The HBCU Card? Why the Community’s Institutional Dollar Constantly Fails to Circulate at the HBCU’s Front Door

Posted on June 7, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Let us put our money together; let us use our money; let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves. – Maggie Lena Walker

The HBCU Card routes HBCU community spending through a family-owned Minnesota bank. African American-owned financial institutions are watching from the sideline. HBCUs are institutions with balance sheets, alumni networks, and banking relationships. When those relationships run through a family-owned bank in St. Paul, Minnesota, the question is not whether the partnership is well-intentioned. The question is who is building institutional capacity for whom.

There is an old arrangement, familiar to the sharecropping South, called the company store. The employer owned the land, controlled the wages, and operated the only store within reach. The worker labored, earned, and spent and every dollar completed a circle that ended back in the employer’s pocket. The arrangement was not presented as exploitation. It was presented as convenience. As service. As the reasonable way things worked given the options available. The options, of course, were controlled by the same party that ran the store. HBCUs in 2026 are not sharecroppers. They are institutions with endowments, alumni networks, and balance sheets. Which makes it harder, not easier, to explain why they are running the company store model on their own communities.

A prepaid Mastercard called the HBCU Card is circulating in HBCU communities, issued through Sunrise Banks, N.A., a family-owned bank headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota. It carries the logos of individual HBCUs. It returns a fraction of transaction fees to participating schools. The pitch is that HBCU students and alumni can express institutional pride through their spending and send a little money back to their alma mater in the process. That is the whole proposal. Read it twice if you need to.

It is not alignment. It is a licensing agreement dressed up as solidarity.

Sunrise Banks is a privately held, family-owned institution headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, wholly owned by University Financial Corp, GBC, led by CEO David Reiling and his father, Bill Reiling. The bank is a certified B Corporation and holds CDFI designation from the U.S. Treasury. Its social impact commitments are real. None of that is the point. Sunrise Banks is not an African American-owned institution. It has no ownership ties to the HBCU community. It is not part of the African American financial ecosystem in any structural sense. It is a vendor that found a distribution channel, and the distribution channel said yes. Banking is not a transaction. It is infrastructure. Deposits flow into balance sheets that fund mortgages, small business loans, and community reinvestment. When that capital is held by institutions with ownership accountability to the depositing community, it compounds within that ecosystem. When it flows to an outside institution, however well-certified, however socially conscious its marketing, it leaves. A branded card does not change the direction of the outflow. Pride does not reroute capital. Ownership does.

HBCUs are, by their founding logic, in the business of building something that lasts. Endowments. Land. Research infrastructure. Alumni networks that compound across generations. That is the institutional premise. Against that premise, the HBCU Card is an embarrassment. It asks HBCU communities to generate transaction fee revenue, a rounding error in any serious capital strategy — and hand the actual value of the arrangement to a Minnesota family bank. The HBCU gets logo placement. Sunrise Banks gets a branded distribution network across dozens of historically Black institutions, customer acquisition at scale, and the reputational association with one of African America’s most symbolically resonant set of institutions. That is not a partnership. That is a concession. This would be forgivable if there were no alternative. There is. There are 221 of them.

As of 2025, there are 205 active African American-owned credit unions holding more than $8.15 billion in assets and serving nearly 727,000 members across 29 states and the District of Columbia. There are 16 African American-owned banks holding $6.7 billion in combined assets. Louisiana alone has 25 African American-owned credit unions. Illinois has 23. Virginia has 13. These institutions are not obscure. They are documented, chartered, federally insured, and in many cases operating within miles of HBCU campuses. Six HBCU-affiliated credit unions, institutions built specifically to serve the campus financial community, are still active after five such institutions closed or were absorbed since 2020. Their combined assets total $76.8 million. They are contracting. The HBCU Card is expanding. This is the choice being made.

The six that remain deserve to be named because the institutions they were built to serve have apparently forgotten them. Southern Teachers & Parents Federal Credit Union, founded to serve the Southern University system across its Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Shreveport campuses, is the largest of the survivors at $30.3 million in assets. Florida A&M University Federal Credit Union serves the flagship public HBCU in Florida. Virginia State University Federal Credit Union serves one of Virginia’s historically Black institutions. Councill Federal Credit Union serves the Alabama A&M University community. Arkansas A&M College Federal Credit Union serves the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Xavier University of Louisiana Federal Credit Union serves the only historically Black Catholic university in the Western Hemisphere. These six institutions held a combined $76.8 million in assets as of the most recent reporting, a number that should be ten times larger given the campus communities they sit inside. Prairie View A&M University Federal Credit Union, founded in 1937 by sixteen people who built a financial institution to serve the employees of Texas’s first state-supported college for African Americans, did not survive. It was absorbed by Cy-Fair Federal Credit Union, the credit union of a Houston-area school district with a documented record of racial inequity in its own student discipline. An 85-year-old Black institution, built by and for a Black university community, became a subsidiary of a school district credit union. Prairie View A&M University has nothing publicly to say about it. These institutions are not disappearing because they failed their communities. They are disappearing because their communities’ own flagship institutions will not anchor them.

The scale of what coordinated HBCU engagement could mean to this sector is not theoretical. The median African American-owned credit union holds approximately $2.47 million in assets and serves roughly 618 members, operating at the margin of viability in an asset tier where the national system is contracting fastest. Only 40 percent have a functional public website. Thirty percent are congregation-affiliated, with succession risks that threaten their continuity across a single pastoral transition. These institutions are not failing for lack of purpose. They are failing for lack of the institutional anchor relationships that would capitalize and stabilize them. HBCUs are precisely that anchor. A single mid-sized HBCU redirecting its payroll processing and student financial services to an African American-owned financial institution is a capitalization event for that institution. Six HBCUs doing it in a coordinated way reshape a sector. Instead, the sector contracts and HBCUs sign prepaid card deals.

The HBCU Card requires nothing from the institution except a logo. There is no governance, no balance sheet commitment, no strategic partnership to build or manage. An administrator with a full calendar can execute it in an afternoon. That is the real explanation, and it is worth saying plainly: this is what institutional avoidance looks like when it has been dressed up with branding. Banking with an African American-owned institution requires relationships to be built, terms to be negotiated, and sometimes real advocacy inside a bureaucracy that defaults to the path of least resistance. It is harder. It is supposed to be harder. Institutions that will not do the harder work in service of their own community’s financial ecosystem are not being strategic. They are being comfortable.

