Politics & Power Quote by Bernice Johnson Reagon

There’s a quiet radicalism in how Reagon frames “a program like that” not as charity or symbolism, but as infrastructure: a machine that produces access. Coming from a musician who treated songs as living archives, she’s attuned to what institutions actually do in the world - who gets to travel, who gets to study, who gets to claim expertise. The line turns on a simple pivot: not “it helped,” but “it allowed.” Permission, funding, passports, professional legitimacy - the unglamorous mechanics that decide whose knowledge counts.

The specificity matters: “field research in the Caribbean and in Africa.” Reagon is naming a reversal of the typical academic flow where Black communities become the field site and white scholars become the authoritative narrators. Here, young African American scholars aren’t just reading about diaspora; they’re building relationships, collecting data, hearing languages and music in place. That’s not just education - it’s a recalibration of intellectual power.

Then comes the hard edge: “than had ever happened before… and since.” It’s both celebration and indictment, a reminder that breakthroughs can be temporary if they aren’t protected. Reagon’s subtext is about volatility: gains for Black scholarship often arrive as exceptions, dependent on brief windows of political will, philanthropic fashion, or institutional experimentation. As a cultural worker who bridged activism and academia, she’s mapping a lineage of opportunity as precarious history - and daring the listener to ask why something so obviously valuable could be so rare.