There’s a viral claim making the rounds on social media that Kevin Roberts, president of the racist Heritage Foundation and one of the key figures associated with Project 2025, has a Ph.D. in “African American history.”
That ain’t true, Y’all.
Roberts does not have a Ph.D. in African American history. What he has is a Ph.D. in history, and his doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin was titled Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831. His earlier master’s thesis examined West African family forms among enslaved people in Virginia. So the more accurate statement is that Kevin Roberts was trained as a historian whose scholarly work focused on slavery, enslaved Black communities, African retentions, kinship, and identity formation.
As my good sis Dr. LaTasha Levy’s recent piece demonstrates, that correction matters because we don’t need to exaggerate the truth to make this racist boolshit disturbing. Levy has already made this point beautifully and forcefully that people are collapsing History, American Studies, African Studies, African American Studies, Black Studies, Africana Studies, and African Diaspora Studies into one messy-ass viral claim. They are also treating “slavery” as if it belongs only to Black history, when slavery is also European history, American history, the history of capitalism, the history of whiteness, the history of race-making, and the history of modernity itself.
But here we are.
For the past couple of weeks folks have been scrolling their feeds and stopping like: Wait what? The man tied to one of the most aggressive right-wing policy projects in modern American life studied Black folks? WTF?!
Do folks really believe that everybody who studies Black people means they actually respect us? Do folks really believe that research equals reverence? Or, that citation means solidarity? I think TF not. You can know everything about Black suffering and still oppose Black freedom. You can write about enslaved people’s kinship networks and still support policies that harm their descendants. You can study resistance and still side with the Empire.
Kevin Roberts studying enslaved Black people is not the plot twist folks thinks it is. Of course he studied us. He’s a racist predator. Predators study patterns. Empires study resistance. Colonizers study kinship. White supremacists study Black history because Black history tells them what survived the fire. White supremacy has always studied the people it intended to control. That ain’t no contradiction. It’s the m’fkin’ method. White scholars have always helped white supremacy do its homework.
Some folks are shocked because they still believe knowledge has a conscience. It doesn’t. The same country that measured our skulls, auctioned our children, mapped our neighborhoods, surveilled and murdered our leaders, stole our music, raided our movements, and banned our books has always understood very clearly that if you want to control a people, you study how they survive.
They study oppressed people’s songs because their songs carry memory. They study our churches because our churches have been meeting houses, political schools, mutual aid societies, underground newspapers, grief shelters, organizing hubs, and places where people learned how to imagine freedom before freedom had a legal name.
They study Black families because slavery never fully destroyed Black kinship, and that failure has haunted white power ever since. The auction block separated mothers and fathers from children, husbands from wives, siblings from one another, and still Black people built family in the cracks. Aunties who were not aunties. Cousins who were not blood. Church mothers. Godparents. Play cousins. Fictive kin. Neighbors who fed children they did not birth. Communities that understood survival as a collective obligation. White supremacy needs to know exactly how that works because anything that can hold a people together under terror becomes an existential threat.
They study our schools because literacy has always scared the fuqque out of Empire. Every enslaved person who learned to read became a witness against the lie. Every Black child who learns history becomes harder to deceive. Every Black teacher becomes dangerous. Every Black library becomes a weapons cache of memory. Every banned book is a confession.
Listen Y’all, they do not ban what has no power. Capisce?
They study our neighborhoods because geography is never a neutral thing. Black neighborhoods hold networks, codes, loyalties, routes, businesses, barbershops, beauty salons, stoops, porches, block associations, funeral homes, corner stores, churches, murals, and elders who remember what the city tried to erase. That is why they map us before they displace us. That is why they study us before they police us. That is why they call it “urban renewal” when they mean removal, “revitalization” when they mean extraction, and “development” when they mean somebody richer and whiter is comin’ for the land.
They study our movements because resistance has a rhythm. Somebody prints the flyer. Somebody opens the church basement. Somebody feeds the people. Somebody watches the children. Somebody calls the lawyer. Somebody knows the route. Somebody knows which elder has the archive in a shoebox under the bed. Somebody knows which song will keep people from breaking. Empires study movements because they know movements are not born from nowhere. They are built from relationships, memory, discipline, and pain that finally found direction.