The Jewish American institutional ecosystem did not build generational financial infrastructure by licensing its brand to well-intentioned outside vendors. It built banks. It built credit unions. It built investment vehicles and directed capital toward them, institution by institution, decade by decade. Cuban American financial infrastructure in South Florida did not emerge from branded prepaid cards issued by Anglo-owned banks. It emerged from institutional discipline from the deliberate decision to route deposits, payroll, and investment relationships toward institutions owned by the community they were meant to serve. African American institutions are capable of the same discipline. The question that must be asked plainly, at this point, is whether they intend to practice it.

Sunrise Banks will receive a branded distribution network across the HBCU ecosystem, customer acquisition at scale, and the reputational weight of an association with institutions that African America has defended, funded, and attended for over 150 years. HBCUs will receive a transaction fee drip. That is the deal, and anyone who has read a term sheet in their life can see which side of it they want to be on. The deeper insult is that the card’s central premise that cultural identity can be expressed through a branded payment instrument is not wrong. OneUnited Bank, one of the largest African American-owned bank in the country with $756 million in assets, already offers a full range of culturally branded debit card designs as part of its standard deposit product. The infrastructure to do this through a Black-owned bank already exists. HBCUs have simply chosen not to direct their communities toward it.

The alternative does not require building anything new. It requires redirecting what already moves. Payroll. Student fee processing. Operating accounts. Auxiliary enterprise banking. These are cash flows that exist at every HBCU right now, today, flowing through institutions with no ownership accountability to the African American community. Fort Valley State University in Georgia operates with Citizens Trust Bank and Carver State Bank in the same state. Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, Florida sits in a market with documented African American-owned financial institution presence. Bethune-Cookman University and Florida Memorial University operate in a Florida context where redirecting institutional banking relationships would register immediately and materially in the balance sheets of the African American-owned credit unions that are currently fighting to survive. None of this requires a capital campaign. It requires a decision.

Delaware State University sits in proximity to one of the most financially sophisticated African American communities on the East Coast and banks with institutions that have no structural accountability to that community. Cheyney University, the oldest HBCU in the country, founded in 1837, older than the Civil War, operates in Pennsylvania, a state with documented African American-owned financial institutions, without a formal banking relationship with a single one of them. These are not resource constraints. These are not governance complications. These are choices. Call them what they are.

This is not an indictment of Sunrise Banks. The Reiling family built a legitimate community development institution and its credentials are real. But good intentions held by people outside a community are not a substitute for ownership infrastructure inside it and this distinction should not have to be explained to the leadership of institutions that exist precisely because the African American community refused to accept the benevolence of outside institutions as a substitute for their own. The HBCU was the answer to that substitution. The HBCU Card reverses the logic entirely.

The pattern is not new and it is not subtle. African American institutions accept the role of distribution channel, brand partner, and program host for arrangements that deliver the primary economic value to someone else. The community benefit is always in the framing. It is often partially real. What it never builds is the ownership infrastructure that makes a community institutionally durable across generations. HBCU Money has documented this in research pipelines that route HBCU-generated intellectual capital into PWI commercialization structures. In philanthropic arrangements that deliver program dollars without governance rights. In workforce development partnerships that build human capital for employers with no reciprocal obligation to the communities supplying the talent. The HBCU Card is the same transaction in a different category. The African American community keeps accepting these terms. Its institutions keep modeling the acceptance. And then everyone wonders why the ecosystem does not compound.

HBCUs are not passive observers of the African American financial ecosystem. They are, or should be, its institutional anchors. A single HBCU redirecting its payroll, student financial services, and auxiliary enterprise banking to African American-owned institutions is a capitalization event for those institutions. Six doing it in coordination reshape the sector’s asset base. Twenty doing it is a structural transformation of African American financial infrastructure that no amount of philanthropic giving or federal grant-making has ever achieved. That is what is being traded away for transaction fee revenue from a prepaid card. Let that land.

The 205 African American-owned credit unions and 16 African American-owned banks — Liberty Bank and Trust, Citizens Trust Bank, Mechanics and Farmers Bank, Optus Bank, Industrial Bank, First Independence Bank, and the rest — are not waiting to be discovered. They are chartered, capitalized, and operational. They have been there. What they have not had is the institutional anchor relationships that HBCUs are positioned to provide and have repeatedly declined to provide. That is the record. It is not ambiguous.

The HBCU Card will keep finding takers. The path of least institutional resistance always does. What it will not build, what it cannot build, is the African American financial ecosystem that 150 years of HBCU existence should by now have helped to anchor. That ecosystem is being built, slowly and against the current, by institutions that have received none of the loyalty that their community’s flagship universities should be directing toward them. HBCUs were founded as an act of defiance against a system that refused to invest in Black institutional capacity. The HBCU Card is an act of surrender to the same logic, branded in school colors.

African America knows the statistic. It has been recited at every convocation, posted on every community Facebook page, cited in every financial literacy workshop for the last thirty years: a dollar circulates in the Jewish American community for an estimated 20 days, in Asian American communities for roughly 28 days, and exits the African American community in less than 6 hours. The room nods. The speaker moves on. And then the HBCU signs a deal with Sunrise Banks. This is the part that should produce institutional shame and does not. The circulation of the Black dollar has become African America’s most repeated and least practiced idea. It functions as a ritual, spoken to affirm shared values, set aside before the next institutional decision is made. And the institutional decisions are where the actual economy is built or surrendered. HBCUs are supposed to be different. They are the institutions African America built when it was not allowed to build them. They carry that founding act in their names. They commemorate it at every homecoming. And then Alabama State University hands a $125 million investment management contract to a European American-owned firm without a public accounting of whether a single African American-owned asset manager was seriously considered. And Howard University puts PNC’s name on a center for entrepreneurship. And HBCU after HBCU runs its student financial services through Wells Fargo or Bank of America while Liberty Bank, Citizens Trust, and Mechanics and Farmers Bank operate in the same states, serve the same communities, and wait for a relationship that does not come. “Buy Black” is the slogan. The institutional behavior is: accept the proposal from whoever shows up with the most polished deck. This cannot be fixed at the household level. Individual people buying Black cannot compensate for institutions that do not. When HBCUs alongside fraternities, sororities, churches, and every other pillar of African American institutional life model the extraction rather than the retention, the community internalizes the lesson being taught, not the slogan being chanted. The HBCU Card is not an isolated mistake. It is a current example of a durable institutional posture: perform solidarity, outsource the economics.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking & Credit Unions

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When the Music Changed: How “No Scrubs” and “No Pigeons” Reflected a Shift in Black Love

Posted on June 5, 2026 by | Leave a comment

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains. – Assata Shakur

In February 1999, TLC released what would become one of the defining singles of their career. “No Scrubs” shot to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, where it remained for four consecutive weeks. The song’s message was clear and unapologetic: women were setting standards, and men who could not meet them need not apply. Within weeks, a relatively unknown rap group from Yonkers called Sporty Thievz fired back with “No Pigeons,” an answer record that used the same beat to deliver an equally scathing critique of women they deemed unworthy.

