Black Doctoral Studies: The Radically Antiracist Idea of Molefi Kete Asante

Abstract

In 1988, Molefi Kete Asante founded the world’s first Black doctoral studies program at Temple University. It was an expression that Black Studies departments should be raising Black Studies scholars, just as other disciplines were raising their own scholars. Asante also maintained that the existing disciplines, which had historically trained scholars studying Black life, were racist and Eurocentric. This essay reveals the founding racist fathers of most of the disciplines. As such, the founding of Black doctoral studies was a profoundly antiracist idea.