Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies

(Hardback)

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White supremacists are attempting to control our peoples future by erasing our past. But we won't let them. The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. Were ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win.
Colin Kaepernick

Since its founding as a discipline in 1969, Black Studies has been under constant attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it.

Florida is the frontline of an increasingly pitched battle taking place in schools and communities across the country. State legislatures are introducing laws to remove work by Black scholars like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Kimberl Crenshaw, James Baldwin, and many others from classrooms, libraries, and curricula.

radical. It came into being in undaunted opposition to the racial status quo. Thats what makes it dangerous. It refuses to accept the world as it isa world of premature Black death and vulnerability, a world of lethal doses of racial inequity, a world where Black people are rendered less than human. To the contrary, Black Studies has always been integral to the struggle for human liberation.

The assault on Black Studies is an assault on movements fighting for a better future. It signals a disturbing truth about the US political landscape: the so-called war on woke is far from over. Its just beginning, and it needs to be confronted head-on.

gives students and non-students alike access to a history and tradition that is being suppressed.

Author Bio

Colin Kaepernick is a Super Bowl quarterback and New York Times bestselling author who fights oppression globally. He founded the Know Your Rights Camp, which advances the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown people through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization, and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University.