a quick note on Black student resistance and the university

I did not write about Black student protests because it was my scholarly interest, and I’m increasingly not really interested in how scholars narrate the meaning and efficacy of Black student protests within the broad fields of history or social movements theory. I am interested for other reasons. Black student protests were the only reason that Black Studies as an intellectual project could exist in its current form. And it’s Black Studies as a project that animates my life and thinking. Its links to the Black liberation struggle were always there, always present. [Which is what some of those academic treatments—some by people who call Black Studies home— often deny, choosing to give autopsies of movements, as if they were not living traditions]. And the question of liberation is what animates the work that was passed to me.

So the meaning of Black student movements within the universities has been to bend and fold and ultimately perhaps rend apart the mechanisms that are in place that prevent that work, that stand in the way of our dreams. These universities, however, are only one site of that struggle. The impetus toward liberation or decolonization, the Black Studies imperative of self-determination and self-awareness, emanate from what has happened and is happening beyond the university gates. If our education is not tied to that momentum, it is not relevant. And worse, it does the work of those for whom our liberation would mean the end of their world.

Universities then have a choice to make. To be clear, they make that choice every day. But student activism—particularly Black student activism is one of the many forms of resistance that is aimed at making that choice more difficult. And so it continues, even as I speak.