All,
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."
--Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)
I have been saying for well over 30 years now (just as the esteemed and always profoundly prescient Ruth Ben-Ghiat, as well as renowned Fascism scholar and historian says explicitly in her conversation below with the equally sharp and brilliant political journalist, author, media producer, teacher, and activist Wajahat Ali), that the ultimate goal of the virulently white supremacist far right wing in this country--just like the fascist minority all white National Party did in South Africa after it brutally seized the reins of government there from the large majority black African population in 1948--was the official establishment of a White Christian nationalist ethnostate. In fact it has ALWAYS been crystal clear since its political emergence in June, 2016 that the primary relentless target of the vile despicable and murderous gangster infested Trump/MAGA/GOP fascist regime will be the complete and utter destruction of the human, constitutional, and civil rights of African Americans as citizens and human beings along with all other people of color as well as all others of every ethnicity and/or nationality who insist on fighting for the active maintenance and truly democratic expansion of a deeply progressive and dynamic multiracial and multicultural society firmly rooted in critical thought, freedom, justice, equality, and self determination for all people.
What's distinctive about the other highly informative and frankly posts featured here is that Elie, Eddie, Imani, and Jafari are all heavily and sincerely committed to working with a broad spectrum of individuals and collective groups throughout this society to not only vigorously engage and defeat the malevolent forces who are both intently insistent on both our collective and individual oppression, exploitation, and subservience to fascist hegemony and control. So as always it is crucial that we openly share what we know and feel in this ongoing struggle to pursue and embrace a new society, culture, and social reality that encourages, represents, celebrates, and defends the multidimensional value, creative expression, and endless roiling diversity of our "common humanity" no matter who or what we are or "appear" to be.
"Dare to Struggle", "Dare To Win",
Kofi
Trump Just Created a White Grievance Reparations Fund
And it will be paid for with your tax dollars.
by Elie Mystal
May 19, 2026
The Nation
A “Stop the Steal” protester on January 6, 2021. (Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images)
On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it was creating a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate Trump supporters who have been “mistreated” by previous Democratic administrations. The fund is clearly an effort to offer a financial reward to January 6 insurrectionists—who have already been pardoned by Trump.
The program amounts to a white grievance fund paid for with money stolen from the public.
The fund was announced as part of a “deal” Trump made to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump had accused the IRS of illegally leaking his tax returns. The Trump administration seems to want people to report these two events as if they are linked—the DOJ has framed the slush fund as a way to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare”—but, in reality, they are connected only by the fact that they are both ways for Trump to try to steal money from the government.
The IRS lawsuit would have been thrown out of court if Trump had not dismissed the case. Trump controls the IRS and the Treasury Department. To the extent that the IRS did anything wrong (and the IRS didn’t do anything wrong), Trump’s case against it should have been moot, as he now oversees the agency. There cannot be a “case or controversy” for the courts to adjudicate when one party controls both sides of the litigation. “Trump v. Trump” is not a case. Trump was just trying to extort the government he now runs for $10 billion.
As for the DOJ slush fund, one way to look at it is that Trump is effectively setting up a mechanism where taxpayers have to pay for him to funnel money to his own private army. The people who participated in the January 6 insurrection are literal criminals who acted on Trump’s behalf and were then pardoned by him—only to now be offered taxpayers dollars for their violent efforts. It’s… insane.
Trump socket puppet and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says that the purpose of the fund is to “make right the wrongs that were previously done” because of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department under previous administrations. First of all: It is not “weaponization” of the DOJ to prosecute the criminals who attacked the Capitol; it is the application of criminal laws. I will stipulate that the white people who attacked the Capitol perhaps did not think that laws should be applied to them, but their expectation of privilege doesn’t change the character of what the Justice Department did when prosecuting their offenses.
Moreover, the Justice Department has never been in the business of handing out free money to “make right” the wrongs of the past. If they suddenly are, boy, do I have some claims to make on behalf of the descendants of enslaved Americans.
Because that’s what this fund is: It’s a reparations fund, but only for white people. It is precisely what the reparations movement has been asking for, only the Trump administration wants to extend monetary apologies to white people who did violence on behalf of Trump.
Taking taxpayer dollars to do this—dollars that include taxes paid by Black people living in this country—well, it all reminds me of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. This law, which predated the Emancipation Proclamation, freed all slaves held in Washington, DC, but it did not compensate them—it compensated the slaveholders who “lost” their slaves. Slaveholders who remained loyal to the Union were paid $300 per emancipated person by the federal government.
Obviously, there are many other historical examples of white people demanding government money for their grievances (see: France demanding that Haiti pay an “independence debt” for winning its freedom). Even the Supreme Court’s decision knocking down Trump’s tariffs, which I support, hinges on the idea that (largely white) business owners who paid Trump’s illegal tariffs should be compensated, while the multiracial consumers who have been paying the price of those tariffs at the checkout counter will get nothing. The through line is that when the government does something “bad” to powerful white people, those white people expect to be compensated by the government in real money for their troubles.
Representatives Joe Neguse and Jamie Raskin, both Democrats, have both indicated that they will sue to stop the white grievance reparations fund, but given the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, we have to assume that Trump will get his way. But: If the Supreme Court decides it wants to create this precedent, then progressives and the left should use it too.
