On Its 125th Anniversary, W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘The Philadelphia Negro’ Offers Lasting Lessons On Gentrification In Philly’s Historically Black Neighborhoods

AUTHORS:

ZAWADI RUCKS AHIDIANA

ASSISXTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

UNIVERSITY OF ALBANY, STATE

UNIVERSIY OF NEW YORK

FREEDEN BLUME OEUR

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR NOF SOCIOLOGY

TUFTS UNIVERSITY

Society Hill, where Sixers star Joel Embiid recently put his penthouse condo on the market for US$5.5 million, has long been one of Philadelphia’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

It’s a distant cry from what the neighborhood looked like 125 years ago when sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois published “The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study.”

The book examines in meticulous detail the social conditions of thousands of Black Philadelphians living in what was then called the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood that overlaps present-day Society Hill.

We are sociologists and scholars of Du Bois whose research covers gentrification and anti-Black racism. We are also guest-editing a special issue of the City & Community journal that will be dedicated to Du Bois’ historic study.

On its 125th anniversary, “The Philadelphia Negro” offers valuable lessons about why many historically Black Philadelphia neighborhoods look the way they do today – and where they might be headed.

Du Bois surveys the 7th Ward

Du Bois and his wife, Nina, arrived in Philadelphia in 1896 at the invitation of the University of Pennsylvania and with the support of the local settlement house movement. With “The Philadelphia Negro,” published in 1899, these benefactors tasked Du Bois with analyzing “the Negro problems”.

As Du Bois wrote, “Here is a large group of people – perhaps 45,000, a city within a city – who do not form an integral part of the larger social group.” He observed that a quarter of all Black Philadelphians lived in the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood at the time bounded from east to west between 7th and 25th streets, and north to south from Spruce Street to South Street.

Philadelphia of the late 1800s was a manufacturing juggernaut and the second largest city in the U.S.. Yet, as Du Bois detailed in his study, Black Philadelphians were concentrated in “certain slum districts,” areas with “poor homes and worse police protection.” They were shut out from well-paying jobs and faced higher rates of incarceration and lower rates of pardons for crimes than white Philadelphians. These challenges, Du Bois explained, were rooted in systemic racism with historical ties to slavery.

“Such discrimination,” Du Bois stated plainly, “is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly.”

When Du Bois arrived in Philadelphia, the process of devaluing and disinvesting in Black neighborhoods like the Seventh Ward had already been decades in the making. Throughout the 1800s, Philadelphia’s population swelled considerably as industry expanded and wealth increased. Real estate values rose across the city. Yet, Black residents were less likely than white residents to own property. Racial discrimination, he determined, kept Black Philadelphians in lower-wage work and segregated in areas of the city with older homes that were poorly maintained.

Urban renewal and resistance

Nearly 50 years after Du Bois’ study, the urban planner Edmund Bacon helped organize a “Better Philadelphia” exhibition in 1947 with a vision for private reinvestment in the city’s slumping downtown economy.

Bacon, deemed the “father of modern Philadelphia,” largely got his way. He trained his eyes on Society Hill, and his vision for that neighborhood became a blueprint for urban design. Expensive high-rise apartments pushed out poor residents, including Black people and Eastern European immigrants who had been there for decades.

Other parts of the Seventh Ward later experienced the effects of urban renewal too. Black Seventh Warders led a long, successful struggle in the 1960s and ‘70s to fight off a proposed expressway that would have cut through their neighborhood. However, as the sociologist Marcus Hunter documents in his book “Black Citymakers,” the neighborhood underwent significant changes from 1975 to 2000. South Street east of Broad Street emerged as a “distinctly artsy and commercial area,” while west of Broad Street “became a combination of high-end condominiums and businesses.”

Modern Philly gentrification

With its visible markers of luxury apartments and trendy cafes and restaurants, gentrification has transformed neighborhoods all across Philadelphia, from Germantown to Fishtown. While not part of the old Seventh Ward, the ZIP codes that encompass Point Breeze, in South Philadelphia, and Northern Liberties, just north of Center City, rank among the most gentrified in the nation since 2000.

For some historically Black Philadelphia neighborhoods, however, the disinvestment and decline over the decades has been so extreme that they are not vulnerable to gentrification anytime soon. Middle-class homebuyers, businesses and real estate developers and investors deem them too risky and stigmatized.

