James Jennings: What Black Studies Means to Me

James Jennings, Jr. is a second-year Master’s student in the African and African American Diaspora Studies Department. He is a Double Discovery Teaching Fellow, educating high school students in popular African American protest music and literature and the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. In this post, James reflects on his academic journey, family history, work as a teacher, and the importance of Black Studies as a discipline.

February 22, 2023

In a recent African American Policy Forum panel entitled Whitewashing Black Studies: The Fight for African American Studies in the Era of Racial Backlash, Yale University Professor Roderick Ferguson, assessed the convergence of College Board and right wing politicians’ efforts to disavow the educational legitimacy of the AP African American Studies proposed curriculum. Our contemporary fight, he said, is to “interrupt the social reproduction of cowardice.” Enter: Black Studies. To more effectively galvanize the intergenerational courage and collectivity needed to combat today’s stifling apathy, careerism, and higher rates of social isolation, learning about Black political struggle and cultural movements instills within us the resilience and determination necessary to keep the fight towards justice for all alive.

Chalkboard and powerpoint presentation

When we acknowledge the past honestly, we can begin to understand how to effectively lead liberatory movements that transform our present and future.

James Jennings (GSAS '23)

I am a musician, poet, teacher, and graduate student in the African and African American Diaspora Studies Department, and I come from a family of educators, healers, and musicians. We value cultural and intellectual knowledge because it has the power to create collective identities, a love for community, and movements for justice. My academic journey and my family history have shown me how essential an appreciation of Black History is today. Black History Month, which initially began as Negro History Week, created by Carter G. Woodson in 1926, is an annual reminder that both political advocacy and education are crucial elements in actuating America’s professed gospel of egalitarian representative democracy. Black History Month gives both Black and non-Black teachers and students the opportunity to really dig into American History for what it is. It’s an annual reminder of what we should be doing all the time.  As someone who studies topics pertaining to Blackness in America and globally, it's essential for me to point out the problematic pattern of reducing Black history to factoids and “did-you-know” recitations to “check-off” 28 days per year. These gestures often feel performative, superficial and, like denialism, do not help us to understand our shared past as Americans – or move forward. 

James holding microphone onstage

When we acknowledge the past honestly, we can begin to understand how to effectively lead liberatory movements that transform our present and future. As Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project and Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle remind us, Black Americans have always led the vanguard for freedom and democracy, even before the official founding of this nation. I think of the many great intellectuals, freedom fighters, and artists of the Black Radical and Feminist Traditions who challenged the status quo and articulated the expansive democratic visions of those identities in the margins of civil society. I often wonder why we don’t readily learn about the Combahee River Collective or hear about the late radical visions of Dr. King or W.E.B. DuBois for instance. Or how figures like Claudette Colvin (who is still alive!) or Bayard Rustin effectively get erased from the Civil Rights Movement narrative, despite their tremendous impact. A proper examination of Black History has the opportunity to ignite the curiosity and courage to be honest about our racial past to create a more equitable future. Black History is American History. As America becomes more racially heterogeneous, opponents of racial harmony must increasingly begin to acknowledge their obsessive attachments to racial hierarchies. These hierarchies work to benefit a small collective while subjugating the equal and inherent dignity of African-Americans and other communities of color. Black Studies fills in the historical gaps where the archive fails, and is a looking-glass to America’s racial aphasia. Its life-affirming pedagogic charge calls us to deracialize the stereotypes, attitudes, and beliefs rooted in separation and fear, that brainwash us into thinking there is a certain way to be or perform American-ness. As James Baldwin stated, “The reason people think it’s important to be White is that they think it’s important not to be Black.” Until this is not true, we have work to do.

“Black History is American History.”

James Jennings (GSAS '23)
James with his mother and grandmother

My mother is a public school educator in the Los Angeles Unified School District, as well as a labor union representative for United Teachers Los Angeles. Her lifelong commitment to equitable educational advocacy influences my worldview as a scholar and as an individual who is concerned about ensuring quality education for future generations. The proliferation of ethnic cultural studies and critical race theory in the classroom today is the tangible result of educators, like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Gloria Ladson-Billings, who have pushed not only for just labor practices but also for inclusive teaching and education policies. The legislative opposition to critical race theory and to acknowledging historical facts is a fight that mirrors 19th century Lost Cause ideology. Many still believe these myths, which were codified as Jim Crow laws that violently diminished the political and economic advancements made by formerly enslaved Blacks during Reconstruction. (Black Studies taught me this!) The struggle to preserve historical facticity within our national politics today is not only about being on the “right” side of justice. Much more, Black studies reminds us to build upon pre-existing historical legacies of ‘freedom dreaming’ and ‘politics of resistance and refusal’ as they invigorate within us the willingness to do something about the injustices we see in our national politics, in the workforce, and in the classroom. 