This exchange sparked what became known as a gender war on and off the airwaves, with radio stations playing both songs back-to-back and nightclubs dividing along battle lines — women shrieking in solidarity with TLC while men whooped for Sporty Thievz. Was this the inflection point where romantic and communal relationships between Black men and women began to fracture? Probably not. The roots run far deeper. But these songs crystallized something that had been building for years, a shift from celebration to criticism, from love songs to diss tracks, from the assumption of solidarity to the performance of mutual contempt.

Rewind a decade, and Black music told a fundamentally different story. The late 1980s and early 1990s gave us ballads that treated Black love not as a battlefield but as a sanctuary. Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, and Whitney Houston soundtracked weddings and anniversaries with a tenderness that affirmed the depth and dignity of Black romantic life. Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” carried the longing of a generation. K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life” became a generational confession. Even within hip-hop, before the genre’s full commercial industrialization, there were moments of striking vulnerability. LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” in 1987 — a soft, earnest admission of emotional need — stood in productive tension with the bravado that would later become the genre’s commercial signature. These were not merely popular songs. They were cultural touchstones that told young Black people what love could look like, should look like. They were aspirational documents for a community’s interior life. And critically, the women in those songs, in those videos, on those album covers, looked like the community. They were Black women, centered and celebrated.

Something changed in the 1990s, and the change was not accidental. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s early albums codified a posture of romantic detachment, the deliberate rejection of love and respect for women, into hip-hop’s dominant vocabulary. This was compelling music that sold in enormous quantities, and in selling, it set a template. What had been one strand within a diverse genre became its commercial center of gravity. But the ideological shift ran deeper than misogyny alone. As hip-hop’s commercial footprint expanded through the mid-to-late 1990s and into the 2000s, something subtler and in some ways more psychologically damaging began appearing in the culture’s most visible spaces: the music video. The women cast as aspirational, as desirable, as worth pursuing began, with increasing frequency, to not be Black.

This was not happenstance. It was a pattern deliberate enough to be legible. As rap artists accumulated wealth and crossover appeal, the women featured alongside them in videos on yachts, in mansions, in the visual grammar of success skewed lighter, then non-Black altogether. The message embedded in those images was not subtle to anyone paying attention: arrival meant distance from Blackness. The highest expression of a Black man’s success, as the visual culture of the era constructed it, was access to women who were not Black. Video vixens of lighter complexions were elevated as the standard while dark-skinned Black women were marginalized or absent entirely. The beauty hierarchy being constructed in plain sight on BET and MTV was one in which Black women occupied an increasingly precarious position in the desirability calculus of their own community’s most prominent cultural exports.

By the time “No Scrubs” arrived in 1999, it landed in a culture already primed for conflict. Co-written by Kandi Burruss and Tameka “Tiny” Cottle during their downtime from Xscape, the song was a declaration of standards — women demanding ambition, respect, and genuine partnership rather than the attention of men riding in the passenger seat of someone else’s car. The demands were not unreasonable. Demands that ironically, many Black men would declare normal and reasonable from non-Black women. And within a media landscape designed to amplify division, what began as standard-setting quickly escalated into something more corrosive.

The response was immediate and polarizing. Radio stations hosted debates. BET reportedly edited both videos into a single seven-minute clip of gender war theater. MTV put both in heavy rotation. The media did not merely cover the conflict, it manufactured it into a cultural event, validating in the process the notion that Black men and women were not simply in disagreement but were fundamentally adversarial. Sporty Thievz’s rebuttal climbed to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, confirming that the antagonism resonated on both sides of the divide.

What made this moment significant was not the back-and-forth between two songs. It was what that back-and-forth revealed about the direction popular culture was pulling Black romantic life. These songs did not create the tensions between Black men and women. Economic dislocation, the carnage of the War on Drugs, and the structural dismantling of urban manufacturing bases had already placed enormous strain on Black households and Black partnership. Sociologist Elijah Anderson observed that young men in economically marginalized Black communities often pursued social status through the exploitation and diminishment of women, a pattern that commercial hip-hop both reflected and, once amplified at industrial scale, reinforced. The music industry, predominantly white-owned and indifferent to the social consequences of what it distributed, found conflict profitable and invested accordingly. What the community was living, the industry packaged and sold back to it as entertainment.

But HBCU Money still believes in love so enjoy….

The visual erasure of Black women from the aspirational imagination of hip-hop did not stay confined to the screen. It seeped into everyday life with a thoroughness that was difficult to track precisely because it moved through private conversation, social expectation, and the slow accumulation of cultural messaging rather than through any single declarable event. By the early 2000s, a certain strain of public Black male discourse had begun treating dating or marrying non-Black women not merely as a personal preference but as a marker of status, sophistication, or liberation — a signal that one had transcended the presumed limitations of the community one came from. The logic was sometimes stated explicitly, more often implied: that Black women were too difficult, too loud, too independent, too damaged by their own circumstances to be worthy partners for men who had achieved something. The very qualities that had allowed Black women to survive conditions designed to break them were reframed as character defects.

This was not a fringe conversation. It became, with the amplification of the internet and eventually social media, a mainstream one relitigated endlessly in think pieces, radio debates, YouTube channels, and the comment sections of platforms that rewarded provocation over nuance. Black women responded with a mixture of hurt, anger, and their own declarations of independence from a community they felt had devalued them. Some began openly discussing dating outside their race with the same performative energy that had been directed at them. What had begun as a visual preference embedded in music videos had, over the course of a decade and a half, become a full-scale public negotiation over the terms of Black romantic belonging conducted almost entirely in the register of grievance.