Meanwhile, Black Philadelphians have expressed frustration at how new research centers at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania – ironically, the same institution that hired Du Bois to conduct his study – have displaced residents in the historic Black Bottom, a neighborhood since rebranded as University City.

Gentrification benefits many middle-class white people who purchase affordable homes that quickly increase in value as the neighborhood demographics change. But long-term residents and businesses often face higher rents and property taxes that can make the homes and neighborhood where they grew up unaffordable. Cultural institutions such as Black churches close their doors for good as the people they serve leave the neighborhood. The First African Baptist Church in South Philly, one of the oldest churches of its kind in the country, was sold to developers in 2016 and became a boutique hotel.

When Philadelphia residents are squeezed out of gentrifying neighborhoods, they often relocate to lower-income areas, a process Hunter calls “secondary migration.” For those who can afford to stay, there is “cultural displacement” as gentrified neighborhoods no longer feel like home.

Yet, Black Philadelphians have always been “place-makers” – people who use creative and political agency to build spaces where they can thrive and respond to neighborhood change. And organizations fighting for housing justice, such as Philly Thrive, have helped lead anti-gentrification efforts in the city. The Jumpstart Germantown program is training area developers to invest in local communities and build community wealth.

Meanwhile, Black middle-class residents have chosen to invest in Philadelphia by opening businesses where everyone is welcome. One example is Uncle Bobbie’s, a beloved coffee shop, bookstore and community meeting space in Germantown.

While the Seventh Ward is no longer an official designation, an arts-based tribute is teaching new generations about the rich Black history in that area. It’s a story about neighborhood change and the possibility for more equitable futures for Black Americans – something Du Bois hoped for in writing “The Philadelphia Negro” and throughout his career.

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In The Worst Of America’s Jim Crow Era, Black Intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois Found Inspiration And Hope In National Parks

W. E. B. Du Bois poses for a portrait at home at 31 Grace Court in Brooklyn Heights in 1958 in New York City. Image: David/Attie/Getty

BY THOMAS S. BREMER

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

AND AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY

RHODES COLLEGE

In his collection of essays and poems published in 1920 titled “Darkwater,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about his poignant encounter with the beauty of the Grand Canyon, the stupendous chasm in Arizona.

As he stood at the canyon’s rim, the towering intellectual and civil rights activist described the sight that spread before his eyes. The Grand Canyon’s “grandeur is too serene – its beauty too divine!” Du Bois wrote. “Behold this mauve and purple mocking of time and space! See yonder peak! No human foot has trod it. Into that blue shadow, only the eye of God has looked.”

But Du Bois’ experience undermined a widely held assumption that was reinforced by early conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt – that only white people could appreciate the landscapes of national parks. For Roosevelt and his progressive allies, saving nature was connected to saving the white race.

My research on the history of national parks shows that these racial assumptions and federal policies contributed to making the parks unwelcome places for Black nature enthusiasts such as Du Bois.

Du Bois traveled to national parks anyway, and he understood that most other Black people were unable to follow because of the cost and discrimination found at every turn. It still bothered Du Bois, however, that Black people were unable to experience a joy similar to what he found at what would later become Acadia National Park in Maine.

“Why do not those who are scarred in the world’s battle and hurt by its hardness travel to these places of beauty and drown themselves in the utter joy of life?” Du Bois asked.

The progressive politics of racial purity

President Theodore Roosevelt has been recognized as a “wilderness warrior” for his unprecedented protection of lands and wildlife. But his conservation record was tied to the belief of white racial superiority that was embodied in eugenics, the racist pseudoscience of the early 20th century that tried to determine who was fit or unfit to have children.

One initiative of the Roosevelt administration was the creation of the National Conservation Commission on June 8, 1908. Though Congress eliminated the commission’s budget after six months, its task was to take an inventory of all the nation’s natural resources and make recommendations on how best to protect them.

Gifford Pinchot, the president’s most trusted environmental adviser, served as the commission’s executive chairman and compiled its final report in February 1909.

It offered 10 far-reaching recommendations on topics as diverse as public health to labor regulation and the elimination of poverty and crime. The 10th recommendation advocated for “eugenics, or hygiene for future generations” that connected federal conservation to white supremacy.

