Editor’s note: In honor of Black History Month, UDaily is resharing a previously published story on Africana Studies and its enduring legacy and impact. A field of scholarship born from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the discipline remains fraught with misunderstanding, even today. The University of Delaware, home to the National Council for Black Studies, proudly celebrates the academic expertise of its esteemed faculty, who continue to educate and elevate the minds of Blue Hens, past, present and future.
This knowledge was never meant to survive. It wasn’t even supposed to exist.
An academic field that emerged from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Africana studies would challenge, from its very inception, the prevailing narrative that has for centuries defined and dominated modern Western thought: our understanding of ourselves.
What does it mean to be human, the discipline asks, and what truths can be found in the humanity and brutality of others? Why does racism exist and persist on a global scale, and what distinguishes its American form? How have oppression and resistance morphed over time, and does our interpretation of the past (and, inevitably, our present) change when re-examined through a different perspective?
To ask these questions honestly, and to answer them through an intentionally Black lens, is to explore a field so psychologically expansive it could dismantle racism itself.
“History is a tool for understanding our lives,” says Department of Africana Studies Prof. Kathryn Benjamin Golden. “It’s also a tool to change our lives.”
Thus, this “fugitive body of knowledge,” as Golden calls it, feels particularly relevant now, four years after a global pandemic disproportionately ravaged communities of color and the repeated, televised killings of unarmed Black Americans led to worldwide cries for racial and social justice.
“There is an inherent link between academic work and the community,” says Wunyabari Maloba, the Edward L. Ratledge Professor of Africana Studies and History. “Africana studies is never a passive intellectual experience.”