I was recently thinking about source texts that every student of Black Studies should read at least once. Not because they are sacred. Not because they contain all the answers. The texts worth returning to are usually the ones that continue to unsettle us. They force us to reconsider questions we thought we had already resolved.
I was led back to W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay Sociology Hesitant. At the time, I was thinking about curriculum. I was thinking about what it means to teach students how to investigate a claim, how to distinguish between evidence and assertion, and how to recognize when an explanation reveals more about the person offering it than the reality it seeks to describe.
I was not thinking about debates over demographic reporting requirements. I was not thinking about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I was not thinking about claims of discrimination against white workers or discussions about Afrikaners seeking refugee status in the United States.
Spotting the Historical Throughline
Over the following weeks however, I found myself returning to those stories repeatedly. For a while, I could not explain why. Part of me suspected I was forcing a connection that was not really there. The obvious explanations did not satisfy me. Depending on who was speaking, these were stories about civil rights, affirmative action, race relations, or politics. But the more I sat with them, the more I felt they were connected by something deeper.
What if these stories are not primarily about race? What if they are about history?
One of the enduring contributions of Black Studies is its insistence that social reality cannot be separated from the historical processes that produce it.
This may seem obvious, but it runs directly against some of the most common assumptions in American public life. We are often encouraged to treat present conditions as if they emerged on their own. Wealth becomes the product of hard work. Poverty becomes the product of poor decisions. Neighborhoods become the result of personal preferences. Institutions become neutral arenas in which individuals compete on equal footing. History disappears. Or rather, history remains present but becomes difficult to see.
Documentation, Visibility, and Who Gets Counted
That is what I hear in Barbara Sizemore’s warning about the collection of racial data. Years ago, she argued that racial inequality would not disappear simply because society stopped documenting it. It would continue through legacy, kinship, friendship, and the accumulated advantages generated by slavery, American apartheid, and tradition. The more I think about that passage, the more I am convinced that Sizemore was writing about something larger than racial data. She was writing about historical visibility.
Legacy, kinship, friendship, and inherited advantage are all ways the past enters the present. They remind us that inequality does not reproduce itself magically. It reproduces itself through institutions, relationships, habits, and assumptions that carry yesterday into today. What concerned Sizemore was not simply that racial data might disappear. It was that the disappearance of evidence that would make historical processes harder to recognize. And once historical processes become difficult to recognize, they become easier to explain away.
The accumulated consequences of slavery, segregation, exclusion, and unequal access to opportunity begin to look less like history and more like nature.
That, it seems to me, is one of the central concerns of Black Studies. Not simply recovering forgotten histories. Learning how to recognize history when it is hiding in plain sight.
This is one reason I found myself returning to Du Bois. In Sociology Hesitant, he worried about explanations that drifted away from the realities they claimed to explain. He challenged scholars to remain accountable to the conditions under which people actually lived rather than becoming captive to abstractions detached from lived experience. More than a century later, I find myself wondering whether we are confronting a related problem. Not the disappearance of knowledge. The reorganization of it.
Manufactured Reality & Historical Disconnection
At the same time that institutions appear less interested in documenting racial disparities, public discourse seems increasingly willing to embrace narratives detached from historical context. Claims about victimhood, discrimination, and injustice circulate widely, yet the historical conditions that produced contemporary inequalities often disappear from the conversation altogether.
The issue is not simply whether inequality exists. The issue is whether we still possess the habits of analysis necessary to recognize inequality as the product of historical processes rather than isolated events. Once history is removed from the analysis, inherited advantage begins to appear natural. Structures begin to look accidental. The consequences of generations of exclusion begin to look like the ordinary outcomes of culture, effort, or individual choice. Perhaps that is why these seemingly unrelated stories continue to stay with me. Not because they prove a particular political position. But because they reveal a deeper struggle over how social reality is understood.
Black Studies emerged, in part, as a challenge to explanations that divorced contemporary conditions from historical causation. It insisted that the past was not finished. It remained active within institutions, policies, communities, and ways of thinking. That insight remains essential. Because once a society loses the ability to connect present arrangements to the historical processes that produced them, inequality no longer needs to justify itself. It no longer needs to explain itself. It only needs to appear natural.