The next Democratic president (if we are allowed to have a Democratic president in my lifetime) should create a slush fund to compensate victims of Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional immigration tactics. Immigrants who have been illegally detained should be able to get money from the government; citizens who have been harassed or brutalized by ICE should be able to get monetary apologies; and families of people who have been murdered by ICE should also receive compensation directly from the public till. And it should cost the government billions.
Trump’s white grievance payments literally set the model for how we should compensate the victims of Trump’s atrocities. Oh, and reparations. After this, I never want to hear white Republicans say boo about reparations for Black people ever again. I never want to hear Democrats hem and haw and deflect on the issue. Even Trump is in favor of reparations! He just wants to give them to white people still pissed off that they can’t own slaves anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it was creating a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate Trump supporters who have been “mistreated” by previous Democratic administrations. The fund is clearly an effort to offer a financial reward to January 6 insurrectionists—who have already been pardoned by Trump.
The program amounts to a white grievance fund paid for with money stolen from the public.
The fund was announced as part of a “deal” Trump made to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump had accused the IRS of illegally leaking his tax returns. The Trump administration seems to want people to report these two events as if they are linked—the DOJ has framed the slush fund as a way to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare”—but, in reality, they are connected only by the fact that they are both ways for Trump to try to steal money from the government.
The IRS lawsuit would have been thrown out of court if Trump had not dismissed the case. Trump controls the IRS and the Treasury Department. To the extent that the IRS did anything wrong (and the IRS didn’t do anything wrong), Trump’s case against it should have been moot, as he now oversees the agency. There cannot be a “case or controversy” for the courts to adjudicate when one party controls both sides of the litigation. “Trump v. Trump” is not a case. Trump was just trying to extort the government he now runs for $10 billion.
As for the DOJ slush fund, one way to look at it is that Trump is effectively setting up a mechanism where taxpayers have to pay for him to funnel money to his own private army. The people who participated in the January 6 insurrection are literal criminals who acted on Trump’s behalf and were then pardoned by him—only to now be offered taxpayers dollars for their violent efforts. It’s… insane.
Trump socket puppet and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says that the purpose of the fund is to “make right the wrongs that were previously done” because of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department under previous administrations. First of all: It is not “weaponization” of the DOJ to prosecute the criminals who attacked the Capitol; it is the application of criminal laws. I will stipulate that the white people who attacked the Capitol perhaps did not think that laws should be applied to them, but their expectation of privilege doesn’t change the character of what the Justice Department did when prosecuting their offenses.
Moreover, the Justice Department has never been in the business of handing out free money to “make right” the wrongs of the past. If they suddenly are, boy, do I have some claims to make on behalf of the descendants of enslaved Americans.
Because that’s what this fund is: It’s a reparations fund, but only for white people. It is precisely what the reparations movement has been asking for, only the Trump administration wants to extend monetary apologies to white people who did violence on behalf of Trump.
Taking taxpayer dollars to do this—dollars that include taxes paid by Black people living in this country—well, it all reminds me of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. This law, which predated the Emancipation Proclamation, freed all slaves held in Washington, DC, but it did not compensate them—it compensated the slaveholders who “lost” their slaves. Slaveholders who remained loyal to the Union were paid $300 per emancipated person by the federal government.
Obviously, there are many other historical examples of white people demanding government money for their grievances (see: France demanding that Haiti pay an “independence debt” for winning its freedom). Even the Supreme Court’s decision knocking down Trump’s tariffs, which I support, hinges on the idea that (largely white) business owners who paid Trump’s illegal tariffs should be compensated, while the multiracial consumers who have been paying the price of those tariffs at the checkout counter will get nothing. The through line is that when the government does something “bad” to powerful white people, those white people expect to be compensated by the government in real money for their troubles.
Representatives Joe Neguse and Jamie Raskin, both Democrats, have both indicated that they will sue to stop the white grievance reparations fund, but given the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, we have to assume that Trump will get his way. But: If the Supreme Court decides it wants to create this precedent, then progressives and the left should use it too.
The next Democratic president (if we are allowed to have a Democratic president in my lifetime) should create a slush fund to compensate victims of Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional immigration tactics. Immigrants who have been illegally detained should be able to get money from the government; citizens who have been harassed or brutalized by ICE should be able to get monetary apologies; and families of people who have been murdered by ICE should also receive compensation directly from the public till. And it should cost the government billions.
Trump’s white grievance payments literally set the model for how we should compensate the victims of Trump’s atrocities. Oh, and reparations. After this, I never want to hear white Republicans say boo about reparations for Black people ever again. I never want to hear Democrats hem and haw and deflect on the issue. Even Trump is in favor of reparations! He just wants to give them to white people still pissed off that they can’t own slaves anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elie Mystal
Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution and Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, both published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie v. U.S.” here.
