2022 NCBS Annual Report

Statement from the National Council for Black Studies President Amilcar Shabazz, Ph.D. Academic Excellence | Social Responsibility | Cultural Grounding Fulfilling Our Duty to Win The National Council for Black Studies is about Unity. We emerged from a simple premise: We are stronger together. The hundreds of academic departments, scholarly programs, and research and cultural centers around the world are more effective and have greater impact when we unite and learn from each other. As Assata Shakur says in Assata: An Autobiography, “We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” What is true for the struggling masses of our people is equally true for our work in the realms of scholarship and intellectual service.

The Annual Report before you does not cover every area of life of importance to our discipline, but those topics it does address have articles that open conversations, present engaged research, and introduce ideas that define the trajectory of Africana scholars in that proverbial vineyard that Perry Hall, bell hooks, Valerie Boyd, and other colleagues who recently transitioned from this life tilled and harvested so well before us. The current state of affairs of political economy and people of African descent is explored in diverse essays, but as Reiland Rabaka points out, the core concern of all our studies is to safeguard the dignity and survival of our people. His point must be underscored because problems, serious threats, continue to plague us—from COVID-19 and other pandemics to the ongoing attack of gentrification to systemic attacks in courts, newsrooms, hospitals, and schoolhouses. Some of the issues analyzed here are the outcomes of social structures that were not designed to advance our wellbeing and that still harm us under twenty-first-century reconfigurations of anti-Black racism. Our report not only identifies the problems but offers analyses on how we are fighting back and winning.

On the general status of our intellectual project, we hear from both emerging researchers and scholars looking at new trends and fields of activity, like the digital humanities, as well as senior scholars who have put in more than a half century of work defining the contours of Africana studies. The word relevancy that was ubiquitous in the 1960s reappears with the urgency of now.

How Africana studies is and can be relevant to the liberation of African people and the disrupting of the system of racial supremacy and subordination that continues to cause so much suffering is the question that remains an imperative one for all our research, teaching, service, and community engagement. If our work is not relevant to that overarching imperative, then it is irrelevant to our mission and the vision that drives the kind of knowledge production we are about. Thus, “The Voices of Black Youth” is a most worthy section to be included in this report.

Seeing what is on the mind of the upcoming generations is a necessary check-in. Research into the ways the COVID-19 pandemic and other social and environmental developments are affecting our young people and what they are feeling, saying, and doing in response to those factors informs us much about issues that are showing up in our classrooms now and in the semesters ahead. Our academic roots and the NCBS itself grew from radical listening and the 6