Pinchot’s report called for the forced sterilization of “degenerates generally” – namely, most immigrants, Black and Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities. It also sought to increase the breeding of what they believed to be racially superior races, such as white Anglo Saxons and people of Scandinavian heritage.

“The problem of the conservation of our natural resources is therefore not a series of independent problems, but a coherent, all-embracing whole,” the report concluded. “If our nation cares to make any provision for its grandchildren and its grandchildren’s grandchildren, this provision must include conservation in all its branches – but above all, the conservation of the racial stock itself.”

Another of Roosevelt’s close associates took an even more pointed approach to white supremacy and conservation.

Madison Grant had worked with Roosevelt since the 1890s and was an avid conservationist. He was also the author of an influential book on eugenics, “The Passing of the Great Race,” a racist tome arguing the superiority of what he called the “Nordic race.”

New agency, same philosophy

The election in 1912 of President Woodrow Wilson saw the implementation of discriminatory policies.

According to historian Eric S. Yellin, Wilson’s administration was “loaded with white supremacists” who effectively enacted harsh anti-Black policies in the federal government.

In 1913, for instance, Wilson ordered the federal workforce to be racially segregated, first at the U.S. Post Office, where most Black federal employees worked, and then at the Treasury Department, which had the second-largest number of Black workers.

The Wilson administration also created the National Park Service, the federal agency in charge of managing and interpreting the country’s national parks, when Wilson signed the Organic Act in 1916.

Not surprisingly, this new park service had the same racial policies of the Wilson administration and abided by local laws on racial segregation. That meant Black nature enthusiasts would continue to be prohibited in national parks in most of the former Confederate South.

My research has shown that the National Park Service catered exclusively to the expectations and needs of white visitors and it had very few Black employees or visitors. The policies included racially segregated dining rooms, picnic grounds and restrooms. Maps and signs in some parks directed Black visitors away from whites and to designated Black sections of the parks.

The official policy didn’t end until 1945, when U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes outlawed segregation at national parks. But local segregation remained in practice in most Southern states for decades and still excluded Black visitors.

National parks as worth the struggle

Du Bois was willing to endure the racist laws that made traveling unpleasant for Black people seeking to find joy in natural beauty.

“Did you ever see a ‘Jim-Crow’ waiting-room?” Du Bois wrote in “Darkwater,” referring to the system of laws and social customs that disenfranchised Black people.

“Usually there is no heat in winter and no air in summer. To buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the ‘other window’ is waited on,” he explained. “Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets and money are over there.”

For Du Bois, the struggle was worth the experience of the Grand Canyon.

“There can be nothing like it,” Du Bois wrote. “It is the earth and sky gone stark and raving mad… It is human – some mighty drama unseen, unheard, is playing there its tragedies or mocking comedy, and the laugh of endless years is shrieking onward from peak to peak, unheard, unechoed, and unknown.”

The sight of the Grand Canyon, Du Bois concluded, “will live eternal in my soul.”

The same view has had the same effect on generations of visitors – Black, white and of countless other backgrounds – ever since.

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LANFORD: The New “Propaganda Of History”

BY RYAN LANFORD

The situation in Florida is dire. There is an ongoing assault on education and the banning of AP African American Studies is just one front in this war. What was a bold new step for American education is now a watered down version of real history. Learning from the great Black historian W.E.B. Du Bois, we can see clearly the danger of allowing these situations to develop and continue. If educational giants like College Board continue to bow down, the very problem that Du Bois highlighted in his work “Black Reconstruction in America” will become realized at the level of state education. Florida wants to avoid dealing with history in full, but only by reconciling with thinkers in their totalities can we begin to understand history.

Last month, Florida announced that it would be banning AP African American Studies from being taught in high schools. The curriculum was initially rejected without an in-depth explanation as to why. After pressure, however, the Florida Department of Education elaborated, saying that the AP African American Studies curriculum was full of “woke indoctrination.” Furthermore, the department stated that intersectionality — a theory developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw — merely “ranks people based on their race, wealth, gender, and sexual orientation.” Anyone who has read Crenshaw’s work would know that the theory is not simply a scale of how oppressed a person is based on their identities. Instead, it moves beyond a “single axis” of oppression, as the unique discrimination that Black women face is “not the sum of race and sex discrimination.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to veil his assault on education by claiming he is trying to eliminate “ideological conformity.” He intends to do so by “mandating courses” on Western civilization, as if there is not a high degree of ideological conformity intended by forcing children to learn a manufactured narrative that places undue emphasis on Western civilization.

