08/30/2026
UWP | Scholarship in Conversation
What Can You Do With a Black Studies Degree? Look Around the World.
This month, The University of the West Indies announced that Jamaican scholar Professor Sonjah Stanley Niaah has joined an international expert panel on the Restitution of Cultural Heritage, emerging from a high-level conference held in Accra, Ghana.
The work reaches across Africa and the African diaspora.
Ghana. Jamaica. Nigeria. Senegal. South Africa. Benin. Mauritius. The United States.
And the questions before these scholars are not small ones.
Who owns cultural heritage?
Who has the authority to interpret it?
What should restitution look like?
How do museums, archives, governments, and communities repair histories shaped by enslavement and colonialism?
How should African knowledge be preserved and transmitted?
These are questions of history.
But they are also questions of public policy, law, culture, economics, research, archives, diplomacy and education.
Which brings us back to a question Dr. M. Keith Claybrook, Jr. asked in THE RESEARCHER:
What can we do with a Black Studies degree?
His answer was wonderfully uncomplicated.
Everything. Especially now.
Claybrook argues that Africana Studies does more than teach students information about Black people. It develops researchers and critical thinkers capable of gathering evidence, analyzing information, fact-checking claims, interpreting human experience and applying knowledge across professions.
The Caribbean offers a useful example.
At The University of the West Indies, Caribbean Studies brings together history, political science, sociology, psychology, migration, culture and African Diaspora Studies. Its career pathways include cultural policy, archives, museums, education, journalism, editing and entrepreneurship.
And now a Caribbean cultural studies scholar is sitting at an international table helping shape conversations about the restitution of African cultural heritage.
That is not Black Studies sitting outside the "real world."
That is Black Studies doing the work of the world.
Perhaps this is the conversation we should be having with students and parents as another academic year begins.
Do not ask only:
What job will this degree get me?
Ask:
What problems will I know how to understand?
What evidence will I know how to investigate?
What communities will I be prepared to serve?
What institutions will need the knowledge I possess?
And perhaps most importantly:
What will I know about the world that someone trained without Africa and its diaspora at the center may never have been taught to see?
That is employability.
But it is also intellectual preparation.
And increasingly, the Global African world needs both.
Continue the Conversation...
M. Keith Claybrook, Jr., Ph.D.
Africana Studies, Possibilities, and Employability: What Can We Do With a Black Studies Degree? Everything. Especially Now!
THE RESEARCHER | Universal Write Publications
July 14, 2025
DOI: 10.65724/PPGP6857
