Afro-diasporic academic freedom

    Historically, the university has been a distant—and often hostile—space for Afro-descendant populations. Due to slavery and racism throughout history, these communities were incorporated into formal education late and in a racist environment.

      One of these mechanisms is epistemic racism, which stems from the assumption that people of the African diaspora lack the capacity and conditions to contribute new knowledge. Consequently, Black intellectual trajectories are rendered invisible in curricula, and Afro-diasporic history is silenced. Therefore, what these peoples constantly experience is epistemic violence, which manifests itself in obstructing the study of their scientific output in universities.

By dismissing the thinking of black peoples as scientific knowledge, Western and Westernized academia applies the most blatant feature of racism: dehumanization.