REPORT OVERVIEW

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,

although these disadvantages have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, she explains the importance of taking stock of recent increases in the number of Black businesses in the United States and in Africa and the importance of continuing to draw on African people’s vibrant business history and tradition while providing entrepreneurs in Black business sectors across the world with the opportunities and skills they need to be successful and to develop international and cooperative agendas. Local-level economic pressures have stimulated creativity at the intersection of cultural values such as collectivism and entrepreneurship. In spite of the impacts of the Great Recession and the global pandemic, Black communities in the United States have experienced a resurgence of a long tradition of African American worker cooperatives. Dr. Stacey Sutton and Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard describe this resurgence and the potential of Black cooperatives to enhance Black resilience and self-determination and to address Black communities’ unmet demands.

The economic development challenges that worker cooperatives address are directly related to affordable housing. Dr. Theodoric Manley describes the cycle of gentrification and involuntary displacement and its effects on historically Black neighborhoods; he uses the Historical Five Points area in Denver, Colorado, as a case study. He explains the possibility of mobilizing resources to develop affordable housing and building counter-structures such as land trusts to reduce the impacts of these forces on Black communities. Local and global economic initiatives hold promise for Black communities and interact with political mobilization and advocacy inside and outside of mainstream politics. While there has been sustained advocacy for the payment of reparations and debate over who should pay and receive it, Dr. Linwood F. Tauheed explains that for Black communities to achieve sustainable economic development, Black communities must also focus on strategic planning before receiving reparations payments. In an essay in this report, Dr. Tauheed describes a proposal for community-led community economic development that will allow Black communities to set a collective agenda to make the most of reparations. Dr. Thomas Craemer critiques popular piecemeal approaches to reparations for people of African descent in the U.S. context. Because these approaches do not indeed constitute reparations, he proposes a plan that centers on federal-level reparations. Based on the model of reparations for the German Holocaust, he asserts that a state actor must take responsibility, apologize, and pay.

However, the meaning that African people assign to reparations must remain multidimensional enough to reflect the full humanity, needs, and concerns of African-descendant communities and not be reduced to political maneuvers alone. Dr. Nicola Frith, Dr. Joyce Hope Scott, and Esther Stanford-Xosei issue an important caveat to the Afrikan world: to be cautious of taking an approach that treats reparations as a question of money alone. Their essay in this report is a call for repair and restitution to redress the crimes of epistemic violence inflicted upon Afrikan people. This repair comes in the form of the cultural re-grounding of Afrikan-descended people’s historical and spiritual restitution and the process of rematriation.

Dr. Justin Gammage situates economics as central to efforts at addressing historic and current systemic barriers to progress. Moreover, economics must be integrated into the development of future pathways to maximizing African people’s human potential. He explains how a critical race analysis must be implemented because it transcends basic economic theory. Clearly, the restitution the authors in this volume call for will require grassroots mobilization. To maintain the momentum of Black social movements, Black communities must appreciate their value beyond the ways that they are presented in mass media. Black Lives Matter (BLM), for example, in the words of Dr. Reiland Rabaka, is a movement that engages Black folk in the process of self-reclamation, decolonization, and re-Africanization. Dr. Rabaka situates BLM as a movement that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness and expansiveness, yet its core concerns remain firmly rooted in the traditions of previous Black protest movements. He calls for revolutionary Blackness and revolutionary humanism to characterize the consciousness of modern Black liberation movements.

Anti-Black Violence, Media, and Justice

African American deaths as a result of police use of force continue to occur, and increased awareness has resulted in not only more widespread political protests and larger social movements but also calls for policy reforms (Maguire & Giles, 2022). This wave is an ongoing public-policy and public-health issue and threat to people of African descent (Maguire & Giles, 2022). Excessive force and undue police violence have resulted in a great deal of physical, psychological, spiritual, and emotional harm (Green & Evans, 2021). Important calls have been made for police reform, yet there is also a need for specific reforms in the treatment of Black youth in the penal system. For example, in this volume, Crystal S. Russell, Tamara T. Venice, and Kiyomi Moore explore where race intersects with law and Black youth, particularly Black males who are overrepresented among adjudicated youth. These authors describe the importance of policy reform that would support service-learning programs to promote self-discovery, social responsibility, and confidence among adjudicated Black boys. The year 2021 has reminded us that awareness of racist media framing is an important tool in preventing unhealthy anti-African thinking from infiltrating the consciousness of and damaging the relationships among people of African ancestry. Media stereotyping influences the criminalization of Jamaican and Surinamese people in the Netherlands, and some Canadian media outlets attempt to silence and downplay experiences of anti-Black racism (Hayes et al., 2018; Mattar, 2020). The year 2021 also involved the continuation of racist media framing of Black people, which fosters negative predispositions toward Black people and civil rights advocacy (Kilgo & Mourão, 2021). This volume includes Dr. Charmane M. Perry’s exploration of how the mainstream new media’s negative discourse on Haitian people, history, and culture has influenced a range of outcomes from the treatment of Haitian migrants to foreign intervention in Haiti. Dr. Perry explains the effects that a more nuanced treatment might have. Dr. Marquita Gammage describes how similar media racism is being used as an instrument to frame Black people as dangerous to the health, safety, and sovereignty of America. In particular,

she explores how the media has continued to negatively frame the victims of police shootings, thereby shaping public perceptions of such victims and validating not only state failures to convict officers but also aggressive postures toward Black people.

