This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Derrick White, who teaches in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at University of Kentucky. He has published widely on African American intellectual history and the cultural study of sports, and is the author of The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (2011) and Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (2019). In this discussion, we explore the relation of historical work to political struggle, the place of cultural study in the Black Studies imagination, and the fecundity of post-disciplinary thinking for the field.