Change Entirely Education and Outlook: Black Studies’ Anticolonial Challenge and Contemporary Attacks on Black Thought and Study

Political education, historical research, and grappling with the political and economic conditions confronting black people in the United States constituted a central feature of the Black Power Movement. And as many turned their attention to global anti-colonial struggles, they recognized that liberation struggles in Africa and the Caribbean were equally concerned with establishing a new educational apparatus. In the early 1960s, as former Caribbean colonies gained formal independence, many intellectuals and artists focused their energies on producing scholarship that would be dynamic enough to meet the challenges of a decolonizing world that remained wedded to Western modes of knowledge production. The New World Group was possibly the most dynamic formation to emerge out of this anti-colonial cauldron, many of its members having a profound influence on those Black Power intellectuals who lead efforts to establish Black Studies in the U. S. academy. In the context of current attacks on Critical Race Theory, D.E.I., and curriculum focused on systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia and transphobia, it is necessary to revisit the core epistemological challenges mounted by Black Studies scholars. Though articulated at different registers in the Caribbean and in the US, Black Studies sought not to fill the gaps in standing disciplinary knowledges by the inclusion of black people in those traditions, but the transformation of knowledge itself—what we might call decolonizing Black Studies. As this suggests, the mounting attacks that began in 2020 and are attempts to sequester and destroy entire bodies of knowledge and intellectual inquiry because those bodies of knowledge have sought to transform the academy and knowledge production in the pursuit of alternative worlds and modes of political association that challenge the very underpinnings of a liberal order whose systems of thought and normative political operations produce fascist regimes committed to the naked practices of coloniality.