Professor Annette Gordon-Reed

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed has become the first African American woman to win the National Book Award in the nonfiction category. A history professor at Rutgers University – Newark and New York Law School, Gordon-Reed won the award for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Writer Christine Le (CelebrityCafe.com) explains how The Hemingses of Monticello builds on the author’s previous exploration of the Thomas Jefferson – Sally Hemings relationship:

[The book] tells the story of the Hemings slave family. Thomas Jefferson infamously fathered several children with Sally Hemings, as proven by DNA testing and discussed in an earlier book by Gordon-Reed.

A graduate of Dartmouth College (B.A., 1981) and Harvard Law School (J.D., 1984), Gordon-Reed offers up The Hemingses of Monticello as her second exploration of the Jeffersons and their curious relationship to the Hemings family. This book joins Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, published in 1997.

In an interview dated November 24, 2008, and published on the George Mason University History News Network website (HNN), Professor Gordon-Reed describes how Thomas Jefferson’s status as a historical icon has impacted contemporary perceptions of his relationship with Sally Hemings:

As to the nature of the relationship between SH and TJ, it’s hard to know. I spend a good deal of time on this question in the book.  I venture to say that if another slave holder had a decades long connection to one woman, seven children with her, children named for members of his family and others important to him, there would be no problem saying that, at least, he was attached to her. TJ’s symbolic importance to many people, his status as a symbol of America, makes some people hesitate to just say that. It’s like some big thing is riding on it. He was clearly deeply attached to other members of her family—James Hemings, Burwell Colbert— and he could have felt exactly the same away about her.  If he were named Tom Smith the answer would be obvious. It wouldn’t be taken as some great statement about slavery, race or anything, because it would not be. It isn’t for Jefferson, either.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Controversy expands and complicates our notions of slavery, love, liberty, and hypocrisy. It has been well-received by scholars and critics, and will very likely have great success in the literary and scholarly marketplace.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

George Curry (b. 1947)

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According to the National Center for Education and the Economy, by the year 2020, the United States will need 14 million more college-trained workers than it will produce. Considering the record of HBCU’s, we should be asking how we can make sure they’re around at least another century.

The National Center for Education Statistics report that although Black colleges represent only 3 percent of the nation’s universities, they produce 23.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by Blacks.

The numbers are even larger in the physical, mathematical, biological and agricultural sciences, where HBCU’s account for more than 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees earned by African-Americans. HBCU’s confer 13.1 percent of master’s degrees earned by African-Americans and 10.6 percent of all doctoral degrees.

Not only are Black colleges still needed, they are indispensable.

–George Curry, Knoxville College alum and Chairman of the Board of Trustees, in The Hudson Valley Press Online, November 19, 2008.

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If there’s one thing that state campaigns against affirmative action have taught me, it’s that many people in the U.S. continue to think of college education as a reward for all-around academic fitness. This type of thinking is based on a scarcity model of higher education, in which there are only limited spaces open for college aspirants, and that a rigorous admissions process will insure that only the strongest, most worthy students will be granted access to those slots.

This thinking is not entirely unfounded. Not every college has open admissions, and at those institutions, admissions officers work hard to figure out which of the many applicants will be the best fit for their college or university.

For the first couple centuries of higher education in the U.S., the fact that there were only a small number of post-secondary institutions insured that only a small population of Americans would be able to attend college. As in most cases when a desirable commodity is in limited supply, only the wealthiest people from the most powerful families had access to higher education. A college degree was a luxury available only to the privileged few.

Today this perception continues to shape Americans’ attitudes toward post-secondary education. College is still considered a luxury, or at least an option that is primarily of interest to and appropriate members of the cultural and economic elite. This thinking, however, fails to reflect the reality of higher education today. College is for anyone who 1) chooses to pursue it and 2) wishes to have greater capacity for employment security, financial freedom, and economic and cultural self-determination.

