“There is a place in God’s sun for the youth “farthest down” who has the vision, the determination, and the courage to reach it.” – Mary McLeod Bethune
It is no secret that desegregation crippled just about every African American owned institution from neighborhoods to businesses to HBCUs – and many would argue the foundational institutions of Black marriage and African American families themselves. African American institutional ownership was faced with having to compete for human capital of the very people whose interest they were built to serve and the institutional ownership that all other non-European American groups envy. In turn, our institutions experienced a mass exodus as African Americans believed that the grass was truly greener and ice colder on the Eurocentric side. Fast forward to today, many African Americans believe they live in a pseudo-meritocracy, a dystopian like post-racial world where even having African American institutions of our own is somehow un-American and participating in our own institutional spaces is a sign of being the “not quite good enough negro” as many of us attempt to impress the European American gaze. This despite other demographics firmly having their own such as Notre Dame for the European Catholics, Brandeis being a secular European Jewish institution, and of course Harvard the flagship WASP institution, so on and so on. Never mind that the majority of the HWCU/PWIs that tout “diversity” often have less than 5 percent African Americans on their campus – and the majority are often there only to play sports.
Case in point, the University of Texas who is one of the most profitable athletic program in the country has a less than 5 percent African American population on its campus. The numbers are even starker when it comes to African American males who make up less than 2 percent of overall campus population, but comprise around 70 percent of the football and basketball teams. HWCU/PWIs have shown one thing to be true, and that is they want the best and brightest of our young women and the fastest and strongest of our young men. HBCUs have been unable to compete due to misperception of inclusion and the reality of the resource/wealth gap between our communities that desegregation and the GI Bill largely caused. Many HBCUs go decades before they can raise enough funding for new facilities or scholarships. Harvard’s endowment in one year can lose more money than the amount all 100 plus HBCUs have combined and still be one of the largest higher education endowments in the world.
In an environment where higher education is getting more and more expensive, African American students who come from the group with the lowest median net worth and income in the country often make college choices based on financial needs more than most. The result, continued exodus and plummeting of African Americans choosing HBCUs due to the lack of scholarship and aid available and the ever present belief that white is right and better.. Currently, less than 10 percent of African American going to college are choosing HBCUs over HWCU/PWIs. A detriment to alumni sizes, social networks, donations, and most dire – HBCU endowments. Just increasing the 10 percent to 25 percent could stave off many of the financial woes facing HBCUs and start to bring circulation of intellectual and financial capital into African American institutions. So how can HBCUs recruit in “Woodcrest”? How do you recruit African Americans who have become immersed in non-Black communities to HBCUs? How do you recruit African Americans who are in African American communities that are impoverished and are only looking to get out? How do you recruit middle class and affluent African American families who have the financial resources African American institutions so desperately need? How do you get African Americans to care more about African American institutionalism than we do African American individualism?
Two of America’s most beloved animated characters of the past 20 years are Huey and Riley Freeman voiced by the regal and benevolent Regina King. The Boondocks first premiered in comic form in 1997 and by 2005 would find their way to television and into our hearts. Huey, the tormented revolutionary and his younger brother Riley, the wanna be thug/hustler and athlete who shows glimpses of artistic genius. Their grandfather, voiced by the late great John Witherspoon, has moved them to a predominantly European American suburb away from the Southside of Chicago’s predominantly African American community at the most formative time in their life. Grandpa Freeman is also part of the Civil Rights generation and is a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s as it turned out in an episode called ‘The Return of the King’. A controversial episode, but poignant of what happens when children, in this case Riley, are removed from cultural immersion of our own community. Riley has no idea who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is and often refers to him as “Morgan Freeman King” in the episode. The irony should not be lost on the Morgan Freeman dig who himself believes Black History Month and being identified as African American is an insult. In another episode, this one more focused on Huey, entitled A Huey Freeman Christmas, Huey convinced his European American teacher to let him write and direct the Christmas play. Naturally, Huey being who he is makes Jesus Black and makes a very Afrocentric production that was ultimately seen by no one as parents of Huey’s European American classmates boycotted the play since their kids were not in it, appalled by its Afrocentricity, and ultimately had the teacher fired for being “irresponsible” highlighting how European Americans will put down one of their own to maintain institutional power. The school was named the J. Edgar Hoover Elementary after all, named for the notorious FBI who infiltrated, spied upon, and sought the destruction of everyone from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Black Panthers, and every other African American individual and institution he even remotely viewed as a threat to the European American institutional power structure.