Another part of DeSantis’s claim against AP African American Studies was that it was not “historically accurate.” This too is a rather dubious claim, especially when we look at the content that was removed. It is not that the old curriculum was historically inaccurate, but that it contained history that DeSantis would prefer to go unnoticed. In comparing the new and old curriculums, the College Board clearly gave in and tried to appease conservative sensibilities. They removed any reference to Black Lives Matter and the present day struggle for Black rights in America. Furthermore, units on Black queer studies and Black feminism were either removed entirely or greatly downsized. Notable authors and theorists such as James Baldwin, bell hooks and Angela Davis were stricken from the curriculum. A section on post-slavery labor and economics disappeared from the new curriculum, an unsurprising development as it is not enough to deny the existence of Black queer people and women but also to ignore the Black labor movement as a whole. The College Board may claim that the final section of class will be for exploration of such topics, but this does not give these ideas the full exploration they deserve.

Last month, we celebrated the birthday of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, whose ideas are as relevant today as they ever were. Du Bois is featured 17 times in the updated AP African American Studies curriculum. His work “The Souls of Black Folk'' and theory of double consciousness play an important role in Unit 3 of the curriculum. Double consciousness is the idea that Black Americans are “born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world.” Looking at Du Bois provides an intriguing look at the new AP African American studies curriculum, especially in comparison to the AP U.S. History curriculum and Florida’s public high school curriculum. Du Bois appears more than Booker T. Washington in the AP African American Studies curriculum, yet in the AP U.S. History and Florida public school curriculum he only shows up in the context of his debate with Washington on education. The updated AP African American Studies curriculum keeps “The Souls of Black Folk” and the concept of double consciousness, a bold and entirely correct move. Despite this, Florida’s controversial Stop WOKE Act will probably render the move largely ineffective as the concept might only be permitted as a way of understanding Jim Crow, and not as a way of analyzing our present moment in history.

Du Bois has more to offer than just “Souls.” In particular, his work “Black Reconstruction” and its final chapter “The Propaganda of History” provide a prescient analysis of the situation in Florida. Here, Du Bois counters the claims made by the prevailing academic opinion of the Dunning School on Reconstruction. Named after Professor William A. Dunning, this school of thought sought to create a version of history which was entirely antithetical to reality. The Dunning School’s tale of Reconstruction argued that Black people were responsible for its failure, with all of their reasoning grounded in abhorrent racial stereotypes. In countering these claims, Du Bois argued that we need a “scientific” conception of history. Similar to how the Dunning School sought to change the narrative of history in favor of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is seeking to change education by “mandating courses in Western civilization.” If we are to follow DeSantis’s version of history, then in Du Bois’s eyes we are simply “using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.” While ideology is absolutely propagated through the teaching of history and what we choose to include in curricula, the study of history itself should strive for impartiality in its endeavor to find facts.

If everyone with a conscience does not fight back against this assault on education — Black history in particular — then we are handing over history to propagandists who would seek to destroy its scientific core. This modern day revisionism in the name of a whitewashed arc of history is disturbing and an offense to pedagogy. “Black Reconstruction” teaches us that we cannot simply stand on the sidelines. If we let history fall to the hands of those who even today are pushing a new narrative with harmful racial undertones, this time morphed to portray the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the end of racism, then we are failing both students and historians alike.

On Feb. 23, we celebrated Du Bois as one of the most influential figures on Black thought. Like many thinkers, he was a complicated individual and his ideas changed over the years. For example, the Du Bois of “the Conservation of Races” is a different man from that of “Black Reconstruction.” Yet we must confront his ideas as a whole — we should not pick and choose which side of him we get to praise and which to ignore. If we are to simply manufacture the best narrative of an individuals life, we only end up ignoring their failures in order to highlight their successes. Furthermore, we cannot ignore double consciousness and the influence it had for future generations of Black thinkers — it was vital for Black feminists and queer theorists as they sought to understand what it meant to be Black and perceive oneself through the eyes of white America.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education would have us ignore controversial thinkers instead of analyzing them. As we reflect on the impact Du Bois has had, we must stand strong against the whitewashing of history, bearing truth and integrity with all our might.

