Black Studies has enriched and advanced scholarship in the disciplines, including in U.S. history, African-American literature, sociology, and so on. It has been further validated by institutional support at elite universities. Yet it remains highly contested and misunderstood, by some uniquely burdened with expectations of social engagement, while others hasten to dismiss it as “essentializing,” and still others believe that it has been superseded by the need to move beyond the “black-white” color line. Such perceptions fail to consider that well before the social movements and campus protests of the late 1960s, Black studies had long been a dynamic and diverse field of critical and anti-essentializing knowledge production, and foundational for recent contributions in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, transnational African American studies, Black feminist studies and Black queer studies. How, in reframing the discussion of Black studies, might we provide a little breathing room for the concept from the pressing, yet conflicting, demands of the academy, “the community,” and the current crisis in U.S. political economy?