This Black History Month, we must do more than celebrate Black achievements. We need to actively defend Black history and the spaces in which it is taught, writes Richard Sudan [photo credit: Getty Images]
This Black History Month, it’s important that we not only celebrate and honour Black achievements in the UK but also confront the ongoing attacks on Black history, academia, and Black representation.
The systematic efforts to erase our narratives from educational institutions and political discourse are happening in clear plain sight.
Two recent alarming cases, the axing of Professor Hakim Adi’s Black history course and Professor Kehinde Andrews’ undergraduate Black Studies program, raise an urgent need to safeguard and treasure Black history and counter an alarming wave of repression.
Professor Hakim Adi’s MRes program in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Chichester was an essential course, the first of its kind in the UK, designed to train students, particularly those of African and Caribbean heritage as historians.
Adi, a highly respected scholar has spent decades researching the histories of African and Caribbean communities producing works like African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History, which meticulously documents the long presence of Black people in the UK. These are our stories, and our stories matter. They are not to be discarded.
Despite this, Adi’s course was shockingly cut in 2023 and Adi himself was made redundant. According to the university, the justification was financial, but this explanation is dubious.
As the University and College Union (UCU) argued, this was an “attack on Black academia”, one that undermined not only Adi’s contributions but also a wider effort to diversify the fields of history. In a country where only 1% of professors are Black, axing a course that empowers Black scholars reads like a deliberate attempt to blunt the advancement of Black academia in the UK.
Similarly, Professor Kehinde Andrews, one of the leading voices on issues of structural racism in the UK, recently saw his pioneering Black Studies undergraduate program at Birmingham City University quietly dropped. Black Studies was the first of its kind in Europe.
Kehinde’s course offered a critical lens on the intersection of race, power, and history while encouraging students to question the foundations and roots of the education system.
Yet, just like Adi’s program, it became a target too. Equally alarming is that Professor Andrews has since been under investigation for using academic terms which are part of Black theory.
The UK’s problem with Black voices
Troublingly, this is not an isolated event but part of a long-standing pattern in which programs that critique racism or challenge the status quo are shut down, silenced and opposed. The history of cultural studies at the University of Birmingham is a case in point.
In the 1970s, under the Margaret Thatcher government, there was an active push to break cultural studies programs that critiqued the state, challenging themes like Thatcher’s ‘law and order’ mantra of the 80s and institutional power more generally.
The late Professor Stuart Hall, one of the founding figures of cultural studies, was at the centre of this struggle. ‘Thatcherism’ itself was a phrase coined in Birmingham by Hall who predicted its rise.
In 2002, the new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology In Birmingham was broken up despite campaigns to fight it.
Professor Andrews, too, is a product of this rich tradition, and the closure of Andrews’s course and the state campaign against him reflects a continuation of that alarming legacy and opposition.
This clear suppression of radical critiques of the state is not confined to education. Politicians like Kemi Badenoch have publicly downplayed the significance of slavery to Britain’s development, furthering a narrative that seeks to minimise Black contributions, experiences and ultimately history.
In an article for the World Economic Forum, Badenoch claimed that slavery was not central to the rise of British wealth — a statement that flies in the face of historical evidence.
This type of historical revisionism is dangerous because it distorts the public’s understanding of Britain’s colonial and imperial past, reinforcing a sanitised version of history that erases the brutal realities of slavery and exploitation.
In addition, we have witnessed troubling moves by political parties to marginalise Black representation. Labour’s recent treatment of figures like Diane Abbott, a longstanding advocate for racial justice, and Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, the candidate sidelined in Clacton at the recent general election, shows the attempts to exclude Black voices from the political arena.
These actions send a clear message that Black contributions to both history and contemporary society are undervalued and under attack.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnIt is no coincidence that the very subjects that encourage students to question institutional power are the ones being shut down alongside efforts to whitewash Britain’s colonial history and political landscape.
Black Studies, cultural studies, and African history programs expose the obvious and evidenced inequalities within the education system and society at large. They encourage students to think critically about race, class, gender and power, and to challenge the dominant narratives that uphold the status quo.
Universities, subject to increasing marketisation under the guise of financial viability, are systematically closing down these programs, claiming they are unpopular or unsustainable.
In reality, these closures are a reflection of neoliberal values that have come to dominate higher education, where courses that do not directly serve capitalist interests are simply seen as expendable.
But we must remember that it’s these radical programs that offer the tools to understand and challenge the deep-seated inequalities that continue to dominate society.
This Black History Month, we must do more than celebrate Black achievements. We need to actively defend Black history and the spaces in which it is taught. Education unions, teachers, and academics, for example, have already called for a more radical approach to Palestine solidarity. It is surely time for these movements to extend their focus to defending Black academics and Black history. Demands for universities to divest from Israel need to be matched with calls to safeguard Black academics and narratives.
Coalitions that resist the ongoing erasure of Black narratives from our institutions must be our route forward and collective pushback. We must unite around a common commitment to anti-racism and anti-imperialism, linking the struggle for Black history with broader movements for social justice.
If pro-Palestinian solidarity is the anti-colonial struggle of our time we need to frame it as an anti-racism battle at heart.
The rise of racism, as demonstrated by numerous studies, makes it clear that this fight is far from over. If we are to protect the gains of the Black Lives Matter movement and ensure that future generations have access to a truthful and comprehensive understanding of history, we need to act.
The fight to safeguard Black history, our academics and historians is a fight for the future in which the massive contributions of Black people are recognised and celebrated, not erased and thrown away.
Richard Sudan is a journalist and writer specialising in anti-racism and has reported on various human rights issues from around the world. His writing has been published by The Guardian, Independent, The Voice and many others.
Follow him on Twitter:Â @richardsudan
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.