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W.E.B. Du Bois, Black History Month And The Importance Of African American Studies

B Y CHAD WILLIAMS

The opening days of Black History Month 2023 have coincided with controversy about the teaching and broader meaning of African American studies.

On Feb. 1, 2023, the College Board released a revised curriculum for its newly developed Advanced Placement African American studies course.

Critics have accused the College Board of caving to political pressure stemming from conservative backlash and the decision of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban the course from public high schools in Florida because of what he characterized as its radical content and inclusion of topics such as critical race theory, reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement.

On Feb. 11, 1951, an article by the 82-year-old Black scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois titled “Negro History Week” appeared in the short-lived New York newspaper The Daily Compass.

As one of the founders of the NAACP in 1909 and the editor of its powerful magazine The Crisis, Du Bois is considered by historians and intellectuals from many academic disciplines as America’s preeminent thinker on race. His thoughts and opinions still carry weight throughout the world.

Du Bois’ words in that 1951 article are especially prescient today, offering a reminder about the importance of Black History Month and what is at stake in current conversations about African American studies.

Du Bois began his Daily Compass commentary by praising Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, who established Negro History Week in 1926. The week would eventually become Black History Month.

Du Bois described the annual commemoration as Woodson’s “crowning achievement.”

Woodson was the second African American to earn a doctorate in history from Harvard University. Du Bois was the first.

Du Bois and Woodson did not always see eye to eye. However, as I explore in my new book, “The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War,” the two pioneering scholars always respected each other.
Reckoning with history and reclaiming the past

Du Bois’ connection to and appreciation of Negro History Week grew during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. During this time, whether in public speeches or published articles, he never missed an opportunity to acknowledge the importance of Negro History Week.

In the Feb. 11, 1951, article, Du Bois reflected that his own contributions to Negro History Week “lay in my long effort as a historian and sociologist to make America and Negroes themselves aware of the significant facts of Negro history.”

Summarizing his work from his first book, “The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade,” published in 1896, through his magnum opus “Black Reconstruction in America,” published in 1935, Du Bois told readers of the Daily Compass piece that much of his career was spent trying “to correct the distortion of history in regard to Negro enfranchisement.”

By doing so, the nation would hopefully become, Du Bois wrote further, “conscious that this part of our citizenry were normal human beings who had served the nation credibly and were still being deprived of their credit by ignorant and prejudiced historians.”

In addition to championing Negro History Week, Du Bois applauded other Black scholars, like E. Franklin Frazier, Charles Johnson and Shirley Graham, who were “steadily attacking” the omissions and distortions of Black people in school textbooks.

Du Bois went on to chronicle the achievements of African Americans in science, religion, art, literature and the military, making clear that Black people had a history to be proud of.

Du Bois, however, questioned what deeper meaning these achievements held to the issues facing Black people in the present.

“What now does Negro History Week stand for?” he asked in the 1951 article. “Shall American Negroes continue to learn to be ‘proud’ of themselves, or is there a higher broader aim for their research and study?”

“In other words,” he asserted, “as it becomes more universally known what Negroes contributed to America in the past, more must logically be said and taught concerning the future.”

The time had come, Du Bois believed, for African Americans to stop striving to be merely “the equal of white Americans.”

Black people needed to cease emulating the worst traits of America – flamboyance, individualism, greed and financial success at any cost – and support labor unions, Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial struggle.

He especially encouraged the systematic study of the imperial and economic roots of racism: “Here is a field for Negro History Week.”
Black history and Black struggle

Looking ahead, Du Bois declared that if Negro History Week remained “true to the ideals of Carter Woodson” and followed “the logical development of the Negro Race in America,” it would not confine itself to the study of the past nor “boasting and vainglory over what we have accomplished.”

“It will not mistake wealth as the measure of America, nor big-business and noise as World Domination,” Du Bois wrote in his article.

Instead, Du Bois believed Negro History Week would “concentrate on study of the present,” “not be afraid of radical literature” and, above all else, advocate for peace and voice “eternal opposition against war between the white and colored peoples of the earth.”

Were he alive today, Du Bois would certainly have much to say about current debates around the teaching of African American history and the larger significance of African American studies. Du Bois died on Aug. 27, 1963, in Accra, Ghana.

