Hollis Robbins has a great article about the relationship between Black Studies and Civic Studies or Civic Thought. This is a timely question, because initiatives labeled as Civic Thought are growing rapidly.

Although legislation passed by conservative state legislatures has created many (not all) of these initiatives, they should not be stereotyped as simply conservative. Robbins uses a paper by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education (American Enterprise Institute, December 11, 2023) as her main source and notes that the Storeys cite my book, What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (Oxford University Press, 2022), “as the canonical formulation.” Storey and Storey call “What should We Do? “‘the citizen’s question’ and the founding question of the field they call Civic Thought.”

I did not pose “the citizen’s question” from a conservative perspective, and the curriculum that I teach includes (among others) radical left thinkers.

In my opinion, Black Studies is Civic Studies. Black American thinkers have deeply explored the question “What Should We Do?” in diverse and innovative ways. For example, as Robbins notes,

Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), is the [Black] tradition’s most famous instance of asking what we should do when “we” is contested. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963), poses the question as the central one for postwar America. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016), takes Levine’s question explicitly and answers it from inside the African American intellectual tradition.

I suppose that Black Studies could evade “the citizen’s question” if all the assigned texts addressed religious, spiritual, aesthetic, or private questions—as some African American authors have—or if all the assigned authors were deeply skeptical about collective action, and if their skepticism wasn’t countered by other assigned texts. But either of these would be an odd way to present the Black American tradition, which has been disproportionately concerned with how to act collectively.

Actual courses and curricula for Civic Thought vary, and I don’t want to overgeneralize. In the course that I regularly co-teach (labeled Civic Studies rather than Civic Thought), we read Douglass for precisely the reason that Robbins suggests, to ask what collective action should mean when the “we” is contested.

As a cautious generalization, I think that many newly required civics courses in conservative states include significant works by African American writers, which means that more undergraduates may be reading Douglass–and even Baldwin–than they would have otherwise.

However, in many of these courses, Black writers feature as critical contributors to an overall tradition that is named “American” and in which most of the authors are White. For instance, after students have read the Declaration of Independence and some Federalist Papers, they may read Douglass as a counterpoint. Perhaps after studying Lincoln, they may read Du Bois for an alternative narrative in which enslaved people achieved their own liberation.

Du Bois opens The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” I think often Black authors are introduced in courses on American history as if to answer that question.

As Robbins argues, Black American thought can be read in a different way, as “a continuous intellectual tradition that runs from David Walker’s 1829 Appeal through Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Dorothy Roberts, Cornel West, Manisha Sinha, Brandon Terry, and the historians’ brief filed in Trump v. Barbara in 2026.” This is not simply a series of critiques but a conversation of its own.

In fact, there are many traditions that address the citizen’s question (“What Should We Do?”) and that are accessible to someone like me. I can read Jefferson, Dewey, and Obama; or Walker, Du Bois, and Baldwin; or Rousseau, Proudhon, and Sartre; or Bhagavad Gita, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi .

Some versions of Civic Thought presume that the proper focus should be the nation-state, the national republic. Although students should entertain critical perspectives, they should all study a common narrative. This is a premise of the Educating for American Democracy project, to which I am committed. One can endorse this view without being xenophobic or chauvinistic. The argument is that we must collectively govern the same republic, so we should debate the country’s canon.

However, my own premise is that we belong to multiple communities, local, cultural, national, and transnational. And we should be curious about communities to which we do not happen to belong. There is not one “we” to which we must direct our attention.

If all the students in a given state–or a specific university–are required to study the same material under the heading of “civics,” there may be pragmatic reasons to choose a version of the national tradition in which the majority group provides the majority of the texts. However, this approach is not self-evidently for the best. For one thing, it is not clear that everyone should study the same civics curriculum, even within a single institution. A course requirement has both pros and cons.

In sum: Black Studies is Civic Studies. There are other versions, too. Who should (or must) study which version is a harder question. But certainly, Americans of all races would benefit from studying the Black intellectual tradition to explore its diverse answers to the question, “What should we do?”.

See also: design challenges for civics in higher education; two dimensions of debate about civics; Summit on Civics in Higher Education etc.