The accumulated effect on a generation was not trivial. The words used to describe each other shape how people see each other, expect from each other, and ultimately what they believe is possible between each other. When the dominant narrative in the music young people consumed shifted from devotion to suspicion, from partnership to transaction, from vulnerability to armor, those shifts did not stay contained within the space of entertainment. They became internalized frameworks for courtship, for conflict, for what intimacy was permitted to look like. Young Black women who grew up hearing themselves described as pigeons, hoes, or gold diggers, and who watched the women in their favorite artists’ videos grow progressively less likely to resemble them, absorbed messages about their worth that the external world was already working hard to diminish. Young Black men who absorbed the message that emotional openness was weakness, that Black women were adversaries to be outmaneuvered or obstacles to be bypassed on the road to something better, were being trained away from the very capacities that stable, sustaining relationships require.

Flash forward to 2026, and the cultural inheritance of that era is visible everywhere. Online spaces where Black men and women engage have become, in many corners, theaters of mutual grievance and elaborate performances of self-protective independence that leave little room for the kind of trust that partnership demands. Love songs have become harder to find in mainstream Black pop, as though tenderness has been deemed commercially unviable. Artists like PJ Morton, who make soulful music about Black love in its full complexity, play smaller rooms while music that treats romantic relationships as contests dominates the charts. This is not to suggest that beautiful expressions of Black love have disappeared. They have not. But they have been pushed to the margins of a culture that once placed them at its center.

The stakes of this cultural displacement extend well beyond the personal. As HBCU Money has documented, the marriage rate among African Americans has dropped precipitously over the past several decades, from roughly 60 percent in the 1960s to just 29 percent in 2021 and that decline carries direct economic consequences for the community’s long-term wealth position. Black married couples held a median net worth of $131,000 in 2019, compared to only $29,000 for Black single individuals — a fourfold gap that represents not merely a lifestyle difference but a structural disadvantage in capital accumulation, homeownership, and the ability to transfer wealth across generations. A culture that spent two decades using its most powerful media to communicate that Black women were not the preferred partners of successful Black men, and that Black men were not worthy of Black women’s investment, did not simply produce unhappy relationships. It produced an economic headwind that compounds over time and registers now in the net worth data of an entire community.

None of this means that “No Scrubs” and “No Pigeons” caused the decline of Black marriage or the erosion of Black wealth. They did not. But they were early, loud signals of a cultural drift that institutions like HBCUs, Black media, Black churches, Black family networks were too slow to name and too under-resourced to counter. The music reflected life. But music also shapes life, and the failure to contest the direction that shaping was taking was itself a strategic failure.

The question now is not how to assign blame for the past quarter century. It is whether the community has the institutional will to consciously reconstruct the cultural narrative that was lost. That means creating material and institutional conditions in which stable Black partnership can flourish such as relationship education, financial literacy, community infrastructure that treats Black family formation as a strategic priority rather than a private matter. It means supporting artists who treat Black love as a subject worthy of complexity and craft rather than caricature. It means being deliberate, in public spaces, about the language used to describe one another and understanding that those descriptions accumulate into the expectations young people carry into their most formative relationships.

Before the gender wars, before the videos, before mutual contempt became entertainment and the erasure of Black women from Black men’s aspirational imagination became a cultural norm, Black music told a different story, one in which men and women were engaged in a common project, in which love was not weakness but the foundation of collective strength, and in which the most natural expression of a Black man’s success was a Black woman beside him. That story was not naïve. It was aspirational in the deepest sense: it named what the community was capable of and invited people to live up to it.

That story is still available to be told. The beat can carry a different message. Whether it does depends on what the community decides to demand, to create, and to believe is still possible.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

Leave a comment

Posted in Lifestyle

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

HBCU Money’s 2025 African American Owned Credit Union Directory

Posted on June 2, 2026 by | Leave a comment

African American-owned credit unions hold more than $8.15 billion in assets and serve 726,929 members in 2025, more than doubling their asset base from $3.81 billion in 2016. That growth confirms that Black-owned cooperative finance remains a living, expanding sector — not a historical artifact. Yet placed against the broader credit union landscape, the numbers tell a more sobering story. The federally insured credit union system holds $2.37 trillion in total assets across 4,411 institutions. African American-owned credit unions, with 205 active institutions down from 318 in 2016, control just 0.34 percent of that total asset base. The sector’s 453 Minority Depository Institution-designated peers collectively hold $95.1 billion in assets; African American institutions account for less than 9 percent of that figure. The gap is not closing fast enough.

The structural challenges are as significant as the asset gap. The median African American-owned credit union holds approximately $2.47 million in assets and serves roughly 618 members placing it squarely in the asset tier where the national system is contracting most aggressively, with institutions under $10 million posting declines in assets, membership, and net worth year over year. Only 40 percent of these institutions maintain an active public website, rendering the majority functionally invisible to younger and mobile-first members. An estimated 30 percent are affiliated with religious congregations, compared to approximately 5 percent of all U.S. credit unions, introducing succession and governance risks that extend well beyond normal institutional turnover. Meanwhile, the HBCU-based credit union subsector has seen five of its eleven institutions close or be absorbed since 2020, leaving six survivors holding a combined $76.8 million in assets — institutions that represent the most direct expression of university-anchored Black financial infrastructure and are quietly disappearing without coordinated intervention.

