“Black Studies is probably the most enduring victory of the Black Power Movement,” says Dr. Melina Abdullah. “It’s part of an institution that never wanted it. And so it means that the struggle is constant, because the institution is always trying to shut us down and kick us out. But it also is kind of a way of taking resources back. An education system that was intended for, you know the sons and daughter of the wealthy—that scandal that’s plagued the country.”
It’s the outspoken voice of Abdullah, the scholar and a leader of Black Lives Matter. She’s also the chair of Pan-African studies at Cal State L.A.
As I was gleaning the media sources for the “Diversity in Media” class I teach at San Francisco State University, I found Abdullah in one of the places you can be assured to hear a voice like hers. Not in the mainstream, but in the online publication Truthdig.com. The audio part of the interview with legendary journalist Robert Scheer is also on KCRW radio.
And so while the mainstream media has covered the college admissions bribery scandal as if it were a celebrity failure, it was refreshing to hear Abdulllah cast it from an ethnic scholar’s perspective; That no matter how the privilege buy their way in, people of color are here and after 50 years of ethnic studies, still an integral part of the institution that didn’t want us in the first place.
I don’t think you’d read that take in the mainstream media.
But Abudllah doesn’t stop there. About the general state of communities of color over the last few decades she was critical, but stays optimistic because the struggle never ends.
And the oppressors do not fare well.