MAGA's End Game is to Replace Democracy With a White Christian Ethnostate! With Ruth-Ben Ghiat
Wajahat Ali
May 19, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skNjyu6ij3M
#MAGA #ChristianNationalism #Trump
What happens when a political movement stops pretending to care about democracy? In this episode of The Left Hook, Wajahat Ali and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on authoritarianism, break down the growing influence of white Christian nationalism inside the MAGA movement and why critics believe the goal is no longer democratic governance — but permanent minority rule built around religious extremism, cultural control, and authoritarian power. From attacks on voting rights and public education to the erosion of church-state separation and the rise of extremist rhetoric, Waj connects the dots on how ideology, fear, and grievance politics are reshaping America’s institutions. This isn’t just about elections anymore. It’s about what kind of country America becomes. thelefthook.substack.com
#MAGA #ChristianNationalism #Trump #Democracy #Politics #Authoritarianism #VotingRights #TheLeftHook #WajahatAli #WhiteNationalism #Project2025 #USPolitics #gop #breakingnews #viral #trending #news #uspolitics
Eddie Glaude and Imani Perry — America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries
Family Action Network
May 15, 2026
VIDEO:
Celebrated
public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Ph.D. (FAN ’20, ’24),
presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American
history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature,
especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back
toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth. "America, U.S.A.: How
Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries," deliberately formulated and
beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s
legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices,
from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin
Luther King, Jr., that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau
of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous
future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous
world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions
of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our
past and present. Centered around the major celebrations of America’s
milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a
riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the
American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply
reflective, "America, U.S.A." is a shining meditation on how we must
reckon with a grim past to strive for the better angels of our future.
Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at
Princeton University and author of New York Times bestselling "Begin
Again" and "We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For." He frequently
appears in the media, as a columnist for TIME Magazine and as an MSNBC
contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline White House with
Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays.
He will be in conversation with Imani Perry, JD, Ph.D., the Henry A.
Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender,
and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard
University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard
Radcliffe Institute. Perry is the author of nine books, including the
New York Times bestseller "South to America" which received the 2022
National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is a 2023 recipient of a
MacArthur Fellowship and has been awarded fellowships from the
Guggenheim and Pew Foundations.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-studies-freedom-democracy/
Feature
The Dismantling of Black Studies
Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-studies-freedom-democracy/
Feature
The Dismantling of Black Studies
Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.
Illustration by Brian Stauffer.
[This article appears in the June 2026 issue, with the headline “The Dismantling of Black Studies.”]
Everyone I know in the US academy—students, staff, faculty, university publishers, and cultural-institution workers—is afraid. But the recent assault on higher education is not evenly distributed. Black studies is where the attack has been the most deliberate, the most structural, and the most revealing of what is at stake. In recent months, university leaders have dismantled departments and deliberately narrowed the pipeline producing the next generation of Black scholars. What is happening is not just a series of isolated bureaucratic decisions; it is a coordinated assault.
The overall chilling effect on academia of these moves, and what they reveal about the erosion of democracy and freedom of thought in the United States, can be enervating, but I have turned to an admonition from Audre Lorde, in a poem that was itself an act of self-preservation:
it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
For students and scholars of Black studies across the country, the process of collective speaking began in earnest on March 5, when Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies, which I lead, hosted a virtual event titled “What We Stand to Lose: A National Forum on Black Studies Under Fire.” I counted 780 people in the webinar at the height of the discussion. The cases presented were specific and damning: The University of Texas at Austin had folded its renowned Department of African and African Diaspora Studies into a generic Social and Cultural Analysis Studies unit; Florida’s Senate Bill 266 had stripped Black-studies courses of their general-education status and cut the research funding that faculty depend on; Kentucky’s House Bill 4 had suspended the University of Louisville’s Pan-African Studies doctoral program and eliminated all graduate assistantships. What emerged from that evening was not despair but a shared and pointed diagnosis: that these were not isolated local crises but nodes in a coordinated sequence—first rhetorical, then legal, then administrative—and the field’s most urgent challenge is not only the government’s relentless crackdown on higher education but also the preemptive measures that institutions are taking to comply with anticipated attacks. Given its scale, this assault is not ours alone to fight: Everyone committed to democracy, intellectual freedom, and the rule of law should be alarmed at what is happening—and prepared to act.
The attacks on Black studies are not only connected to the tectonic rightward shifts we are experiencing in every terrain of public life in the United States, but fundamental to them. It is at the nexus of a project funded by a network of conservative foundations that aims to reverse generations of hard-won progress. The government has waged this war on behalf of those interests to restore an order in which certain kinds of knowledge, certain kinds of people, and certain kinds of life are returned to the margins—where, in this worldview, they belong. What is happening is the product of a sequence that is familiar to students of American history.
A
long tradition: Black scholarsip at, clockwise from top left, Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania; Prairie A&M University in Texas; Hampton
Univeristy in Virginia; and Claflin University in South
Carolina.(Clockwise from top left: Lincoln University via Getty Images;
Prairie View A&M University / Getty Images; Buyenlarge / Getty
Images; Cecil Williams / Claflin University / Getty Images)
Following the rapid progress that took place during the Reconstruction era, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled the legal architecture of Black citizenship, and the country settled back into an arrangement that white citizens apparently found more comfortable. This reneging on the promise of Reconstruction happened in a short period—after the Civil War amendments had been ratified, after Black men had served in Congress and held office across the South, and after the Freedmen’s Bureau had built more than a thousand schools in a decade. Everything that had been won was reversed—not in spite of the law but through it. We are watching that sequence again. What is being unmade this time is not only the right to vote or the right to citizenship—both of which are being whittled away—but also the right to know, the right to make knowledge, and the right to tell the truth.