The sector’s geographic concentration compounds these institutional vulnerabilities. Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, and Virginia together account for roughly 80 percent of all African American-owned credit union assets nationally, while states like California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin maintain only token institutional presences despite substantial African American populations. The South remains the geographic and institutional core, with Louisiana’s 25 institutions representing the largest state count and Mississippi’s Hope Credit Union standing as the sector’s clearest model of what scale and institutional commitment can produce. The path forward runs through consolidation where fragmentation cannot be reversed, digital investment where infrastructure is absent, geographic expansion where populations go unserved, and the fuller utilization of federal support mechanisms such as MDI designation, CDFI certification, and NCUA technical assistance that the sector has historically left on the table.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

  • African American-owned credit unions now hold $8.15 billion in total assets across 205 active institutions, representing 0.34 percent of the $2.37 trillion held by all federally insured credit unions nationally.
  • Total assets in the sector have more than doubled since 2016, rising from $3.81 billion — a 114 percent increase — while membership grew 39.5 percent from 521,078 to 726,929 members over the same period.
  • AACUs average assets per institution: approximately $39.8 million. AACUs median assets per institution: approximately $2.47 million. The gap between the mean and median reflects a sector dominated at the top by a small number of large institutions while the majority operate at a scale that limits their competitive viability.
  • AACUs average members per institution: approximately 3,546. AACUs median members per institution: approximately 618.
  • Only 40 percent of African American-owned credit unions maintain an active public website, representing a critical digital infrastructure deficit in an era of mobile-first financial services.
  • An estimated 30 percent of African American-owned credit unions are affiliated with religious congregations compared to approximately 5 percent of all U.S. credit unions introducing institutional succession risk as American religious participation continues its long-term demographic decline.
  • Louisiana has the largest number of active African American-owned credit union institutions (25), followed by Illinois (23), New York (15), Texas (14), Virginia (13), and Alabama and the District of Columbia with 12 and 10 respectively. Maryland leads all states in total sector assets at $4.47 billion, followed by Mississippi at $1.05 billion and Missouri at $480 million.
  • California — the most populous U.S. state and home to one of the largest African American populations in the country — has a single active African American-owned credit union with $318,105 in assets and 262 members, a presence that has contracted since 2016.
  • The sector’s credit union count has declined from 318 institutions in 2016 to 205 active institutions in 2025, a reduction of 35 percent, driven primarily by closures, mergers into non-Black institutions, and voluntary dissolutions.
  • For comparison, the national credit union system added 2.9 million members over the past year alone, reaching 143.2 million total members — nearly 200 times the total membership of all African American-owned credit unions combined.

Complete Directory

African American Owned Credit Unions by State:

Alabama

Arkansas

California

Connecticut

Delaware

District of Columbia

Florida

Georgia

Illinois

Indiana

Louisiana

Maryland

Michigan

Minnesota

Mississippi

Missouri

New Jersey

New York

North Carolina

Ohio

Oklahoma

Pennsylvania

South Carolina

Tennessee

Texas

Virgin Islands

Virginia

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Source: NCUA

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking & Credit Unions

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Two Truths: Yes, Black Men Marry Black Women. They Also Lead the Country in Not Doing That

Posted on May 31, 2026 by | Leave a comment

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything. — Ronald Coase

A particular kind of rhetorical move has become standard in Black online discourse around marriage, and it goes roughly like this: Black women claim that Black men are abandoning them for women of other races. Black men respond that the data proves this is false, that the overwhelming majority of Black men who marry do in fact marry Black women. They cite the statistics. They declare the narrative debunked. They move on, satisfied that they have won the argument with evidence.

They have not won the argument. They have answered a question that was not quite being asked, using data that does not quite say what they think it says while simultaneously being correct. This is the uncomfortable, clarifying reality that neither side of this debate has been willing to sit with: both claims are true, they are not in contradiction, and the failure to understand why is fundamentally a failure of data literacy.

The statistics are not in dispute. According to Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data, roughly 75 percent of married Black men are married to Black women. Among newly married Black men, a more precise cohort that captures current behavior rather than accumulated stock, approximately 64 percent marry Black women. These are majority figures. They are decisive. Any claim that Black men have broadly turned away from Black women as partners cannot survive contact with those numbers, and Black men who cite them in their defense are citing real data correctly.

But here is what that same data also shows, in the same reports, on the same pages: among all groups of men in America, Black men have experienced the fastest-growing intermarriage rate over the past four decades, a rise that is without parallel in the data. In 1980, 8 percent of newly married Black men wed outside the race. By 2015, that figure had reached 24 percent, a tripling of the rate over 35 years, while the Black share of the marriage market remained essentially constant. No other male group comes close to that rate of change.

Intermarriage Rates Among Newly Married Adults, by Race and Gender (Pew Research Center, 2015)

GroupMenWomenGender Gap
Black24%12%12 pts (M higher)
Hispanic26%28%2 pts (F higher)
Asian21%36%15 pts (F higher)
White12%10%2 pts (M higher)

Source: Pew Research Center, “Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia” (2017). Newly married = wed within the prior 12 months.

The comparison table requires some careful reading. Hispanic men, at 26 percent, have a nominally higher intermarriage rate than Black men in absolute terms. But Hispanic intermarriage rates have been essentially flat since 1980, shaped by the consistent arrival of immigrant cohorts who marry within their community before subsequent generations integrate more broadly. The Hispanic figure is demographically stable. The Black male figure is demographically dynamic — it moved, substantially and consistently, across a generation.

Intermarriage Rate Trajectory Among Newly Married Men, 1980 vs. 2015 (Pew Research Center)

Group (Men)1980 Rate2015 Rate
Black men8%24% (+16 pts)
Hispanic men~26%26% (flat)
Asian men26%21% (slight decline)
White men4%12% (+8 pts)

Source: Pew Research Center. Hispanic 1980 figure reflects early ACS-era estimates; trajectory reflects relative stability across the period.

The trajectory table is where the Black male pattern becomes impossible to explain away. A rate that triples over 35 years, in a population whose share of the marriage market did not meaningfully change, is not demographic noise. It is a structural signal. Something changed in the conditions under which Black men form partnerships and the data points consistently toward the same structural variable: education and income mobility. Black men who attain a bachelor’s degree intermarry at 30 percent. Black men without a college degree intermarry at 17 percent. The intermarriage rate is not evenly distributed across the Black male population. It concentrates among those with the credentials and income that predict integration into majority-white professional and social environments.

These two facts are majority intra-racial marriage, fastest-growing intermarriage rate among men describe the same population, measured at different scales. The first is an absolute majority statement. The second is a relative and directional statement about change over time. Neither cancels the other. A community can be predominantly endogamous and simultaneously the demographic group whose male intermarriage rate has grown faster than any other in the country. Both coordinates are necessary to accurately describe the terrain. Choosing to cite only one of them is not data literacy. It is data selection which is a different thing entirely, and always in service of a conclusion reached before the data was consulted.