Health

Even before the present moment, Black communities, professionals, and scholars have advocated for culturally aligned and relevant education as well as justice and equity in healthcare services provided to Black people. However, the combined effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social justice movements of the last couple of years have heightened African people’s levels of exposure to and awareness of multidimensional and interrelated injustices as well as such people’s desire to address the social determinants of health disparities (Simpson et al., 2022). One of the dangers of this exposure is damage to the collective consciousness of victory among Black people. Dr. Anna Ortega-Williams urges Africana people to engage in a paradigm shift in how they appraise challenges and victories in this extraordinary time. Through the lens of the collective-self, she examines how we must take stock of pandemic-related mortality and institutionalized anti-Black racism. Yet she urges that we draw on the intergenerational wisdom and power of our ancestors to resist while maintaining joy and wellness without being too narrowly-focused on statistical disparities. Because there must be instruments to resist and to maintain wellness, Dr. Daudi Azibo proposes the Azibo Nosologies as a tool in the hands of mental health workers so that they may engage in African-centered culturally aligned diagnoses of personality disorders among people of African descent. By using the Nosologies, Dr. Azibo proposes that mental health workers engage in diagnoses that could mitigate the guilt and sentencing upheld by current anti-Black jurisprudential psy-profession/psychiatric scrutiny. Using a global perspective, Tarik A. Richardson discusses the importance of taking steps to decrease the African world’s overreliance on Western organizations for medical support and intervention. He also espouses the significance of having more informed conversations about how to responsibly invest in and make use of traditional African healing technologies. These authors advocate drawing upon our heritage of health-seeking wisdom, particularly in times of political turmoil.

Education

The current debates over CRT have influenced many people to question existing school structures, policies, and frameworks for teaching and learning the experiences and heritage of people of African ancestry (Appling & Robinson, 2021)—from confronting the residues of apartheid in the form of racial hierarchies in South African education (Roberts, 2021) to U.S. legal challenges to pedagogy and curriculum that oppose White privilege and racist ideologies. Under the banner of CRT, the struggle for empowerment of Black people in the arena of education is truly global. The solution to many of the challenges related to White supremacy, as Dr. Sonya McCoy-Wilson explains, involve education and reeducation. Her essay in this volume presents the Truth,

Reconciliation, and Education model as a pathway to a form of transformative justice that will change the way people think and act. On the pathway, McCoy-Wilson says, African people have found themselves confronted with deficit narratives of Black children.

According to Dr. Natalie D. Lewis, it is important that Black people avoid becoming too consumed with educational narratives of loss, lack, and despair. Instead, it is vital to counter negative narratives of Black youth in education with narratives of Black community love and support. These narratives, Dr. Lewis claims, are essential for ensuring that teachers enter classrooms with healthy perceptions of Black students; such perceptions allow teachers to identify and empathize with their Black students. The educational challenges that African people face share commonalities and differences throughout the diaspora. To counter the ongoing underrepresentation of Black boys and girls in the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and Latin America, Dr. Patrice Juliet Pinder presents the Solutions Approach Mechanism. This African-centered intervention is designed to motivate, encourage, and increase Black student involvement in science, technology, reading/writing, engineering, arts, and math (STREAM) disciplines. Naaja Rogers clarifies the legacy of Afrocentric schools and their critical roles in contributing to mental decolonization and liberation. However, given the rapid decline of Afrocentric schools, Rogers identifies several steps that local communities of people of African descent should take to promote Afrocentric education, cultural reclamation, and agency restoration in their absence. Each of these authors presents educational actions that address but go above and beyond reacting to recent attacks on CRT and advancing Black communities.

The State of Black/Africana Studies

The issues that face the discipline of Africana studies are emerging and ongoing; addressing them appropriately will leave the discipline equipped to continue to advance Black communities into the distant future. It is important for Africana studies to have a space where there is an annual conversation about the key challenges confronting the discipline at present and in the future. An ongoing challenge is greater infusion of the African world into the discipline at all levels.

Dr. Maria Martin explores the means of building greater interest in modern and contemporary intra-Africa-focused research in Africana studies. Furthermore, she describes how creating greater space for the Black studies Africanist can expand the discipline and enhance approaches to studying Africa within it. The responsibility to serve communities is a core principle of the discipline and its importance is an ongoing concern for scholars. Brandon Stokes explores Africana studies’ waning links to the community. He describes 360 Nation, a community-based nonprofit agency that uses relationship building and social capital to promote self-determination for Black children and their families. For Stokes, 360 Nation is an agency grounded in Africana studies scholarship and aligned with its principles yet missing the broad support of Africana studies departments.

Building on the same idea, Dr. Miciah Z. Yehudah and Dr. Clyde Ledbetter Jr. carry out an assessment of Black studies’ commitment to its community-centric mission. By examining departmental dissertation research, the authors make several practical recommendations for how departments can enhance their commitment to aligning scholarship with community advancement.