Black studies is not merely a container for scholarship. It is the set of practices and habits of mind developed over the long intellectual tradition that began before Black people were permitted to attend any educational institution in the United States. Learning to read was itself an act of resistance, routinely punished with violence and sometimes death. South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740, or “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province,” made it a criminal offense to teach enslaved people to write, among the other ways it redefined the enslaved as chattel. Every state in the Deep South followed suit. These new laws targeted writing because writing is the technology of legal personhood—contracts, passes, manumission papers, and official testimony. The logic was clear: Writing is a tool with which to make claims of personhood and belonging.
The long Black intellectual tradition did not wait for institutional permission. It built itself in churches and newspapers; in art, music, and literature; in the margins of Qurans and Bibles; and in the holds of ships. When it finally won its way into the academy, it built itself again. While the standard account of how Black studies came to exist in the American university is accurate and should not be minimized—strikes at San Francisco State in 1968 and a campus takeover at Cornell in 1969, campus shutdowns, and occupations that spread across the country—that account does not always acknowledge what happened after students’ demands were partially met, or how those demands were channeled into particular institutional forms, or who underwrote those forms. As Noliwe Rooks argues in White Money/Black Power, the philanthropic funding of Black studies did not simply help expand the field—it shaped it in specific ways. Grants from the Ford Foundation during the field’s early years favored supplementing the existing curricula at predominantly white institutions over the autonomous, self-governing departments that Black student activists had demanded, producing a field that has been dependent on administrative goodwill from its inception. The American-studies scholar Roderick Ferguson extends this analysis: The university’s incorporation of Black studies was an exercise of power, calibrated to absorb the field’s critical force precisely by appearing to welcome it.
Black studies, strengthened by the diversity within the field, has revised, expanded, and corrected history and transformed academic disciplines and the terms of popular debate. It has provided generations of students of every racial and ethnic background with the tools to participate productively in a multiracial democracy. This success is precisely why it is under attack. But there is a second reason, inseparable from the first: At the very moment Black studies became impossible to ignore, its opponents decided they could no longer tolerate it. Visibility and vulnerability arrived together.
My colleague Farah Jasmine Griffin captured what this moment of “Blacklash” revealed. “Movements are long in the making,” she wrote. “Activists, organizers, artists, and thinkers invest time, do the work, preparing, imagining new possibilities, and identifying the way. Finally, an ember ignited by a myriad of factors takes flame and becomes incandescent.” This is precisely what Black studies has been for more than 50 years—the long preparation, the imagining of new possibilities, the identifying of the way. After George Floyd was murdered by police on May 25, 2020, and protests erupted in all 50 states and more than 60 countries, that preparation became visible on a scale its opponents could not ignore. In June 2020, all of the top-10 nonfiction titles on the New York Times bestseller list were by Black authors or about race, a milestone in the world of publishing. The prevalence of PhDs and faculty members on the bestseller lists was a unique feature of the era. Strands of the long Black intellectual tradition became visible, legible, and highly marketable in unprecedented numbers, even as the backlash was being organized. The same summer that saw a record-breaking surge in sales of anti-racist books and protests for systemic reform also saw a rapid legislative and judicial reaction. The incandescence that cleared ground for transformation became another sort of beacon for those who feared transformation: a call to arms.
Christopher Rufo’s campaign to pervert and weaponize the term critical race theory—a campaign triggered by the College Board’s proposed Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum—bore direct legislative fruit. By 2022, more than 40 states had introduced bills restricting the teaching of “divisive concepts”—a phrase lifted from the vocabulary of the first Trump administration. Texas’s House Bill 3979, Kentucky’s House Bill 4, and Florida’s Stop WOKE Act and Senate Bill 266 were among the most sweeping. The laws were immediately contested in federal court—Andrea Queeley, one of the scholars who spoke at the March 5 Black-studies forum, is a plaintiff in the ongoing federal lawsuit against Florida’s SB 266—but the litigation did not halt their effect, especially after the hard right secured a series of crucial wins.
In the culmination of a generations-long legal battle, in June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The logic that had long treated Black studies as a demographic concession, a diversity mechanism, and a recruitment tool—rather than as a scholarly discipline with its own intellectual authority and reason for being—now had a legal warrant. This conflation with affirmation action and DEI made Black studies acutely vulnerable to whatever fate might befall affirmative action itself. Simply put, the terms of entry contained the terms of eviction.
After Trump’s second inauguration, his administration wasted no time in launching probes into institutions of higher education. His executive orders targeting diversity initiatives bear Orwellian titles like “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which invoke the language of civil rights to dismantle civil-rights infrastructure, and directed civil-rights divisions to investigate and penalize the very programs designed to make civil-rights law meaningful.
In March 2025, the Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations against 45 universities for their participation in the PhD Project—a 32-year-old nonprofit that has helped more than 1,700 Black, Indigenous, and Latino students earn doctoral degrees. Thirty-one of those universities, including Yale, Duke, MIT, Ohio State, and Michigan, have since signed agreements cutting ties with the organization. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called this “the Trump effect in action.”
