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Last night I was listening to a popular counter-racist radio program. I like the program and think overall it is constructive but lately, more and more I am hearing anti-blackness coming from those who say they are counter-racists.
Last night on this particular “counter-racist” radio program, I heard a black man demonize Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the context of discussing Donald Trump’s comments on HBCUs. This black counter racist said that the Historically Black Colleges and Universities do not educate the students. Specifically he said “there is nothing academic going on” and that all they, the students do is party, have sex and fight on these Black campuses. No one corrected this man on his anti-black stereotypical commentary on Black students at HBCUs.
Of course students party, have sex and sure there may be the occasional fights but let us not act like these are not typical things that happen on all college campuses. In all my years of living in North Carolina which has quite a few HBCUs, I have only heard of one serious instance of violence where a non-student went to the Johnson C. Smith University campus in Charlotte, North Carolina and started a fight when he was told to leave by student and the non-student shot someone.
This person making the anti-black statements about these Black students is not alone in his anti-blackness in counter-racist circles. I once heard a counter-racist author on a Youtube clip say that whenever large numbers of black people get together, there are always fights. Mind you I have been to plenty of concerts and clubs in my youth and while there was the occasional fight, the night did not always end that way. Being a former athlete, I have been to plenty of recreation centers and parks in predominately black communities and maybe once witnessed a fight that was quickly broken up. I have been to plenty of family unions on both sides of my family and do not recall a single fight that broke out and these reunions are held every year.
Graduation rates at HBCUs are presently a problem and they started falling in 2008 according to my research. Considering that was the first year of the Obama administration which set about cutting Pell Grants, is it possible that those funding cuts played a big role in the problem of lower graduation rates at HBCUS? I imagine it is hard to graduate from college when you can not afford to pay for college.
We should also point out that HBCUs have a disportionate share of poor students coming from communities that have terrible public schools for a variety of reasons.
However, let us not take any of this into account and lets just make up some crap about sex, parties and fights being the main culprit of lower graduation rates. Let us not put it on the institutional racism that affects almost every black child whose parents are in a certain socio/economic status the moment they are born. They don’t call it the school to prison pipeline for no reason and many of these students are counted fortunate just to get into any college.
I’ll also this about HBCUs, at least they have not been at the center of child rape scandals like Pitt and nor do most of the stories involving college campus rapes seem to involve HBCUs.
If in your efforts to comment on racism or to so-called counter racism, you rely on telling untruthful anti-black stories about black people, I say to you, who needs racist crackers when we can just listen to black people and their anti-blackness under the guise of countering racism.
This has been Scotty Reid with a Black Talk Radio commentary. Support independent media today with a donation to the non-profit media organization Black Talk Media Project.
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