A Project Toward Black Life: Teaching Black Studies in the Humanities

Abstract

By primarily locating the study of Black people through the lens of victimhood and pathology, university research and teaching often reinforce the notion of Blackness as social, cultural, and economic deficit. Centring Black ideas, art, and imagination as critical to a reformulation of the racist logic of Western thought offers a model for engaging the histories of Black peoples in Canada that exceeds a simple anti-racism lens. Invoking the early 19th-century debate about Black education between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and drawing on lessons learned through the creation of a Black Canadian Studies Certificate at York University in Toronto, Canada, this article suggests that positioning Black studies within the humanities offers a different set of theoretical paradigms for thinking about human relationships and human possibilities. Understanding Black studies as a project toward, and not against, Black life reveals the critical role Black studies plays both in transforming the core character of universities and the societies in which we live.