Following the rapid progress that took place during the Reconstruction era, the Supreme Court systematically dismantled the legal architecture of Black citizenship, and the country settled back into an arrangement that white citizens apparently found more comfortable. This reneging on the promise of Reconstruction happened in a short period—after the Civil War amendments had been ratified, after Black men had served in Congress and held office across the South, and after the Freedmen’s Bureau had built more than a thousand schools in a decade. Everything that had been won was reversed—not in spite of the law but through it. We are watching that sequence again. What is being unmade this time is not only the right to vote or the right to citizenship—both of which are being whittled away—but also the right to know, the right to make knowledge, and the right to tell the truth.
Black studies is not merely a container for scholarship. It is the set of practices and habits of mind developed over the long intellectual tradition that began before Black people were permitted to attend any educational institution in the United States. Learning to read was itself an act of resistance, routinely punished with violence and sometimes death. South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740, or “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Other Slaves in this Province,” made it a criminal offense to teach enslaved people to write, among the other ways it redefined the enslaved as chattel. Every state in the Deep South followed suit. These new laws targeted writing because writing is the technology of legal personhood—contracts, passes, manumission papers, and official testimony. The logic was clear: Writing is a tool with which to make claims of personhood and belonging.
The long Black intellectual tradition did not wait for institutional permission. It built itself in churches and newspapers; in art, music, and literature; in the margins of Qurans and Bibles; and in the holds of ships. When it finally won its way into the academy, it built itself again. While the standard account of how Black studies came to exist in the American university is accurate and should not be minimized—strikes at San Francisco State in 1968 and a campus takeover at Cornell in 1969, campus shutdowns, and occupations that spread across the country—that account does not always acknowledge what happened after students’ demands were partially met, or how those demands were channeled into particular institutional forms, or who underwrote those forms. As Noliwe Rooks argues in White Money/Black Power, the philanthropic funding of Black studies did not simply help expand the field—it shaped it in specific ways. Grants from the Ford Foundation during the field’s early years favored supplementing the existing curricula at predominantly white institutions over the autonomous, self-governing departments that Black student activists had demanded, producing a field that has been dependent on administrative goodwill from its inception. The American-studies scholar Roderick Ferguson extends this analysis: The university’s incorporation of Black studies was an exercise of power, calibrated to absorb the field’s critical force precisely by appearing to welcome it.
Black studies, strengthened by the diversity within the field, has revised, expanded, and corrected history and transformed academic disciplines and the terms of popular debate. It has provided generations of students of every racial and ethnic background with the tools to participate productively in a multiracial democracy. This success is precisely why it is under attack. But there is a second reason, inseparable from the first: At the very moment Black studies became impossible to ignore, its opponents decided they could no longer tolerate it. Visibility and vulnerability arrived together.
My colleague Farah Jasmine Griffin captured what this moment of “Blacklash” revealed. “Movements are long in the making,” she wrote. “Activists, organizers, artists, and thinkers invest time, do the work, preparing, imagining new possibilities, and identifying the way. Finally, an ember ignited by a myriad of factors takes flame and becomes incandescent.” This is precisely what Black studies has been for more than 50 years—the long preparation, the imagining of new possibilities, the identifying of the way. After George Floyd was murdered by police on May 25, 2020, and protests erupted in all 50 states and more than 60 countries, that preparation became visible on a scale its opponents could not ignore. In June 2020, all of the top-10 nonfiction titles on the New York Times bestseller list were by Black authors or about race, a milestone in the world of publishing. The prevalence of PhDs and faculty members on the bestseller lists was a unique feature of the era. Strands of the long Black intellectual tradition became visible, legible, and highly marketable in unprecedented numbers, even as the backlash was being organized. The same summer that saw a record-breaking surge in sales of anti-racist books and protests for systemic reform also saw a rapid legislative and judicial reaction. The incandescence that cleared ground for transformation became another sort of beacon for those who feared transformation: a call to arms.
Christopher Rufo’s campaign to pervert and weaponize the term critical race theory—a campaign triggered by the College Board’s proposed Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum—bore direct legislative fruit. By 2022, more than 40 states had introduced bills restricting the teaching of “divisive concepts”—a phrase lifted from the vocabulary of the first Trump administration. Texas’s House Bill 3979, Kentucky’s House Bill 4, and Florida’s Stop WOKE Act and Senate Bill 266 were among the most sweeping. The laws were immediately contested in federal court—Andrea Queeley, one of the scholars who spoke at the March 5 Black-studies forum, is a plaintiff in the ongoing federal lawsuit against Florida’s SB 266—but the litigation did not halt their effect, especially after the hard right secured a series of crucial wins.
In the culmination of a generations-long legal battle, in June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The logic that had long treated Black studies as a demographic concession, a diversity mechanism, and a recruitment tool—rather than as a scholarly discipline with its own intellectual authority and reason for being—now had a legal warrant. This conflation with affirmation action and DEI made Black studies acutely vulnerable to whatever fate might befall affirmative action itself. Simply put, the terms of entry contained the terms of eviction.
After Trump’s second inauguration, his administration wasted no time in launching probes into institutions of higher education. His executive orders targeting diversity initiatives bear Orwellian titles like “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which invoke the language of civil rights to dismantle civil-rights infrastructure, and directed civil-rights divisions to investigate and penalize the very programs designed to make civil-rights law meaningful.