Riley ignorant of his cultural identity, Huey militantly attempting to push his Afrocentricity into an Eurocentric institutional space, and Grandad feeling as if he has “made it” because he is able to eat cheese with The Man. This is the family you have to convince that an African American institution and space is the best place to be. There also is the influence of the community on Huey and Riley. Tom DuBois who is married to a European American woman, Uncle Ruckus who rails against all things Black – while being the darkest character on the show, Tom’s daughter Jazmine whom you are never quite sure how she identifies and that probably is the point, and countless others who throughout the show push against anything and everything that would empower African American institutionalism at all turns. In fact, there is no exposure or presence of any Black institutions on the show. The Boondocks one could argue was actually the forerunner to Blackish, but that is another article for another time. With so much pushing against Huey or Riley choosing an HBCU and their grandfather allowing them to attend an HBCU, how do we overcome such an obstacle? Is it possible? Is it even worth the energy?
The answer of course is – it is complicated. How do you win a war most of your population does not know it is in? Another part is turning every other cheek to be included and a proverbial peace that means its erasure? Those that do know they are in a war are fighting with antiquated strategies, equipment, and/or resources? HBCUs have limited resources and manpower to dedicate to recruiting. HBCUs one advantage is being an African American space, an African American institution dedicated to African American empowerment, or at least they were. Many HBCUs see making recruitment of African Americans a secondary objective in favor of more ethnic diversity – ignoring African American and Diaspora diversity as they attempt to parrot their PWI counterparts, declines in African American faculty and research geared towards African American interests becoming ever more pervasive – institutional gentrification by our own hands. In other words, many HBCUs are trying to become a watered down version of a PWI. This makes their case for recruiting even harder because of the aforementioned issues of limited resources and manpower. If a college student is going to choose a PWI versus an HBCU posing as a PWI knockoff, then usually they will go with the one who is the real thing so to speak. For those HBCUs trying to hold the line it is rough. They have to convince an African American population that does not want to live in or build African American communities, bank with African American banks, and see their ancestry as starting at slavery more than they see it internationalized with the Diaspora as Malcolm X and so many other Pan-Africanist have desperately tried to connect to little avail. That being educated by African Americans in an African American space as something valuable, worthwhile, and imperative to the African American community’s empowerment. A small task it is not.
How do we even get to students like Huey and Riley? Their geography is world’s away from any African American institution, their socialization will largely save for trips back to Chicago sparingly be within the confines of European American institutions and spaces, education will be firmly European American with a likelihood of an European American perspective on diversity being from European American majority ideology, and certainly it would be remiss to say that neither of their possible love interest are African American girls. Jazmine, the daughter of Tom and Sara DuBois, who is biracial and fits the cultural aptitude that often comes with those who have African American fathers and European American mothers where the mother drives the cultural nourishment and almost certainly are reared with an anti-Afrocentric value system. Riley’s probable love interest that is Cindy McPhearson, an European American girl, who shares a lot of the same interest and often similar toxic behaviors as Riley. One could argue they make even more sense should it play out than Huey and Jazmine from a qualitative level. All which was described, virtually none of it sits within an African American space or possibility. Yet, these are exactly the African American students you could argue we are in large part trying to recruit to HBCUs. This is the group that you need more than any other if you want to increase the African American rate choosing HBCUs to increase from 10 percent to 25 percent.
If African Americans are going to continue to not be proactive in the development of African American communities and empowerment of African American marriage and families then this entire conversation maybe for naught within a few generations as we will have self-gentrified ourselves out of existence. The question of how we get our talents and resources to prioritize the building of new African American institutions, supporting of existing African American institutions, and the empowering of all of our African American institutions is the central question for our survivability and furthermore our success as a people.
HBCU Money 