But he left behind his clairvoyant words that remind us of the connections between African American studies and movements for Black liberation, along with how the teaching of African American history has always challenged racist and exclusionary narratives of the nation’s past.

Du Bois also reminds us that Black History Month is rooted in a legacy of activism and resistance, one that continues in the present

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The Meaning Of African American Studies

BY KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

On Wednesday, February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, the College Board released its long-awaited curriculum for a new Advanced Placement class in African American studies. Two weeks earlier, the Florida Department of Education had rejected the course, claiming that it “lacks educational value and is contrary to Florida law.” Then, nearly a week later, Manny Diaz, Jr., the state’s commissioner of education, released a flyer listing his complaints, based on a pilot version of the course. They included the fact that there were units on intersectionality and activism, Black queer studies, “Black Feminist Literary Thought,” reparations, and “Black Study and the Black Struggle in the 21st Century.” The Movement for Black Lives—which brought out the largest demonstrations in American history, in the summer of 2020, with more than twenty million people participating—was dismissed as a topic of study.

When the College Board released the revised curriculum, all of the sections that Florida complained about had been removed. Representatives of the nonprofit have insisted that they were already planning to revise the pilot version, and that the onslaught from Florida had nothing to do with their changes. It is certainly believable that the preliminary version of the class would have been revised, but it is unbelievable that right-wing complaints did not influence the final outcome. Trevor Packer, the head of the Advanced Placement Program, told Time magazine, last summer, that the Movement for Black Lives had inspired a renewed effort to get the class under way. He said, “The events surrounding George Floyd and the increased awareness and attention paid towards issues of inequity and unfairness and brutality directed towards African Americans caused me to wonder, ‘Would colleges be more receptive to an AP course in this discipline than they were 10 years ago?’ ” It is hard to reconcile that inspiration with the decision to excise almost all mention of Black Lives Matter, intersectionality, police brutality, or any of the litany of issues that shape the experiences of Black people in the United States. Indeed, there is barely any mention of the Black rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, which were the backdrop to the demands of Black students that Black studies be included in college and university curricula. These omissions undermine the legitimacy of the A.P. course and the College Board itself. They also diminish the power of Black studies to make sense of our contemporary world.

On Wednesday evening, I spoke to Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of history at U.C.L.A. and one of the authors whose work was removed from the revised course. (My work was listed as secondary reading in the pilot curriculum; it has also been removed.) In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the history of African American studies, its connection to political struggle, and the consequences of the College Board’s actions.

What is Black studies? Why is this not just Black history?

This course is not by any stretch of the imagination a course in African American studies. The College Board says African American studies is an interdisciplinary approach, with the rigors of scholarly inquiry, to analyze the history, culture, and contributions of people of African descent in the U.S., and throughout the African diaspora. But this is not the definition of African American studies, Africana studies, Black studies at the university level.

The way that we teach it, in the way that I came up, is really about examining Black lives: the structures that produce premature death, that make us vulnerable; the ideologies that both invent Blackness and render Black people less than human; and, perhaps most important, the struggle to secure a different future. And so, therefore, a lot of it’s about interrogating racial categories, understanding the persistence of inequality, how this is shaped by the very foundations of Western thought, which is to say, it’s not about making Black people feel better. It’s not about your accomplishments. I’m sure that comes in. But, as a scholarly endeavor, it tries to understand how Black people came into being in the modern world—how that process through kidnapping, enslavement, the extraction of labor, the extraction of ideas, was foundational to the modern world. And, finally, the way that African people really tried to remake and re-envision that world, through art, through ideas, through social movements, through literature, through study in action. That’s what I understand it to be. And that’s not really in this curriculum.

So what do you think happened with the College Board and this course?

There’s two levels. One is that it’s about Ron DeSantis possibly running for President. I think that’s the most important thing, because, no matter what we think about DeSantis and his policies, we know he went to Yale University, and majored in history and political science with a 3.7 G.P.A., which means that he was at one of the premier institutions for history. That’s why I get frustrated when people say he needs to take a class. He took the class. He knows better. He knows that the culture wars actually win votes. He’s trying to get the Trump constituency.