The growth of information technology and its integration into every aspect of human society have benefited the world tremendously; however, like other social phenomena or sectors of society, such growth and integration are subject to inequitable accessibility, availability, and quality in ways that vary by race and geography. Technology may also be used as a tool to advance the discipline. Using the University of Kansas Department of African and AfricanAmerican Studies as an example, Dr. Peter Ukpokodu writes about how Black studies can take a major step in rejuvenating its epistemology by investing in African digital humanities. According to Ukpokodu, making this investment can help the discipline of Black studies prepare students to meet challenges of the 21st century and to bridge the digital divide throughout the African world. Securing the future of this discipline will require Black studies scholars to resist the tide of Eurocentric and mainstream intellectual thought, continue to build new approaches to knowledge, and maintain fidelity to the original goal of Black liberation. In this report, Dr. Mark Christian brings light to the growing influence of Eurocentric mainstream bourgeoise epistemologies that seek to hold sway over Black studies scholarship. Yet in this time of heightened human insecurities across the African world, Dr. Christian warns that our mere possession of knowledge is not enough; if Black studies is to sing its own song, we must also be bold enough to critique evolving forms of Eurocentric and mainstream non-empowering scholarship and the new politics of divide and conquer. Dr. Molefi Asante calls for the emergence of a cadre of individuals who are willing to take the methodological and conceptual lead and push the frontiers of Africological knowledge so that the discipline is not overtaken by the epistemologies of so-called “traditional” disciplines. Dr. Asante expresses concern that at present, the discipline has not quite lived up to its expectations of being distinct, assertive, and grounded in our own realities through our scholarship. He makes several practical administrative, curricular, and scholarly recommendations to enhance the discipline’s alignment with its destiny. Finally, using the principle of Sankofa, Dr. Abdul Alkalimat provides a lesson plan for the future of Black studies that is rooted in the wisdom of its past. Drawing on original dialectics, Dr. Alkalimat suggests that one of the root challenges of Black studies is that its adaptation to the norms of higher education has drawn it further and further away from its fundamental goal of Black liberation. He outlines the current challenges to the discipline and presents an action plan to generate a Black studies renaissance of relevance.

Voices from the Youth

This volume includes two messages on effective culturally aligned STEM programs, both written by Black youth. Dr. Dannielle Joy Davis, Deborah Bush-Munson, Bryce Davis Bohon, Trinity Munson, and Evelyn Washington describe culturally relevant STEM programs for

underrepresented youth. The authors provide first-person testimonials of the programs’ effectiveness in promoting science careers and social justice through science. Bryce Davis Bohon and Jamarr Hoskins contribute an essay on their experiences with the Circle of Excellence program, which teaches about STEM careers and introduces mentors and teachers in the field. The writers provide first-person accounts of the successes of the program and the mentorship received through several science competitions and achievements. These programs demonstrate effective models for nurturing Black youth’s passion and capacity in STEM, which are critical for ensuring that Black communities meet the demands of the future and take advantage of growing STEM opportunities.

Commentaries

The Commentaries section includes essays that add further discussion to the key issues of the report. The essays contain some original data collection and also highlight different and complementary ways of looking at the aforementioned issues. Instead of focusing on referencing other scholarship, the essays introduce emergent ideas that have implications on pertinent topics. Within this report, there is a poignant commentary written by an anonymous Black police officer from a major U.S. city. The officer explains the unique experience of a racially conscious Black police officer who must negotiate perceptions of Black communities as well as racist cultures within police departments while simultaneously trying to protect Black communities. Although it is important to remain ever vigilant in the fight against extrajudicial killings of Black people, according to one of the foremost legal activists of this era, Black communities must use their vision and imagination to create a world beyond brutality. Attorney Benjamin Crump, who is of this tradition and has achieved many high-profile and high-impact victories, contributes a commentary that highlights the importance of Black communities’ visions for a future beyond present realities. Using an autoethnographic approach, Taylor D. Duckett, Samantha Horton, Andrew Stadeker II, Madison Clark, Corryn Anderson, and Nya Anthony describe how the COVID-19 pandemic and the secondary pandemic of a series of high-profile acts of anti-Black racism extraordinarily impacted BIPOC students. The essay explores how African American and African diaspora studies graduate students created innovative pedagogical and community-oriented practices to address some of the issues caused by the pandemic. The authors also describe practical steps for how students can be better served.

Demetrius W. Pearson highlights the U2 Rodeo Production Company, an agency that combines community engagement and family entertainment. Pearson brings attention to the cultural education U2 provides, the mentorship it affords aspiring rodeo cowboys and cowgirls, and its overall social-cultural contributions.

The articles in this report highlight the fact that people of African descent must maintain broad visions of themselves and their realities, which are informed by their own unique worldviews and do not simply respond to emergent crises. The aforementioned authors’ articles can be found in the report’s sections: Economics and Politics; Anti-Black Violence, Media, and Justice; Health; Education; the State of Black Studies; the Voices of Black Youth; and Commentaries.

References

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