We Need Critical Hope

Self-Reflections on Cultural Wars, the Black Scare, and Black History

Abstract

This paper examines the contemporary cultural wars surrounding Black history, racial literacy, and Critical Race Theory through the author’s personal experience of being targeted by conservative activists, legislators, and university administrators. It situates these events within a long history of policing Black history education and introduces the concept of the Black scare (Burden-Stelly, 2023), a coordinated effort to distort, criminalize, and suppress Black intellectual work. The author advances critical hope as an urgent framework for protecting Black history and sustaining liberatory futures, offering reflection, “not victimhood,” but resilience.