How should Black scholars prepare for media opportunities that can expand, distort, or politicize their expertise? This article explains the questions worth asking before accepting a high-stakes appearance.
Updated: August 14, 2026
Black scholars enter public media carrying conditions that generic training often treats as incidental. A historian invited to discuss one period can discover that the producer really wants a general answer about race in America. A legal scholar can become available for every breaking story involving Black people and the law. A person with a narrow, hard-earned area of expertise can become a representative before she has finished answering the first question.
Sometimes the invitation is useful and welcome. Sometimes it gives a scholar a chance to say something she very much wants to say. Sometimes it quietly moves her several miles away from the work she actually knows. Those possibilities can coexist, which is why the decision has to belong to the scholar.
Publicists can make this worse because a booking is satisfying, looks clean on a report, gives everyone something to celebrate, and lets the next email say that a national outlet called. I have to be careful that my pleasure in getting the opportunity never becomes more important than the terms on which the scholar has to enter it. I want to know how the segment is framed, who else is participating, what the outlet is actually asking for, where the scholar’s expertise begins and ends, and what she hopes the appearance will do for the public life of her work.
The 2025 ASALH conference centered “African Americans and Labor,” bringing Black history scholarship into conversation with labor, public memory, and contemporary life.
At ASALH, this is especially hard to ignore because the institution itself has spent more than a century insisting that Black history belongs in public life. Visibility can be a form of power while also bringing distortion, symbolic inclusion, harassment, or demands that are distributed very unevenly. A Black scholar should be able to want a major public role, a narrow one, a temporary one around a book, or almost none at all. The size of that role belongs to the scholar, not to the media and certainly not to me.