In March 2025, the Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations against 45 universities for their participation in the PhD Project—a 32-year-old nonprofit that has helped more than 1,700 Black, Indigenous, and Latino students earn doctoral degrees. Thirty-one of those universities, including Yale, Duke, MIT, Ohio State, and Michigan, have since signed agreements cutting ties with the organization. Education Secretary Linda McMahon called this “the Trump effect in action.”
Rearguard
action: Students at Harvard protested in 2018 in response to a lawsuit
attacking affirmative action.(Adam Glanzman / Bloomberg / Getty Images)
Iunderstand the situation not only from my vantage as the director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies and a professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, but also as a student. In the late 1990s, I returned to college after a long stint away. I was a work-study student in the Africana Studies program at New York University, which comprised a beautiful suite of offices, a seminar room, and a library filled with African art. Writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and actors regularly dropped by for what felt like an ongoing extracurricular graduate seminar. Across the hall was the Asian/Pacific/American Studies program, which had its own resources and intellectual agenda. The connections that formed—scholars thinking together about diaspora, colonialism, and belonging—were possible because each program could show up as itself. We were intellectual neighbors not because an administrator had decided that all the subalterns should be housed together to feed at the same shallow resource trough, but because each formation had been built into something that could stand on its own.
In 2005, NYU quietly folded its Africana Studies program into a broad administrative umbrella called the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, without meaningful consultation with the faculty and students who would be affected. One day there was a program and an intellectually rich and generative space. The next day there was an announcement and a reorganization. At the time, this move was called “prudent.” We should have paid more attention.
Dissolving into “Social and Cultural Analysis” what took 50 years to build was a ruthless redistribution—a wresting away—of earned power. What remains of a distinct scholarly project is being subjected to a process whose outcome has not merely already been determined but has been decided off-campus, in what I can only imagine are dank, smoke-filled bunkers at the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute, which coauthored the model anti-DEI legislation that Texas enacted and then praised the Texas campaign—calling on the federal government to defund universities that do not comply. Their work is financed by the same groups that have spent decades building the legal and legislative infrastructure now being deployed against public universities.
On February 12, 2026, the news arrived the way bad news often does now: colleagues pinging one another across time zones about the latest development in what had become a litany of academic catastrophes that had been mounting since Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, but which took on head-spinning velocity with Trump’s second inauguration and the crackdowns by universities on students protesting in solidarity with Gaza. The leaders of the Black-studies program at UT Austin learned, in a 30-minute Zoom call, that the department would be folded—along with American studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies—into yet another Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the blandly efficient label that’s shaping up to be the preferred nomenclature. More than 800 students are currently enrolled in the departments being dismantled.
One week after UT Austin announced the consolidation, the university’s governor-appointed regents voted unanimously to limit what they called “unnecessary controversial subjects” in the curriculum. This purposefully vague language is part and parcel of the moves by the Trump administration to censor Smithsonian museum exhibits and limit the “guilt” white people might feel when confronting US history, for example. Undefined “controversy” as an administrative criterion is a mandate to be afraid. And the mandate is being issued everywhere at once.
On February 20, NYU canceled 13 culture-, identity-, and faith-based graduation celebrations—including for Black, Latine, LGBTQ+, and first-generation students—citing “the current political climate” without elaboration. NYU is not a public university in a red state; it is a private research university in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The false dichotomy of red state/blue state, public/private, flagship/Ivy has become not only debilitating but dangerous. The assault on the academy does not recognize those distinctions. Neither should our resistance.
Iunderstand the situation not only from my vantage as the director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies and a professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, but also as a student. In the late 1990s, I returned to college after a long stint away. I was a work-study student in the Africana Studies program at New York University, which comprised a beautiful suite of offices, a seminar room, and a library filled with African art. Writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and actors regularly dropped by for what felt like an ongoing extracurricular graduate seminar. Across the hall was the Asian/Pacific/American Studies program, which had its own resources and intellectual agenda. The connections that formed—scholars thinking together about diaspora, colonialism, and belonging—were possible because each program could show up as itself. We were intellectual neighbors not because an administrator had decided that all the subalterns should be housed together to feed at the same shallow resource trough, but because each formation had been built into something that could stand on its own.
In 2005, NYU quietly folded its Africana Studies program into a broad administrative umbrella called the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, without meaningful consultation with the faculty and students who would be affected. One day there was a program and an intellectually rich and generative space. The next day there was an announcement and a reorganization. At the time, this move was called “prudent.” We should have paid more attention.
Dissolving into “Social and Cultural Analysis” what took 50 years to build was a ruthless redistribution—a wresting away—of earned power. What remains of a distinct scholarly project is being subjected to a process whose outcome has not merely already been determined but has been decided off-campus, in what I can only imagine are dank, smoke-filled bunkers at the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute, which coauthored the model anti-DEI legislation that Texas enacted and then praised the Texas campaign—calling on the federal government to defund universities that do not comply. Their work is financed by the same groups that have spent decades building the legal and legislative infrastructure now being deployed against public universities.
On February 12, 2026, the news arrived the way bad news often does now: colleagues pinging one another across time zones about the latest development in what had become a litany of academic catastrophes that had been mounting since Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, but which took on head-spinning velocity with Trump’s second inauguration and the crackdowns by universities on students protesting in solidarity with Gaza. The leaders of the Black-studies program at UT Austin learned, in a 30-minute Zoom call, that the department would be folded—along with American studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies—into yet another Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the blandly efficient label that’s shaping up to be the preferred nomenclature. More than 800 students are currently enrolled in the departments being dismantled.