So I think this is about Ron DeSantis wanting to run for President. But I also think that the focus on Florida occludes a bigger story. As you know, this goes back to the Trump years—well before Trump, but let’s just talk about the Trump years—the attack on the 1619 Project, Chris Rufo’s strategy of turning critical race theory into an epithet by denying it any meaning whatsoever. And creating a buzzword. That’s actually a strategy that has nothing to do with the field of African American studies; it has everything to do with vilifying a field—attacking the whole concept of racial justice and equity. So, to me, if DeSantis never banned the class, we would still be in this situation. And although it is true that a number of states did accept the pilot program for the A.P. class, some of those same states have passed, or are about to pass, laws that are banning or limiting what they’re calling critical race theory. So there is a general assault on knowledge, but specifically knowledge that interrogates issues of race, sex, gender, and even class.

It’s an ongoing struggle to roll back anything that’s perceived as diminishing white power. They want to convince white working people—the same white working people who have very little access to good health care and housing, whose lives are actually really precarious, as they move from union jobs to part-time, concierge labor to make ends meet—that somehow, if they can get control of the narrative inside classrooms, their lives would be better. Racism actually damages all of our prospects and futures.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the people who are targeted are you, Angela Davis, myself, bell hooks. To say that we’re not radical would be a lie. What does radical actually mean? What it means, what Black studies is about, is trying to understand how the system works and recognizing that the way the system works now benefits a few at the expense of the many. It’s easy to allow someone to come in, in the name of Black status, and say, “We’re going to talk about ancient Africa, and the great achievements of the Kush of ancient Egypt.” That’s not a threat—not as much as the idea of critical race theory saying that, no matter what policies and procedures and legislation are implemented, the structure of racism, embedded in a capitalist system, embedded in a system of patriarchy, continues to create wealth for some and make the rest of our lives precarious. Precarious in terms of money, precarious in terms of police violence, precarious in terms of environmental catastrophe, precarious in many, many ways. And I think people could agree with me that that’s why we do this scholarship: because we’re trying to figure out a way to make a better future. You know, that’s the whole point. And if that’s subversive, then say it, but it’s definitely not indoctrination, because indoctrination is a state that bans books.

I think one of the ways that this discussion about African American studies has been distorted is that the right claims that, if you are radical and on the left, it is disqualifying as a teacher and an author. In an article published by National Review about the A.P. course, the author said that you were prima-facie disqualified, because your first book was about the Communist Party in Alabama. If you have radical ideas, or radical politics, they claim, you’re more interested in indoctrination than you are in teaching. And so I wonder how you would respond to that—if parents are concerned that, because you are a socialist, or an activist, or embrace, you know, causes on behalf of people, you can’t teach objectively.

Right, of course it’s ridiculous. We have outright conservatives—sometimes just actual confessed white supremacists—who are teaching at all levels. Stanley Kurtz, who wrote that article, was a professor, he got a Ph.D. And he’s writing for a partisan publication. But his credentials are not in question. In fact, he not only is doing that but he’s doing something neither one of us is doing: he’s writing legislation—literally writing legislation for states to ban critical race theory. [In an e-mail, Kurtz acknowledged that a Texas C.R.T. law was partly based on model legislation he authored.]

Our job, as educators, is to open up all students to the world—which is the root of university, universitas. We can do that and still take a political perspective, because we are actual people, right? What I think would disqualify any teacher is to say, “You know what, we’re not going to touch that. That’s off limits.” Unless it’s some made-up, useless piece of information. Generally, we teach in a way that opens up debate and discussion. We encourage disagreement, between us and our students or between students. We don’t necessarily reveal in our classes what our political stakes are. We choose readings that are across the board. And the evidence of it is there in the syllabi, it’s there in the actual teaching evaluations, it’s there in the colleagues who decide that we’re worthy of being hired.

I always tell my students, “I don’t need you to think like me, I need you to think for yourself. And I’m here to help you think critically about everything, and to ask a million questions and try to figure out how to answer them.” It is the right that is actually saying, “Don’t read this book, don’t listen to this person, don’t have this conversation.” I don’t know if that’s ironic—it’s just rank hypocrisy. In the so-called concern about the left ruling the campuses, what we actually have is an onslaught by the right wing to control what we read, who we talk to, and what we talk about.