The impulse behind the selective reading is understandable, even if the execution is flawed. Black men have spent years being characterized in cultural commentary as disloyal, as chasing proximity to whiteness, as leveraging any financial or social ascent to exit the community that produced them. That characterization is often unfair, often reductive, and frequently deployed without statistical grounding of its own. The defensive response, reaching for data that proves the accusation false, is a natural one. But a defensive reading of data is still a compromised reading. When you approach a dataset looking for vindication rather than understanding, you will find the numbers that vindicate you and stop there. The 75 percent figure becomes a shield. The trajectory becomes inconvenient and gets left on the table.

This is precisely what data illiteracy looks like in practice. It is not ignorance of numbers. It is the selective deployment of real numbers to foreclose rather than advance understanding. The person citing the 75 percent is not making a statistical error. They are making an interpretive error by treating a partial truth as a complete one, and treating the absence of explicit contradiction as confirmation. The result is a community that believes it has examined the evidence and settled the question, when in reality it has examined the portion of the evidence that was comfortable and set down the rest.

The gender gap column in the first table is where the conversation should actually be happening. Among every other racial group, the gender intermarriage gap is narrow or runs in the direction of women with Hispanic women and men are essentially equal; Asian women dramatically exceed Asian men; white men and women are within two percentage points of each other. Among Black Americans, the gap is 12 percentage points, and it runs entirely in the direction of men. That gap has been present since at least 1980, and it widens sharply with education: among newly married Black college graduates, 30 percent of men intermarry compared to 13 percent of women. The more education, the wider the gap.

This asymmetry matters because it is not offset. When a Black man marries outside the race, there is no symmetric compensating behavior among Black women. The pool of available same-race partners for Black women, particularly credentialed, economically stable Black women contracts in direct proportion to the Black male intermarriage rate, without equivalent contraction on the other side. Combined with the well-documented effects of incarceration rates on the available Black male population and an educational attainment gap that has shifted decisively toward Black women over three decades, the structural picture that emerges is one of a marriage market with a meaningful and measurable supply-demand imbalance. That imbalance has quantifiable downstream consequences for household wealth formation, given that married households across all racial groups accumulate significantly more wealth than single ones.

None of this is an accusation. It is an accounting. And the distinction matters enormously for how Black communities engage with the question. An accusation calls for defense. An accounting calls for analysis. The man who hears the trajectory data as an indictment of his personal character is reading sociology as if it were a court proceeding. The figures say nothing about any individual’s choices or motivations. They describe population-level patterns with structural determinants, determinants that are, importantly, amenable to institutional response if the community is willing to read the data honestly enough to identify what the actual levers are.

Learning to read data better means, first, understanding the difference between absolute levels and rates of change, and refusing to treat a snapshot as a substitute for a trend. It means placing a number in comparative context not just asking what percentage, but compared to whom, over what period, and moving in which direction. It means sitting with findings that complicate the narrative you prefer, rather than mining the dataset for the figure that ends the conversation on your terms. And it means understanding that two statistics can both be true, can appear to pull in different directions, and can together describe something more accurate and more useful than either describes alone.

Black men are not abandoning Black women en masse. That is true, and the data supports it. Black men have also recorded the fastest-growing intermarriage rate of any male demographic group in America, a rate that has tripled since 1980 and that concentrates among the most educated and economically mobile. That is also true, and the same data supports it. The community that can hold both facts simultaneously without defensiveness and without accusation and ask what structural conditions produce that pattern and what the downstream consequences are for Black household formation and wealth accumulation, is engaging in the kind of rigorous self-examination that serious institutional development requires. The community that cites one number and declares the conversation over is having a different discussion entirely. It is the one that feels better, about a problem it has decided not to fully understand.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

Leave a comment

Posted in Lifestyle

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Price of a Statue: A’ja Wilson’s Bronze and the Billion-Dollar Theft (from HBCUs) Disguised as Progress

Posted on May 29, 2026 by | Leave a comment

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. – Desmond Tutu

The image is powerful: A’ja Wilson, WNBA superstar and Olympic gold medalist, immortalized in bronze on the grounds of the University of South Carolina. Wilson herself captured the poignancy of the moment in a quote that went viral: “When my grandmother was a child, she could not even walk on the grounds of the University of South Carolina… Now the same grounds houses a statue of her granddaughter.”

It’s the kind of story that gets shared across social media, celebrated in sports columns, and held up as evidence of how far we’ve come as a nation. But is it? Is this progress, or is this something else entirely? Is this the culmination of the civil rights movement, or is it the very thing that movement warned us about—the integration of individuals while the institutions built to serve the community crumble?

There’s another story here, one that rarely gets told in the celebratory press releases and ESPN features. It’s a story about institutional theft, strategic underfunding, and the systematic gutting of Black educational institutions that continues to this day. Because while A’ja Wilson’s grandmother couldn’t walk on USC’s campus due to segregation, the institution that would have educated her, South Carolina State University has been financially starved for generations to help build the very programs that now celebrate diversity milestones.

Before we dive deeper into the numbers, we must ask a fundamental question: Who determines what progress looks like for the African American community? This question cuts to the heart of the paradox surrounding A’ja Wilson’s statue and the underfunding of HBCUs. African America has long suffered from a destructive pincer movement between two ideological forces, both claiming to know what’s best for Black communities, neither actually serving those communities’ interests. On one side sits conservative ideology, committed to choking resources from Black institutions through “fiscal responsibility” rhetoric and states’ rights arguments that echo the same justifications used to maintain segregation. This path leads to institutions like South Carolina State University being denied half a billion dollars while legislatures claim budgets are tight and everyone must sacrifice equally ignoring that the sacrifices are never equal.

On the other side sits liberal ideology that views the disappearance of distinctly African American institutions not as a tragedy but as the ultimate goal. In this worldview, true progress means Black students dispersed throughout predominantly white institutions, Black neighborhoods giving way to “diverse” communities, and HBCUs eventually becoming obsolete historical footnotes and relics of a segregated past we’ve happily moved beyond. Both roads lead to the same destination: the destruction of Black institutional power, Black economic infrastructure, and Black self-determination. One just has sugar on top.