Today Americans are going to college in greater numbers than ever before; and the U.S. sends a greater proportion of its citizens to college than any other nation in the world. This is fortunate and necessary. Greater numbers of Americans need college (to insure their access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), and the U.S. needs greater numbers of college graduates — to fill its steadily increasing numbers of highly-skilled and intellectually demanding positions and in order to insure its own continued self-determination, prosperity, viability, and stability as a nation).

As we become a greater and greater proportion of the U.S. population America’s racial and ethnic minority groups must have access to the same educational credentials and mastery of the same skills of critical thinking, reading, and writing and the same opportunities for upward mobility that have traditionally been the domain of a white cultural and economic elite.

Majority white colleges have not yet become very successful at educating people of color. African Americans, for example, graduate at a much lower rate than white people at the very same institutions, and often with much lower GPAs. Many elements contribute to this outcome, including cultural isolation, racism, alienation, and the lack of proper emotional, academic, and financial support. HBCUs, however, are expert, not only at graduating Black bachelor’s degree holders, but at producing grads who are well-prepared for the workplace as well as for post-baccalaureate study (graduate or professional school).

If the U.S. needs larger numbers of bachelor’s degree holders than the white population alone can provide — and it does — then the U.S. needs HBCUs. Their expertise at meeting the needs of Black students will insure that increasing numbers of African Americans become successful in the classroom, in the workplace, and as active and engaged citizens in our democracy.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Manhattan Institute Fellow John McWhorter

(Source: Gawker.com )

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He seemed to fall into the garden “pearl clutching” variety of black person who faints upon hearing “She got dem Apple Bottom jeans, boots wit the furs.”

— The Black Snob blogger on Manhattan Institute Fellow and former linguistics professor John McWhorter.

***

I am adding another regular feature to the Black on Campus blog. McWhorter Watch will join The Quotable Black Scholar, Black Milestones,  Wordless Wednesday, and A Beautiful Black Mind as a recurring item.

McWhorter Watch will track media coverage and published comments by Manhattan Institute Fellow John McWhorter. The former Berkeley professor is a popular commentator on race, culture, and politics, with a special focus on the African American community, higher education, and achievement.

One of the nation’s most widely read Black intellectuals, John McWhorter’s opinions matter because of the ways that his high visibility and his predilection for publicly criticize what he perceives as the failures of U.S. Black culture and values has drawn a level of attention and high regard from the political mainstream rarely accorded to African American scholars whose writings on race are rooted in a critique of white supremacy.

A Quick Summary of McWhorter’s Ideas: McWhorter’s critiques and analyses tend to grow out of his belief that key portions of the U.S. Black community have internalized a victim mentality that hampers their academic, social and economic progress. There is nothing new or particularly unique about this perspective. Shelby Steele, Ken Hamblin, Bill Cosby and many others have made similar claims in similarly public spaces.

But — and this is a big but–McWhorter is not, strictly speaking, a conservative. A few years ago, in an article published in Oakland’s East Bay Express, he expressed amusement at the fact that his first mainstream book on race and achievement, Losing the Race, landed him on panels with conservative spokesmen like Orrin Hatch, most of whose beliefs McWhorter disagreed with. In this article, he offered up as proof of his left-wing credentials the fact that he voted for Nader in the 2000 election.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Source: Hero UK University Guide)

In 2007, nearly three quarters of all the Black students enrolled in graduate school (73%) were women. This face raises some issues and questions that are as interesting as they are disturbing.

Some Black kids may very well believe that good grades and an interest in education constitutes “acting white,” but this wrong-headed notion has failed to dissuade African Americans from pursuing post-secondary education. Black people make up only 12-13% of the population, and are currently enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities at a rate that is roughly proportional.