One week after UT Austin announced the consolidation, the university’s governor-appointed regents voted unanimously to limit what they called “unnecessary controversial subjects” in the curriculum. This purposefully vague language is part and parcel of the moves by the Trump administration to censor Smithsonian museum exhibits and limit the “guilt” white people might feel when confronting US history, for example. Undefined “controversy” as an administrative criterion is a mandate to be afraid. And the mandate is being issued everywhere at once.
On February 20, NYU canceled 13 culture-, identity-, and faith-based graduation celebrations—including for Black, Latine, LGBTQ+, and first-generation students—citing “the current political climate” without elaboration. NYU is not a public university in a red state; it is a private research university in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The false dichotomy of red state/blue state, public/private, flagship/Ivy has become not only debilitating but dangerous. The assault on the academy does not recognize those distinctions. Neither should our resistance.
Confronting
history: High school students protested after the teaching of critical
race theory was banned in Southern California’s Temecula Valley school
district.(Watchara Phomicinda / The Press-Enterprise / Getty Images)
Ikeep returning to an image that heather McGhee gives us in her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together: the city of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959, filling its public swimming pools with cement rather than allow Black children to swim in them. And it wasn’t just the pools: The parks, the zoo, the community center—all public spaces were shuttered for more than a decade. McGhee documents this pattern throughout American public life: the willingness to destroy the commons rather than share them. Pools around the country were not drained because they were expensive or dangerous or posed any harm. They were drained because white citizens found Black presence in those pools intolerable. And as white children sweltered in the heat—believing that something had been taken from them that was rightfully theirs—their parents continued to insist that the pools had been closed for everyone’s benefit.
Black studies is the pool. All over the country, you can hear cement trucks rumbling down the streets.
The political theorist Juliet Hooker gives us the analytical frame this moment requires. In Black Grief/White Grievance, Hooker argues that American democracy is structured by a fundamental asymmetry: Black citizens are expected to absorb political loss without breathing a word of grief, while white citizens are permitted to experience and bemoan losses that have not yet occurred—and in many cases never will—as legitimate political wounds demanding remedies. What the current moment calls a restoration, a return to some undivided and uncontested American knowledge before things became “unnecessarily controversial,” is a grievance projected from a past that never existed.
“Those were the days,” sang Archie and Edith Bunker. “Make America great again,” chant the president and his supporters. The regents of UT Austin, solemnly voting to protect students from subjects they cannot name, are singing the same song. The harm they insist be remedied cannot be documented, because it has not occurred. This is anticipatory grievance—laundered through the administrative process and dressed in the false attire of stewardship and public trust. And yet the performance of that imaginary loss produces entirely real consequences for actual people.
Vice President JD Vance, who holds degrees from Ohio State and Yale, has called educators “enemies.” He and the other Ivy League–educated men and women in the administration who are attacking academic freedom do not want to destroy the university because it is “elite.” They want to remake all universities in their own old image and with all the old exclusions. Their quarrel is not with so-called elite universities, and it is certainly not with real elites. They are mad at what their alma maters look like when Black students and scholars are fully present in them—when the pool, in other words, is open. The knee-jerk accusation of elitism is key scene-setting shtick in the political theater: performed to force those who object to the destruction to disqualify themselves before speaking, so that the work of destruction may continue without witness.
Ikeep returning to an image that heather McGhee gives us in her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together: the city of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959, filling its public swimming pools with cement rather than allow Black children to swim in them. And it wasn’t just the pools: The parks, the zoo, the community center—all public spaces were shuttered for more than a decade. McGhee documents this pattern throughout American public life: the willingness to destroy the commons rather than share them. Pools around the country were not drained because they were expensive or dangerous or posed any harm. They were drained because white citizens found Black presence in those pools intolerable. And as white children sweltered in the heat—believing that something had been taken from them that was rightfully theirs—their parents continued to insist that the pools had been closed for everyone’s benefit.
Black studies is the pool. All over the country, you can hear cement trucks rumbling down the streets.
The political theorist Juliet Hooker gives us the analytical frame this moment requires. In Black Grief/White Grievance, Hooker argues that American democracy is structured by a fundamental asymmetry: Black citizens are expected to absorb political loss without breathing a word of grief, while white citizens are permitted to experience and bemoan losses that have not yet occurred—and in many cases never will—as legitimate political wounds demanding remedies. What the current moment calls a restoration, a return to some undivided and uncontested American knowledge before things became “unnecessarily controversial,” is a grievance projected from a past that never existed.
“Those were the days,” sang Archie and Edith Bunker. “Make America great again,” chant the president and his supporters. The regents of UT Austin, solemnly voting to protect students from subjects they cannot name, are singing the same song. The harm they insist be remedied cannot be documented, because it has not occurred. This is anticipatory grievance—laundered through the administrative process and dressed in the false attire of stewardship and public trust. And yet the performance of that imaginary loss produces entirely real consequences for actual people.