It’s funny, because they were trying to attack you when you tweeted that the police are not actually helping us and that we have to think about abolition—and yet no one is called into account for arguing that we actually need more police and we need to spend more money. They’re both actual political positions. They’re positions that could be argued, rationally, with evidence.

It’s all politics; it’s just whose politics do you agree with? They want to teach the 1776 Commission, and think that that is O.K., even though that is also a political viewpoint of the world. It’s looking at American history through a particular kind of lens, and that’s O.K. But, if you look at it through a different lens, through a different set of experiences, then it’s somehow indoctrination, propaganda, and something that should be dismissed.

And yet, despite all of these contradictions, they have a tremendous amount of momentum. The 1619 Project has been banned in many localities. Every day, there’s a new state that is finding some way to ban the discussion of critical race theory. What happens next?

I work with a number of organizations, but one in particular, called Communiversity, is a project of Black workers for justice in North Carolina. And what we’ve been talking about is what they’re talking about in Detroit, which is going back to the Freedom Schools idea. The United States might look like Mississippi did in 1960. So, if we cannot provide a fair and objective and useful education in public schools, then movements will have to create alternative institutions and structures.

On the other hand, it’s worth fighting at the legislative level, at the school-board level. And the thing is, the grounds for this were established a long time ago. Do you remember, back in the nineteen-nineties, the whole movement to eliminate school boards and put schools in the hands of mayors? And I’m not talking about the South. I’m talking about New York, Chicago, places like that, saying that somehow school boards are tainted. Why? Because they’re grassroots, or have some kind of relationship to the community.

So the fact is that we’ve been moving in this direction, where you have government input into a public education. Florida is a good example, where the former governor Rick Scott was promoting special incentives for high schools that develop stem programming and none for those that invest in the humanities at the public-school level. Now, this may not sound like an attack on critical race theory, but it’s certainly an attack on critical thinking. What they want to do is reduce public schools to vocational schools. Meanwhile, if you’re rich, and you go to private school, you could do anything you want. You can read the best of literature, you can read the best of art criticism, you can be free—and that is your ticket to Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and to do whatever the hell you want to do. So it is reproducing this kind of class inequality. The architecture for doing so is already there.

There is one last thing I want to ask you just to reflect on, about African American history. Black people were brought to this country to be slaves. And we were enslaved for hundreds of years. And then, when slavery ended, we were legally subjugated for another hundred years. And so it stands to reason that the entirety of Black letters would be completely bound up in questions of struggle, resistance, rebellion. And these are the very issues, topics, and histories that DeSantis and the right are trying to extract from the teaching of Black history. So I was wondering if you could talk some about the development of Black studies, which is a discipline that emerges out of this long struggle that Black people have been engaged in, because of the conditions under which we were brought to this country and the conditions that have been foisted upon us to try to resist.

I would just amplify everything you said: the subject of African American studies, even before it was called that, has been not just the condition of Black people but the condition of the country. And not just narrating that oppression and understanding it, and not just trying to think about ways to move beyond it—to transcend it, to come up with strategies to try to live—but also understanding what’s wrong with this country, with the system.

We’re not just interrogating our lives, we’re interrogating knowledge production itself. And this is the thing that frustrates me, and I keep reminding people: when we look at what’s being banned, it’s anti-racist literature, not racist literature. I’ve never seen any book ban against Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” or John C. Calhoun, or Edmund Ruffin’s “The Political Economy of Slavery,” or Samuel Cartwright, George Fitzhugh, Louis Agassiz. They wrote straight-up scientific racism that has been discredited. And yet those books are not being banned. What’s banned is Toni Morrison. And I’m not saying that those racist books need to be banned. We need to read that, we need to know it. But that they are not the books being banned—what does that tell us?

So much of that work, including by W. E. B. Du Bois, what they were trying to do is write texts that both understand and push back against a whole edifice of extraction, oppression, dispossession. And you would think that anyone who really believes in the American creed, who believes in what the Declaration of Independence says, is going to defend anything that tries to make the nation better—that tries to recognize that, you know, all people are created equal.

But it’s always an uphill battle. Because we could talk about the actual physical brutality that this country is built on. But it’s also built on the scholarship or the mythologies that are written in texts and taught in schools at every single level, that keep reproducing the same structure of knowledge. Black studies is supposed to be an epistemological break, and that’s why it’s dangerous—because it actually wants to try to figure out a way to make this country not racist.

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