The conservative approach is at least honest in its hostility. Budget cuts, funding formulas that disadvantage HBCUs, and legislative indifference make their intentions clear. But the liberal approach is perhaps more insidious because it wraps institutional decimation in the language of progress, integration, and opportunity. It celebrates the statue while ignoring the $500 million debt. It applauds diversity in predominantly white spaces while shrugging at the decline of Black spaces. This false choice between resource starvation and institutional disappearance has been forced upon African American communities for six decades. Meanwhile, no one asked whether the Jewish community should close Yeshiva University to prove they’ve integrated. No one suggests that Catholic universities are relics of discrimination that should fade away. No one celebrates the closing of women’s colleges as a victory for gender equality. Yet HBCUs are expected to gracefully accept their decline as the price of progress. And when they struggle due to systematic underfunding, that struggle is presented as evidence that they’re no longer necessary rather than proof that they’ve been deliberately undermined.

Real progress would mean African American communities having the power to determine their own institutional futures. It would mean robust, well-funded HBCUs and access to all institutions. It would mean integration as addition, not subtraction and expanding opportunities without destroying the institutions that served the community when no one else would.

According to Forbes reporting, South Carolina State University has been underfunded by nearly $500 million over the years. This isn’t an accident or an oversight it’s a pattern repeated across the nation. Much of that funding that should have gone to SC State was instead redirected to predominantly white institutions like USC, enabling them to build state-of-the-art facilities, offer competitive scholarships, and recruit top talent like A’ja Wilson. The results speak for themselves: USC now boasts a $1.1 billion endowment as of 2025, while South Carolina State struggles with just $17.2 million. That’s not a typo—USC’s endowment is more than 60 times larger than the institution that was created specifically to serve Black students when USC wouldn’t admit them. Let that sink in for a moment. The money that could have made SC State a powerhouse institution offering world-class facilities, attracting premier faculty, and providing transformational opportunities for thousands of Black students was instead funneled to USC. And now we’re supposed to celebrate that USC has become diverse enough to recruit and celebrate Black athletes while the institution that was built specifically to serve Black students struggles with inadequate funding, aging infrastructure, and an endowment that wouldn’t cover the cost of a single building on USC’s campus. This is not progress. This is resource extraction disguised as inclusion.

The cruel irony of school integration is rarely discussed in polite company. Yes, it was necessary. Yes, it broke down legal barriers that should never have existed. But it also created an economic hemorrhaging from Black institutions that has never been addressed or remedied. Today, less than 10% of African American tuition revenue flows into Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Read that statistic again. Despite making up over 13% of the U.S. population and a significant portion of college students, the institutions built specifically to serve the Black community receive less than a tenth of the tuition dollars spent by Black families on higher education. Where does the other 90% go? Largely to predominantly white institutions that, for decades or even centuries, excluded Black students entirely. Institutions that built their endowments, their reputations, and their infrastructure without ever having to serve Black communities—until it became politically and economically advantageous to do so.

The financial disparity tells only part of the story. HBCUs have experienced a devastating brain drain over the past six decades, a loss of intellectual capital, leadership talent, and institutional knowledge that would be considered catastrophic in any other context. The nation’s brightest Black students, who once had little choice but to attend HBCUs, now have the option to attend any institution. On its face, this seems like unqualified good news. But when those predominantly white institutions actively recruit Black talent while simultaneously supporting state funding mechanisms that starve HBCUs, the result is predictable: HBCUs lose both the students and the resources, creating a vicious cycle of decline.

This brain drain extends beyond students. Faculty members, seeing better funding and facilities elsewhere, often make the rational choice to leave. Donors, wanting to support institutions perceived as prestigious or on the rise, redirect their giving. Athletes, artists, and future leaders choose schools with newer facilities and bigger budgets. And with each departure, the HBCU left behind grows weaker, making it harder to compete for the next generation of talent. The students who remain at HBCUs often from lower-income backgrounds, first-generation college students, or those specifically committed to the HBCU mission deserve the same quality of education and resources as their peers at heavily-funded state flagships. Instead, they attend institutions forced to do more with less, year after year, generation after generation.

State governments have become expert at justifying HBCU underfunding through seemingly neutral “funding formulas” based on enrollment numbers, research output, and facility utilization. This is where conservative fiscal ideology and liberal integrationist ideology converge into a unified assault on Black institutional sustainability. These formulas ignore the historical context that created the disparities in the first place. How can an HBCU compete on research output when it’s been denied the laboratory facilities, equipment, and graduate programs that enable such research? How can it boost enrollment when prospective students see crumbling buildings next to a predominantly white institution’s gleaming new science complex—built partially with funds diverted from the HBCU’s budget? How can it improve facility utilization when it doesn’t have the capital to build new facilities in the first place?

Conservative legislators champion these “neutral” formulas as fiscally responsible governance, conveniently ignoring that the formulas are designed to perpetuate historical inequity while providing political cover for continued discrimination. Meanwhile, liberal voices remain largely silent about these formulas because they don’t fundamentally object to HBCU decline, they’ve happily accepted the premise that integration means these institutions should eventually fade away. Arguably, many liberals quietly support conservatives as a means to an end of their agenda. The result is the same regardless of which party controls the statehouse: HBCUs lose funding, infrastructure deteriorates, and the institutional capacity of the Black community diminishes. The conservative approach does it through direct budget cuts and “objective” formulas. The liberal approach does it through purposeful neglect and celebrating individual success stories at PWIs as proof that separate institutions are no longer needed. Both roads, sugar-coated or not, lead to the same hell.

South Carolina State University’s $500 million funding gap didn’t happen overnight. It’s the accumulated result of decades of choices—choices to prioritize USC over SC State, to invest in predominantly white institutions while allowing the HBCU to make do with aging infrastructure and limited resources. The numbers tell a devastating story. As of June 2024, the University of South Carolina’s endowment reached $1.044 billion, a figure that crossed the billion-dollar threshold for the first time in the institution’s history. By October 2025, it had grown to $1.1 billion with a 12.8% return that exceeded median returns for similar institutions. This massive war chest funds scholarships, faculty recruitment, research initiatives, and state-of-the-art facilities. Meanwhile, South Carolina State University’s endowment stood at approximately $17.2 million as of 2023. Let that disparity sink in: $1.1 billion versus $17.2 million. USC’s endowment is more than 60 times larger than SC State’s. USC can establish endowed faculty chairs for $1.5 million, name entire departments for $3 million, and fund comprehensive scholarship programs all from investment returns alone. SC State struggles to fund basic operations.