Vice President JD Vance, who holds degrees from Ohio State and Yale, has called educators “enemies.” He and the other Ivy League–educated men and women in the administration who are attacking academic freedom do not want to destroy the university because it is “elite.” They want to remake all universities in their own old image and with all the old exclusions. Their quarrel is not with so-called elite universities, and it is certainly not with real elites. They are mad at what their alma maters look like when Black students and scholars are fully present in them—when the pool, in other words, is open. The knee-jerk accusation of elitism is key scene-setting shtick in the political theater: performed to force those who object to the destruction to disqualify themselves before speaking, so that the work of destruction may continue without witness.
Institution
builder: Manning Marable founded the Institute of African American
Studies at Columbia University in 1993.(Mario Tama / Getty Images)
I joined Columbia’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, which grew out of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, in 2023. Founded by Manning Marable, who was one of the most widely read and influential scholars of the late 20th century, the department also publishes Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, which Marable launched in 1999. As its editor, I often sit in his chair, not metaphorically but literally. I am telling you this not to establish a credential but to offer an orientation: I know what it feels like to inherit hard-won infrastructure and to feel, in the same moment, how fragile that infrastructure is.
Columbia has been specifically targeted by the current administration: federal funding frozen, governance restructured under duress. The institution—and, by definition, all universities—was never and should not be the uncomplicated sanctuary that some, from the outside, thought it to be.
Marable understood this. He spent decades insisting that the intellectual life of Black people deserved a permanent institutional home at one of the world’s great universities—adjacent to Harlem, in the city of New York. He knew that Black studies was neither a gift that any university bestowed on Black people nor a cosmetic service to an institution. It was a demand that Black people made: that their lives and their thought be treated as the center of inquiry rather than the margin of someone else’s paradigm. Marable and many others worked so that the next generation would inherit infrastructure rather than rubble. I feel the weight of that inheritance precisely because what was built is not permanent. Right now in the United States, it is being tested in ways that he anticipated, and that we are still learning to meet.
Across this country, university leaders and trustees seduced by the path of least resistance that the words “Social and Cultural Analysis” seem to promise must recognize that diminishing or dissolving departments in Black, gender, queer, and ethnic studies, canceling graduation ceremonies, and placing academic programs under federal conditions are not educational judgments or even smart budgetary decisions. These are choices to participate in a political project whose trajectory is already historically clear—a project whose other nodes include book bans, voting restrictions, and the suppression of immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights, leading to the diminishment of everyone’s rights and making “rule of law,” “academic freedom,” and “citizenship” meaningless rhetoric left for the dustbin of history. The signal they send—that belonging is conditional and subject to revision whenever the political climate makes it inconvenient—will outlast this administration. It will be remembered, even if these shortsighted decisions destroy the university and fill it with cement.
This country has been here before—and more than once, sweltering in the heat of the disappearance of a common good and blaming the wrong folks. The question is not whether we understand the arc of this history. The question is whether we will bend it—or, silently, watch it break.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jafari Sinclaire Allen
Jafari Sinclaire Allen is a professor at Columbia University and the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies.
I joined Columbia’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, which grew out of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, in 2023. Founded by Manning Marable, who was one of the most widely read and influential scholars of the late 20th century, the department also publishes Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, which Marable launched in 1999. As its editor, I often sit in his chair, not metaphorically but literally. I am telling you this not to establish a credential but to offer an orientation: I know what it feels like to inherit hard-won infrastructure and to feel, in the same moment, how fragile that infrastructure is.
Columbia has been specifically targeted by the current administration: federal funding frozen, governance restructured under duress. The institution—and, by definition, all universities—was never and should not be the uncomplicated sanctuary that some, from the outside, thought it to be.
Marable understood this. He spent decades insisting that the intellectual life of Black people deserved a permanent institutional home at one of the world’s great universities—adjacent to Harlem, in the city of New York. He knew that Black studies was neither a gift that any university bestowed on Black people nor a cosmetic service to an institution. It was a demand that Black people made: that their lives and their thought be treated as the center of inquiry rather than the margin of someone else’s paradigm. Marable and many others worked so that the next generation would inherit infrastructure rather than rubble. I feel the weight of that inheritance precisely because what was built is not permanent. Right now in the United States, it is being tested in ways that he anticipated, and that we are still learning to meet.
Across this country, university leaders and trustees seduced by the path of least resistance that the words “Social and Cultural Analysis” seem to promise must recognize that diminishing or dissolving departments in Black, gender, queer, and ethnic studies, canceling graduation ceremonies, and placing academic programs under federal conditions are not educational judgments or even smart budgetary decisions. These are choices to participate in a political project whose trajectory is already historically clear—a project whose other nodes include book bans, voting restrictions, and the suppression of immigrant and LGBTQ+ rights, leading to the diminishment of everyone’s rights and making “rule of law,” “academic freedom,” and “citizenship” meaningless rhetoric left for the dustbin of history. The signal they send—that belonging is conditional and subject to revision whenever the political climate makes it inconvenient—will outlast this administration. It will be remembered, even if these shortsighted decisions destroy the university and fill it with cement.
This country has been here before—and more than once, sweltering in the heat of the disappearance of a common good and blaming the wrong folks. The question is not whether we understand the arc of this history. The question is whether we will bend it—or, silently, watch it break.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jafari Sinclaire Allen
Jafari Sinclaire Allen is a professor at Columbia University and the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies.
