African American Studies

A concept introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois in 'The Souls of Black Folk' (1903) describing the internal conflict experienced by African Americans who must reconcile their identity as both Black and American in a society that devalues Blackness. Du Bois described it as 'this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.'

The forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the Americas, forming the middle leg of the triangular trade route. An estimated 12.5 million Africans were transported between the 16th and 19th centuries, with roughly 2 million dying during the crossing due to inhumane conditions.

State and local laws enacted primarily in the Southern United States between the 1870s and 1960s that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised Black Americans. These laws mandated separate and unequal public facilities, restricted voting through poll taxes and literacy tests, and were enforced through both legal mechanisms and extralegal violence.

The mass movement of approximately six million African Americans from the rural South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. Driven by Jim Crow oppression, racial violence, and the search for economic opportunity, it fundamentally transformed American demographics, politics, and culture.

A theoretical framework coined by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 describing how overlapping social identities, particularly race, gender, class, and sexuality, create interconnected systems of discrimination and privilege. The concept demonstrates that forms of oppression do not operate independently but compound one another.

A cultural, intellectual, and artistic movement centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City during the 1920s and 1930s. It represented a flowering of Black literature, music, visual art, theater, and political thought that challenged racial stereotypes and asserted a new Black cultural identity.

The totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, healthcare, media, and criminal justice. Unlike individual acts of prejudice, structural racism operates through policies and institutional practices that produce cumulative, durable racial inequality even without explicit racist intent.

An intellectual and political movement asserting that Black women's experiences of race, gender, and class oppression are simultaneous and inseparable. Pioneered by thinkers such as Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, and the Combahee River Collective, Black feminism critiques both the racism within mainstream feminism and the sexism within Black liberation movements.

A cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical movement that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, Afrocentrism, and speculative technology to imagine Black futures and reinterpret Black pasts. It challenges the erasure of Black people from visions of the future and uses speculative frameworks to critique present-day racial inequalities.

Historically, the movement to end the institution of chattel slavery in the United States, led by figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and William Lloyd Garrison. In contemporary African American Studies, abolition also refers to the intellectual and activist movement to dismantle systems of policing, imprisonment, and surveillance rooted in the legacy of slavery.