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Christian Dittus
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English

OUR HISTORY HAS ALWAYS BEEN CONTRABAND

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Colin Kaepernick Robin D. G. Kelley

In Defense of Black Studies

Since its founding as a discipline in 1969, Black Studies has been under constant attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it.

Florida is the frontline of an increasingly pitched battle taking place in schools and communities across the country. State legislatures are introducing laws to remove work by Black scholars like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, James Baldwin, and many others from classrooms, libraries, and curricula.

Books are tools—sources of knowledge and inspiration, especially in the hands of young people and organizers—to challenge the world and imagine something better. This barrage of attacks by the state represents something more chilling and insidious than a dismissive “culture war” headline: it's an attempt to hide our radical history from future generations. And Black Studies as a field of knowledge and inquiry is by necessity radical. It came into being in undaunted opposition to the racial status quo. That's what makes it dangerous. It refuses to accept the world as it is—a world of premature Black death and vulnerability, a world of lethal doses of racial inequity, a world where Black people are rendered less than human. To the contrary, Black Studies has always been integral to the struggle for human liberation.

Contributors include Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and many others.

Editors:
Colin Kaepernick is a Super Bowl quarterback and New York Times bestselling author who fights oppression globally. He founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which advances the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown people through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States.
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Published 2023-07-01 by Haymarket Books