2022 NCBS Annual Report

Overview: Watching the Clock and Keeping the Compass The idea for this report is a seed, and its development and the many contributions it has received are signals that its time has come. The report represents our efforts to use our expertise to articulate the most recent challenges before the African world and to point toward solutions. Far from looking for a one-size-fits-all approach to the possibilities and challenges facing African people, we seek to bring into solidarity thinkers who are determined to produce a diversity of knowledge that can guide concrete steps toward Black liberation. Some of the thinkers are complementary, others contradictory; they do not all represent the views of the National Council of Black Studies but are all representative of the nuance in thought that typifies African people’s intellectual heritage. This volume also contains analyses and projections about the current state and future of Black studies, drawing on insights from disciplinary insiders and subject experts.

The articles in this inaugural volume explore complex factors shaping developments across the Black world—including the COVID-19 pandemic, critical race theory (CRT), state- and nonstate-sanctioned anti-Black violence and terrorism, gentrification, reparations, rematriation, and media framings of Black people. Given the diversity of the conditions that are discussed, each has created opportunities for African/Black people to develop lasting local, global, and culturally aligned interventions as well as preemptive steps and practices, all of which our contributors discuss. The authors who have written about Black studies examine steps that can be taken to sustain and enhance the discipline’s relevance, commitment to its mission, and innovations so that its multidimensional structure can be utilized to meet the varied, distinct, and common needs of the African world.

Economics and Politics The pandemic has had significant impacts on Black economic security. Solutions offer opportunities for economic and political solidarity on local and international levels. The economic impact of COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Black economic conditions, from the high Black youth unemployment rates in the UK to African American food security in the United States (Larson et al., 2021; Thomas, 2021). Along with a chorus of Black leaders, 2021 saw Olivia Grange—Jamaica’s Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport—make a bold call for reparations for people of African ancestry affected by slavery, colonization, and ongoing anti-Black racism (Hassan, 2021). Black communities also continue to face the silent scourge of gentrification as historically Black neighborhoods across the United States experience displacement and replacement while more well-off and often non-Black residents move in (Chronopoulos, 2020). The consequences include but are not limited to Black financial stress, race-related stress, decreased Black property ownership, lack of social cohesion and sense of belonging, and overall destabilized infrastructure (Chronopoulos, 2020; NewsRX, 2020).

In this volume, Dr. Bessie House-Soremekun examines the economic state of the African/Black world and the necessity of a global Black business agenda. She describes how the impacts of colonization, enslavement, and subsequent institutionalized marginalization have resulted in disadvantages in the areas of employment, income levels, and homeownership rates. However, 8