In defense of African American studies

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Princeton recently announced Daniel Yu ’26 as the Class of 2026 valedictorian. But on an Instagram post announcing his accomplishment, a top comment derides his major: “How are physics and other real majors supposed to compete with someone majoring in African American studies for valedictorian.”

This comment is obviously problematic for how it undermines Yu’s accomplishments, but its criticism extends beyond him as an individual. Suggesting that African American studies is not a “real” major devalues the critical social and intellectual importance of Black studies as an academic discipline. It is an essential academic department, at Princeton and elsewhere, because it exceptionally engages critical thinking into our social and cultural reality, especially in the context of a political environment which actively devalues the humanities.

Born out of student movements in the 1960s calling for the decentering of the Euro-American perspective in higher education, Black studies explores history through the perspectives of those  who have most been marginalized, both in history and in our textbooks. Princeton’s African American Studies Program was founded in 1969, becoming the Department of African American Studies (AAS) in 2015. But now, the discipline is under attack, both from the Trump administration and from a broader cultural anti-wokeism. Throughout the Trump administration, Black studies and other humanistic disciplines like anthropology have been strategically weakened to obscure the foundational role of race in society and curtail the interrogation of the past and present. Black studies acknowledges an important reality: We can’t erase racism by erasing race.

Black studies allows us to understand history not as a distant or detached narrative but as the foundation for the social and political structures that define our lives today. When I took AAS 304: Black Health Activism in African America, I engaged with agentic stories of suffering, kinship, and resistance under slavery that upended the surface-level narrative of American history I was taught in high school. AAS equipped me with the frameworks to understand how issues like incarceration in the United States, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and environmental injustice are inextricably linked and underpinned by a unified logic. I learned that while slavery may have been outlawed, the ideologies that justified it persist today in reinforcing hierarchies of race, gender, class, and able-bodiedness in the United States and in the world. 

In these classrooms, it becomes clear why Black studies threatens both right-wing “color-blind” and liberal narratives of American progress. By interrogating categories treated as objective and neutral, like “normal” and “disabled,” as founded on histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and anti-Blackness, Black studies refuses to accept historical injustices as merely events of the past. The discipline challenges liberal measures, like civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, that address descriptive representation but obscure the foundationally oppressive systems that continue to entrench white supremacy in the modern era.

An absence of Black studies means that racial inequalities are reproduced, often without acknowledgement of the foundationally oppressive systems that gave rise to them. 

Furthermore, Black studies challenges the “ivory tower” of academia, where knowledge production often exists separately from material change. By telling stories of resistance that are largely excluded from Western education systems, Black studies legitimizes resistance and change as possibilities of the political imagination. The AAS classroom becomes a space where students can imagine radically different ways of existing, encounter political models that embody those possibilities, and see themselves as the builders of those worlds. Black studies is, thus, a deeply liberatory discipline — in telling the stories of those who’ve gone against oppressive forces, resistance is represented as a necessary historical process. As a result, the field empowers us to see ourselves as agents of change in realities we may have regarded as fixed.

The critical engagement with history that Black studies exercises is particularly essential for elite universities like Princeton and other Ivy League institutions, whose graduates make up 13 percent of the top 0.1 percent of highest earners in the United States. When a university education is absent of Black studies, those who carry the most weight in influencing the United States and the world may become blind to how race structures our daily lives. It is a serious error to dismiss AAS as a soft option when it provokes such meticulous and unflinching interrogation of the institutions that define our cultural present and future. 

Especially in a political climate that devalues Black studies, an AAS degree represents a commitment to centering obscured histories as they are pushed to the margins and eroded from within. In addition to experiencing funding cuts and the cancellation of “woke” programs, Black studies is threatened by a cultural anti-wokeism, stigmatizing the field as unnecessary and discouraging students from engaging with it. Furthermore, the devaluation of humanistic pursuits against “prestigious” careers in finance, consulting, and tech distracts from and breeds apathy towards the everyday violence of structural oppression.

Yu’s selection as valedictorian arises as a tide of hope. It is important, now more than ever, to regard Black studies as a legitimate and critical site of knowledge production.

Irene Kim ’28 is a sociology major and African American studies minor from Orange County, Calif. She can be reached at ik7641[at]princeton.edu.

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