This isn’t coincidence. This is the direct result of systematic resource allocation that has funneled state support, donor dollars, and institutional advantages to USC while SC State has been left to survive on scraps. When the state underfunds SC State by $500 million over the years and redirects those resources to USC, this is the inevitable outcome: one institution accumulates generational wealth while the other fights for survival. USC used this enormous financial advantage to build a basketball program capable of recruiting a generational talent like A’ja Wilson. It constructed state-of-the-art training facilities, hired top-tier coaches with competitive salaries, and created an environment where champions could be developed. The USC Foundations managed portfolio supports permanent, invested funds that ensure long-term financial stability, the kind of stability that allows an institution to compete for the best students, faculty, and athletes. All admirable goals except when achieved partially through funds that should have gone to the state’s HBCU, and when celebrated as “progress” while the disparity grows ever wider.

To SC State’s credit, it is fighting back. The university raised over $6 million in the 2024-25 fiscal year and achieved a 15.2% alumni giving rate as of July 2025, a remarkable achievement given the economic challenges many HBCU alumni face. But even record-breaking fundraising cannot overcome a 60-to-1 endowment disadvantage created by generations of state-sanctioned discrimination. This isn’t ancient history. Forbes reported on this ongoing underfunding in recent years, documenting a pattern of systematic disinvestment that continues today. While we celebrate milestones like statues on integrated campuses and billion-dollar endowments at predominantly white institutions, the institutions that educated Black students when no one else would continue to be starved of resources, their endowments a fraction of what they should be, their futures perpetually uncertain.

True progress would be A’ja Wilson’s statue at USC and South Carolina State University receiving its full $500 million in owed funding (plus interest). Progress would be that less-than-10% of Black tuition dollars flowing to HBCUs becoming 70%, 80%, or 90%. Progress would be state legislatures across the nation acknowledging decades of discriminatory funding and implementing genuine remedies, not just apologies. Progress would look like HBCUs having facilities that rival their state flagship counterparts. It would mean competitive faculty salaries that stop the brain drain. It would mean endowments built through equitable state funding and private investment that reflect the institutions’ importance to American education. Instead, we get symbolic victories while the infrastructure crumbles. We celebrate individual Black excellence at predominantly white institutions while the institutions built to serve Black communities struggle to keep the lights on.

Acknowledging this reality doesn’t require diminishing A’ja Wilson’s achievements. She is an extraordinary athlete and role model who has earned every accolade. The issue isn’t her success or where she chose to attend college, the issue is a system that presents her individual achievement as collective progress while systematically defunding Black institutions and using integration as justification for that defunding. Fixing this requires several concrete steps. State legislatures must conduct honest audits of HBCU funding over the past 60 years and develop remediation plans to address documented underfunding. South Carolina owes SC State $500 million and that debt should be acknowledged and paid. This isn’t charity; it’s restitution for documented, systematic discrimination. Endowment equity must be addressed directly. When USC holds $1.1 billion while SC State holds $17.2 million—a 60-to-1 disparity—that gap didn’t emerge from market forces or donor preferences alone. It resulted from decades of state policy that enriched one institution while impoverishing the other. South Carolina should establish a dedicated endowment equalization fund, potentially matching private donations to SC State dollar-for-dollar until the disparity is meaningfully reduced.

Federal policy (one day) must address the structural disadvantages HBCUs face in funding formulas, perhaps through direct appropriations that account for historical discrimination. The current system perpetuates inequality under the guise of neutrality. Alumni of all institutions, but particularly successful HBCU graduates at predominantly white institutions, must direct resources back to HBCUs to help stop the financial bleeding. Every major gift to a PWI with a billion-dollar endowment is a choice not to support an HBCU fighting to survive. And perhaps most importantly, we must change the narrative. We must stop treating the closure or decline of HBCUs as inevitable or even acceptable. These institutions represent irreplaceable cultural and educational resources that deserve investment, not managed decline. A $17.2 million endowment for an institution serving thousands of students is a scandal that should generate the same outrage as crumbling infrastructure or contaminated water supplies.

A’ja Wilson’s grandmother couldn’t walk on USC’s campus as a child. That was wrong, and it’s right that those barriers no longer exist. But her grandmother could have attended South Carolina State University, an institution that has been systematically underfunded for generations, partially to build up institutions like USC. That underfunding continues today, as true now as it was decades ago. So when we celebrate the statue, what exactly are we celebrating? The opening of doors, or the closing of others? Individual achievement, or institutional destruction?

The question of whose version of progress we accept matters deeply. The conservative approach would deny South Carolina State its $500 million and call it fiscal responsibility. The liberal approach celebrates the statue as proof we’ve moved beyond needing institutions like SC State. Both ideologies, whether through resource starvation or purposeful neglect disguised as integration, arrive at the same endpoint: weakened Black institutions and diminished Black institutional power. But there’s a third path, one that rejects this false choice entirely. It’s a vision of progress defined by and for the African American community—one that says we can have A’ja Wilson’s statue at USC and a fully-funded South Carolina State University with facilities that rival any institution in the nation. One that recognizes robust HBCUs as evidence of progress, not obstacles to it.

We can hold all these truths simultaneously. We can celebrate individual achievements while demanding that the institutions built to serve Black students receive the funding and support they deserve. We can acknowledge barriers broken while refusing to accept that the gutting of Black institutions is an acceptable price for that change whether that gutting comes from conservative budget cuts or liberal narratives that view HBCU decline as inevitable evolution. Until we do, stories like A’ja Wilson’s statue will remain bittersweet moments of individual triumph shadowed by institutional injustice, symbols that raise more questions than they answer about what progress actually means and who gets to define it. And the power to define what progress means will remain in the hands of those who have never had to worry about the survival of their own institutions.

The question isn’t whether A’ja Wilson deserves her statue. She absolutely does. The question is whether South Carolina State University deserves its $500 million. It absolutely does, too. And until that debt is paid, we haven’t truly addressed what integration cost or what real progress requires. More importantly, until African American communities have the power to define progress for themselves to build and sustain their own institutions without being forced to choose between resource starvation and institutional disappearance we’re still living with the consequences of other people’s definitions, other people’s choices, and other people’s versions of what our future should look like. Both roads of conservative resource choking and liberal institutional disappearance lead to the same hell. One just comes with celebration, statues, and sugar on top. Real progress would mean building a new road entirely.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

Leave a comment

Posted in Editorial

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,