great again,” chant the president and his supporters. The
regents of UT Austin, solemnly voting to protect students from
subjects they cannot name, are singing the same song. The harm they
insist be remedied cannot be documented, because it has not occurred.
This is anticipatory grievance—laundered through the administrative
process and dressed in the false attire of stewardship and public
trust. And yet the performance of that imaginary loss produces
entirely real consequences for actual people.

Vice President JD Vance, who holds degrees from Ohio State and Yale,
has called educators “enemies.” He and the other Ivy
League–educated men and women in the administration who are
attacking academic freedom do not want to destroy the university
because it is “elite.” They want to remake all universities in
their own old image and with all the old exclusions. Their quarrel is
not with so-called elite universities, and it is certainly not with
real elites. They are mad at what their alma maters look like when
Black students and scholars are fully present in them—when the pool,
in other words, is open. The knee-jerk accusation of elitism is key
scene-setting shtick in the political theater: performed to force
those who object to the destruction to disqualify themselves before
speaking, so that the work of destruction may continue without
witness.

INSTITUTION BUILDER: Manning Marable founded the Institute of African
American Studies at Columbia University in 1993._(Mario Tama / Getty
Images)_

Ijoined Columbia’s Department of African American and African
Diaspora Studies, which grew out of the Institute for Research in
African American Studies, in 2023. Founded by Manning Marable
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one of the most widely read and influential scholars of the late 20th
century, the department also publishes _Souls: A Critical Journal of
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which Marable launched in 1999. As its editor, I often sit in his
chair, not metaphorically but literally. I am telling you this not to
establish a credential but to offer an orientation: I know what it
feels like to inherit hard-won infrastructure and to feel, in the same
moment, how fragile that infrastructure is.

Columbia has been specifically targeted by the current administration:
federal funding frozen, governance restructured under duress. The
institution—and, by definition, all universities—was never and
should not be the uncomplicated sanctuary that some, from the outside,
thought it to be.

Marable understood this. He spent decades insisting that the
intellectual life of Black people deserved a permanent institutional
home at one of the world’s great universities—adjacent to Harlem,
in the city of New York. He knew that Black studies was neither a gift
that any university bestowed on Black people nor a cosmetic service to
an institution. It was a demand that Black people made: that their
lives and their thought be treated as the center of inquiry rather
than the margin of someone else’s paradigm. Marable and many others
worked so that the next generation would inherit infrastructure rather
than rubble. I feel the weight of that inheritance precisely because
what was built is not permanent. Right now in the United States, it is
being tested in ways that he anticipated, and that we are still
learning to meet.

Across this country, university leaders and trustees seduced by the
path of least resistance that the words “Social and Cultural
Analysis” seem to promise must recognize that diminishing or
dissolving departments in Black, gender, queer, and ethnic studies,
canceling graduation ceremonies, and placing academic programs under
federal conditions are not educational judgments or even smart
budgetary decisions. These are choices to participate in a political
project whose trajectory is already historically clear—a project
whose other nodes include book bans, voting restrictions, and the
suppression of immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights, leading to the
diminishment of everyone’s rights and making “rule of law,”
“academic freedom,” and “citizenship” meaningless rhetoric
left for the dustbin of history. The signal they send—that belonging
is conditional and subject to revision whenever the political climate
makes it inconvenient—will outlast this administration. It will be
remembered, even if these shortsighted decisions destroy the
university and fill it with cement.

This country has been here before—and more than once, sweltering in
the heat of the disappearance of a common good and blaming the wrong
folks. The question is not whether we understand the arc of this
history. The question is whether we will bend it—or, silently, watch
it break.

_JAFARI SINCLAIRE ALLEN is a professor at Columbia University and the
director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies._

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* Black Studies
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* Black scholars
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* democracy
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* freedom
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* students
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* legislation
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* ultra-right
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* conservative foundations
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* U.S. history
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* Reconstruction
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* Critical Race Theory
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* Supreme Court
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