How Black Studies departments are being dismantled at American colleges – Literary Hub

How Black Studies departments are being dismantled at American colleges.

By Brittany Allen, March 20, 2026

A new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education shows how Black Studies departments around the country have been kneecapped by a multi-pronged conservative strategy to halt the study of race at American schools.

Those who have been paying attention to the administration’s ongoing campaign against “DEI” will not be shocked to find that gambling’s been going on here. But Jafari S. Allen, author of the Chronicle analysis and editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, broke down the how and the who in a compellingly clear-eyed study.

Inspired by an emergency forum held earlier this March—which convened leaders of the imperiled discipline from colleges all around the country—Allen takes a bird’s eye view of bummer terrain. The current crisis facing ethnic studies, he argues, is the result of four distinct rhetorical, legal, administrative, and enforcement strategies.

Allen pins the origins of a rhetorical strategy to early 2020, when conservative activist Christopher Rufo launched his screed against Critical Race Theory, a complex body of scholarship that he effectively defined as “any teaching in K-12 education about race, racism, and American history.”

This tack gained major traction on the right, and became a key Trump platform. And while public opinion was being whipped, a legal strategy kicked off behind the bench.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ended “race-conscious admissions,” i.e., affirmative action.

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