Folk think that white supremacy simply hates Black history. Nahhh, it studies it first. It studies what we survived so it can figure out what still holds us together. It studies what we built so it can decide what to defund. It studies what we remember so it can decide what to ban. It studies where we gather so it can decide where to send the cops.
I ain’t done . . .
It studies how we vote so it can decide where to gerrymander and close polling places. It studies how we teach our children so it can decide which curriculum to criminalize. It studies how we mourn so it can decide how much grief we are expected to swallow, and how many times we will forgive before we rebel.
Black history teaches that we were never supposed to make it, and yet here we are. It teaches that every system built to reduce us to labor, property, pathology, data, spectacle, and threat failed to finish the job. It teaches that Black people keep on making worlds inside a country committed to making us disappear. And that is exactly why white supremacists study it. They don’t study us because they are moved by our humanity. They study us because they are alarmed by our endurance.
And lemme say also that racism has never survived on ignorance alone. It survives through surveillance, classification, extraction, imitation, distortion, and control. White power does not simply hate Black people from a distance. It watches us up close. It studies how we move, how we worship, how we organize, how we parent, how we love each other, how we survive rupture, how we build family beyond blood, how we turn grief into strategy, and how we have the audacity to keep creating life under conditions designed to destroy us.
That is the part people keep missing. African American Studies, Black Studies, slavery studies, and the broader study of the African diaspora do not simply teach people about Black pain. They teach people about Black power. They reveal how Black people survived systems that were supposed to annihilate us. To a person committed to liberation, that knowledge is sacred. To a person committed to white power, that knowledge is intelligence.
What does a racist like Kevin Roberts learn when he studies Black people? He studies where Black families are strong and where policy can weaken them. He learns that Black churches, schools, HBCUs, libraries, archives, museums, newspapers, and cultural institutions preserve counter-memory. So he supports attacks on curriculum, DEI, ethnic studies, public education, libraries, and historical truth.
He learns that Black voting power transforms the country. So he backs voter suppression, gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, voter roll purges, and court decisions that gut the Voting Rights Act. He learns that Black children who know their history become harder to lie to. So he calls Black history “indoctrination.”
He learns that Black people have always organized through kinship, culture, spirituality, mutual aid, art, music, storytelling, and memory. So he studies the architecture of that survival and figures out where to apply pressure. This is why the scandal is not that someone like Kevin Roberts studied us so he could use the Heritage Foundation to dress white backlash in policy language, launder racial panic through think-tank respectability, and turn the old architecture of domination into a governing blueprint.
Because what is Project 2025 if not a political attempt to identify every site where marginalized people have gained ground and then figure out how to claw it back? Public education. Civil rights enforcement. Diversity programs. Voting access. Historical memory. Reproductive freedom. LGBTQ protections. Labor rights. Environmental protections. The administrative state itself. It is a map of backlash. It’s a goddamn revenge manual and a restoration project for people who believe the country went wrong the moment it had to pretend Black folks were human.
So no, it does not shock me that Roberts studied enslaved Black people, kinship, survival, and African retentions. The disturbing part is how perfectly that knowledge fits inside a political project obsessed with controlling what survives. And this is why I have always side-eyed white scholars who build careers studying Black people.
Not all of them. Let me be clear before somebody starts clutching a beige tote bag from an academic conference. There are white scholars who do careful, ethical, accountable work. There are white scholars who cite Black thinkers generously, who refuse to extract from Black suffering, who know when to step back, who understand that proximity to Black history does not make them authorities over Black life.
But the side-eye remains.
Because history has taught us to be suspicious of white fascination with Black pain. Too often, Black people become the archive, the object, the data set, the dissertation chapter, the tenure file, the conference paper, the fellowship application, the prize-winning book, or the public intellectual brand. Our dead become their evidence, our suffering becomes their expertise, and our resistance becomes their career. And then, after years of studying us, some of them still cannot manage to stand with us when it matters.
African American Studies, at its best, is a liberation project. It teaches that Black people are not side characters in the American story. We are not a footnote, a problem, a minority, or a seasonal unit in February. We are central to the making of the modern world. We are central to democracy, capitalism, culture, law, education, resistance, and every freedom struggle this country loves to claim after trying to crush the people who made it possible.
Sometimes knowledge liberates. Sometimes it extracts. Sometimes it surveils. Sometimes it becomes policy. And in the hands of white supremacy, even Black survival can be studied like a target.
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