Over the last three nights I have attended several scholarship awards ceremonies, all remarkable occasions, celebrations of the power of generosity and the possibilities of youth; uplifting affirmations and remarkable investments in the future and public good. As an educator, I believe passionately in the transformative power of education and have the deepest admiration for individuals and institutions that provide scholarships to enable bright young people to get an education that they might not otherwise receive. I should know. I got my entire education through scholarships.
In the United States scholarships and student aid have become even more crucial to millions of young people desperately seeking higher education to move up the class ladder or to reproduce their parents' class position as the costs of education have grown and the Great Recession continues to wreck havoc on personal, private and public finances. As I wrote on this site more than two years ago when my son and daughter graduated from college in "The Rising Costs of Middle Class Certification," even middle class families are increasingly being priced out of higher education.
This week's The Chronicle of Higher Education reported a staggering development: the number of private colleges charging $50,000 or more has grown from 5 last year to 58 this year! In 2003-4 there were only two colleges charging $40,000 or more, this academic year there are 224. This is equivalent to the median household income, which in 2008 was $50,303 (representing a decline of 3.6% from 2007). The median household income for African Americans was $34,218, compared to $65,637 for Asians, $55,530 for non-Hispanic whites, and $37,913 for Hispanics.
At each of the three ceremonies, I was struck by the composition of the scholarship recipients in terms of gender. Females far outnumbered males, reflecting the gender composition of students on American campuses where women currently make up 57.2% of the 18.2 million students enrolled in the country's 4,861 higher education institutions. The unevenness among African Americans is even more pronounced: women make up 64.8% of the country's 2.4 million Black (non-Hispanic) college and university students.
This was quite evident at the scholarship awards ceremony I attended last night in downtown Los Angeles, a glittering occasion amply graced by, this being Los Angeles, several celebrities including Tatyna Ali, Vivica A. Fox, LisaRaye McCoy, Chante Moore, Morris Chestnut, and Bill Duke. There were only three men out of the sixteen scholarship recipients from several Los Angeles and California universities. Some of the friends and colleagues I sat with are in the process of starting an initiative to help young black males at their university and this added poignancy to my observations.
The underrepresentation of African American males on university campuses is a cause for serious concern and has given rise to what are often called Black male initiatives, programs and interventions that seek to deal with the crisis in Black male education. This crisis reflects and reproduces the challenges facing black male youths and men in the wider society, which include distinctive patterns of discrimination in the K-12 education system, the pipeline for college, in the criminal justice system in which Black males suffer from disproportionately higher rates of incarceration, and in employment.
On university campuses, especially at predominantly white institutions, the enrolment rates for Black males tend to be lower while their dropout rates are higher than the average. University specific interventions to improve enrolment, retention, and graduation rates are obviously important. They often include counselling and mentoring programs, job placement services, and improving teacher training for urban or ethnic minority education. More ambitious ones involve outreach programs to high schools and youths in surrounding communities, establishing extensive partnerships with local organizations, governments and employers to address the challenges arising out of the historic and contemporary structures of racial and ethnic inequality, and prevailing major public issues that impact society at large and minorities including Black males in particular.
The connections between education and employment especially as the economy becomes more knowledge intensive cannot be overemphasized, nor can the challenges of unemployment for Black males. Last month (October 2009), the unemployment rate for African Americans was 15.7% overall, and 17.1% for men aged 20 and over and 12.4% for women, and 41.3% for both sexes for those aged 16-19 years. The comparable data for whites are 9.5% overall, 9.9% and 7.4% for white men and women aged 20 and over respectively, and 25.3% for both sexes aged 16-19 years.
The underrepresentation of Black males in universities and overrepresentation in prisons constitutes not only a racial emergency for African Americans but a national emergency for the country as a whole. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of June 30, 2008, there were 846,000 black inmates (more than the 838,100 black males who enrolled in College in Fall 2007), compared to 712,500 white male and 427,000 Hispanic male inmates. In other words, the rate of incarceration for black males was 6.6 times that of white males. To put it more starkly, one in 21 black males was incarcerated as compared to one in 138 white males. This cannot be justice by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it amounts to low intensity ethnic cleansing.
A country that jails so many of its citizens, one out of 131 or 2.3 million people in mid-2008, the majority of them racial and ethnic minorities, cannot claim to be civilized. Social justice must be at the heart of any meaningful notion of enlightenment for any society. The incarcerated population grew by 19% overall between 2000 and 2008. While the incarceration rates for women were lower than those for males, the number of women inmates increased by 33%. Black women were 3.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white women and twice as likely as Hispanic women (with incarceration rates among the three groups per 100,000 of 349, 93, and 147, respectively).
African American boys and men are the primary fodder of the prison industrial complex, a vicious and voracious system whose socioeconomic and political imperatives reproduce and reaffirm the racialized social divisions and structural deformities of America's political economy. It represents a wastage of human capital and well-being that is truly astounding and evokes the savage depravities of plantation slavery. And it could be argued the disenfranchisement of citizens which it stokes warps the national psyche and helps sustain imperial belligerence abroad manifested in unwinnable and wasteful wars.
A nation that despises many of its own citizens cannot respect outsiders especially those who might look like the detested natives. In fact, as several studies have shown, migrants from Africa and those of African descent both legal and illegal tend to be incarcerated at higher rates than others for criminal and non-criminal offenses much like their unfortiunate American brethren. This is why the racialized U.S. prison industrial complex matters to the Pan-African world: it offers a critical measure of America's evaluation of the humanity of the world's people of color.
Indeed, there is a connection between the prison industrial complex which has sucked states of resources for education and other social services as they have built more prisons thereby making higher education more unaffordable and imperial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have cost nearly $1 trillion in congressional appropriations ($698 billion in Iraq and $231 billion in Afghanistan). This doesn't take into account the collateral economic and social damage to the troops, their families and communities in the United States, let alone the destruction wrought on the economies, societies and peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.
One can only imagine how far these resources wasted on prisons and wars would go in financing education, health care, and other forms of social welfare in the United States, not to mention sustainable development around the world; how much they would compliment philanthropy instead of turning private giving into an alternative to public investment. I admire people who use their personal resources to help others beyond family and friends by giving scholarships to complete strangers that benefit and transform their present and future lives. I try to do that myself with a family educational trust fund that supports more than a dozen orphans each year to attend secondary school in Malawi.
But private charity should never become a substitute for state responsibility. Education is a public good that deserves public support. And the state remains the only accountable expression, enabler and enforcer of collective social life beyond the affective bonds of family and friends, or the imagined solidarities of ethnicity, religion, and ideology. It is the indispensable glue for the social compact of modern citzenship. Even the mighty captains of American finance and industry now know that: they ran to the state that they and their ideologues love to malign for salvation when their fallible gospel of neo-liberal fundamentalism failed them during, and many say caused, the recent recession.
Clearly, the struggles for the upliftment of black boys and men, equipping them with the enduring transformative possibilities of education and rescuing them from the debilitating perils of imprisonment, are inseparable from all the other heroic struggles taking place in the U.S. and elsewhere by women, gays, immigrants, and advocates of progressive social causes from universal health care to environmental sustainability to international peace to turn this mighty nation into a truly civilized country in the way it treats its own citizens at home and the citizens of other countries on this lovely little planet we all share and call home.
First Written November 7, 2009