Image of James holding book and Standing behind Angela Davis

My journey to Black studies was circuitous, to say the least. As a classical vocalist entering undergrad at Bucknell University, I had firmly selected music as my primary major. As I searched for a second major, I jumped in and out of political science, anthropology, and history, finally arriving at Africana/Black studies. Like most Black students, prior to taking Black studies coursework, I rarely saw positive reflections of people who looked like me in the assigned materials. Whenever a Black figure appeared, they were nearly always in a “supporting” role. They were often merely a vessel (or a  “thing”) to assist, be punished, or humiliated–not the person driving the narrative. I began to internalize this, wondering why my educational system continued to circulate notions of Black serviceability as normative and as something Black students should not be offended by and should get accustomed to. Luckily, my advisor at Bucknell Dr. Jaye Austin Williams, a director and theater expert in Black Performance Theory put me on a new academic path; exposing me to authors who interrogated the structural nature of American race relations and the violent interplay of white supremacy and anti-blackness globally. Through numerous classes with her and other departmental professors, I learned about cultural hegemony through James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Toni Morrison’s Playing In The Dark. I devoured the pages of liberatory writers such as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter, Paulo Friere, and contemporary Black theoreticians like Saidiyah Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, and Hortense Spillers. I realized that I came to the discipline of Black studies lacking the language and ability to analyze and articulate the unconscious  prejudice and racism I saw and endured. These literary and artistic giants intellectually and psychologically affirmed my existence, while enlivening my imagination to creatively respond through the protest music and poetry I produce. I am still learning from them.

Inspired by my undergraduate studies where I ventured beyond the assigned reading lists to learn about numerous Black classical 19th and 20th century composers like Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, George Walker and William Grant Still, I decided to pursue a Master’s in African American Studies to further ground my historical training with theoretical and literary analysis. As a musician-scholar, I often draw inspiration from entertainers and performers who shifted from their role as artist to that of a social commentator/reflector or public intellectual like Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, and Stevie Wonder. The African and African American Diaspora Studies Department here at Columbia is interdisciplinary, giving me the space to connect Black history, culture and politics with literary analysis, poetry, sound and performance studies, and religion.

"Prior to taking Black studies coursework, I rarely saw positive reflections of people who looked like me in the assigned materials."

James Jennings (GSAS '23)

As I move closer towards the end of my program here, I am interested in spaces of Black sonic authorship (religious and popular). I study the rise of the New City Parish following the 1992 LA riots as a multiracial, multi-congregational religious public activist model that is built primarily on evangelical worship but is artistically substantiated through choral vocal performances, sign language, and orchestral ministries that bounds Lutheran churches in Inglewood, Compton, and Los Angeles together. In these spaces, messages of collective struggle and the potential of societal unity ring out. I am thinking about how I can be involved in creating, growing, and making sure spaces like this thrive today and are remembered tomorrow.

James sharing meal outdoors

On February 4th, following the official 2:30pm class dismissal for my Double Discovery course, Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, three students voluntarily stayed behind for additional questions and discussion. The lesson of the day introduced students to three poets of the movement: Langston Hughes (who most knew from school), Claude McKay, and Anne Spencer. These poets were some of the earliest voices to contest racial subservience in their writings following WWI’s national episode of racial terror, the Red Summer of 1919. After reading through McKay’s “If We Must Die and Spencer’s “White Things,” these three students began to problematize their school’s politically watered-down and historically fragmented lesson plans, which solely focused on singular figures like Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and Barack Obama. They then challenged themselves to think about the numerous Black leaders, activists, and everyday people who have intentionally been erased from public memories as a result of their counter hegemonic protestations. They asked me questions about political organizing and the role of cultural production in achieving racial justice, and affirmingly, I conversed with them at length like my mentors Dr. Jaye Williams at Bucknell and Dr. Shana Redmond at Columbia did with me. Roughly three hours later, at 5:28pm, we exited the Hamilton classroom, giving way for the incoming debate team practice. Later that night, I wondered how long we would have gone on talking, if not for the untimely room request, and I smiled at the thought. Luckily, as my students prove, interest in Black history and African American Studies is here to stay. The students are hungry for it, and so too must America. 

“Interest in Black history and African American Studies is here to stay. The students are hungry for it, and so too must America.”

 

James Jennings (GSAS '23)


 

Profile

James Jennings, Jr. is a second-year Master’s student in the African and African American Diaspora Studies Department. He is a Double Discovery Teaching Fellow where he teaches high school youth courses in African American popular protest music and literature and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. An aspiring historian of Black cultural and expressive movements, James’ research interests include religious and popular musical activism, Black Performance studies, Christian literary criticism, Afrofuturism, Black geographies and sound studies. His studies are informed by Black Radical and Feminist analyses, blackness as possibility, and Black Popular culture. He earned his undergraduate degree in Africana Studies and Vocal Performance from Bucknell University in 2020. He is currently at work on a poetry collection entitled What Rainbows Reveal and other poems (IG: @jamesjwrites for more information) and a song cycle entitled What Do You Do When the FBI is Following You?