2025/11/19 by John B. Diamond, Chinyere Odim · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Critical Race Theory in Education #African cultural and philosophical studies #Critical and Liberation Pedagogy
paper · doi:10.1080/01419870.2025.2581848
openalex publication_date 2025/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/11/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Karida L. Brown’s The Battle for the Black Mind is a compelling and timely account of the struggle to control Black education, shape Black minds, and determine the trajectory of the color line in the United States and across the globe. In this essay, we argue that Brown’s work enters the discourse at a critical moment for how sociologists make sense of the past, present, and future. In recent years, scholars have worked to correct the discipline's erasure of W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental contributions to sociology. Relatedly, historical sociologists and other scholars have developed new approaches to making sense of the past, and several recent books about Black education grapple with how the echoes of US racial history live with us today. We argue that Brown’s work contributes to each of these developments at a moment when the past is indeed prologue with regard to the color line.