Such is not the case when it comes to gender. African American men and boys are graduating from high school, entering college, graduating from college, and completing graduate degrees at a numbers that fall well below their proportion of the larger U.S. Black population. I cannot say whether or not Black boys taunt those who get good grades with the accusation that they are “acting like girls,” but I fear that somehow the message is being communicated to Black boys and young men that education (especially graduating from high school and entering and completing college) somehow constitutes acting like man.

Black boys and young men are receicing the message that education is for girls and women; and the Black male college experience, during which he may well be outnumbered by women on his campus at a ration of 2-1, reinforces that idea.

I can’t imagine any of the startistics that I have cited for 2007 changing very much during 2008. They question is, however, whether or not Barack Obama’s high visibility as President of the U.S. will have any impact on African American educational attainment. Obama is, in a sense, the “biggest baller” on the planet, with the closest any Black man has ever come to infinite power; and a key stepping stone on the way to achieving to all that he has become was his education.

Might Obama model a new vision of Black manhood, one in which masculinity and power would not be a cross purposes with intellectual engagement and a passion for learning?

I’ll be waiting and watching.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

The average of the (black) race as to intelligence, economic status and industry is so far below the white average that it seems to me futile to build up hope for a great future.

–Ora Wildermuth, and Indiana University trustee from 1938-1949, in a 1948 letter to IU president Herman B. Wells

[T]he Wildermuth name needs to be removed once and for all – not dressed up with the name of an honorable man who cannot object.

–IU Alumnus Russ Bridenbaugh, in a letter to the Indiana Daily Student

In 2007 the Indiana Daily Student newspaper brought to light a series of letters in which the late Ora Wildermuth, an IU trustee during the 1940s, expresses his racist feelings toward African Americans. In addition the quote at the beginning of this post, Wildermuth also wrote openly about his opposition to integrating the University residence halls, stating, “I am and shall always remain absolutely and utterly opposed to social intermingling of the colored race with the white.

Once the letters came to light, IU president Michael McRobbie asked the All University Committee on Names to take up the question of whether or not to change the name of the Ora L. Wildermuth Intramural Center, in light of the former trustee’s racist views.

After lengthy consideration, the Committee on Names has decided to change the name of the building in question to the William L. Garrett-Ora L. Wildermuth Fieldhouse.

William L. Garrett was the first African American basketball player at IU and the first African American to play basketball in the Big Ten conference. He was deeply respected not only for his extraordinary skill on the court, but for his strength of character, this at a time when he was regularly subject to racist taunts from both players and fans at other Big Ten schools. Garrett died of a heart condition in 1974, at the age of 45.

The Committee on Names decision to renamed the athletic center for both Wildermuth and Garrett was unanimous. The idea of simply removing Wildermuth’s name was rejected, based on the committee’s belief that it would unfair to judge him and his beliefs by today’s standards, this according to IU Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer J. Terry Clapacs. Clapacs elaborated on this opinion in a recent IU press release:

As wrong as he was, his views on race were not that uncommon at that time in history. Even our Armed Forces were segregated in those days. What is remarkable is that our society has changed so much in just 60 years.

This is utter foolishness. By the time Wildermuth was penning his racist letters to the IU administration, African Americans and white advocates for social justice had been fighting for the end of segregation for over 50 years. To call Wildermuth’s beliefs unacceptable is to judge him by the standards of his own generation and at least two generations before him. The fact that then IU President Herman continued down the path of integration despite the objection of at least one of his trustees illustrates this very fact; many whites were just as aware as their Black brothers and sisters of the folly of the “separate-but-equal” doctrine.

If IU’s Committee on Names wishes to retain the Wildermuth name, so be it; but they should not hide their true motivations for this decision behind the mask of a weak, ahistorical argument.

Bill Garrett in his IU basketball uniform

(Source: IU Newsroom)

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Derek Walcott (b. 1930)

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“Forty Acres”

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is

a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s

receding rim —

a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

(2008)

***

Biographical Notes: Noble Laureate and Boston University professor Derek Walcott was born in 1930, in St. Lucia, the West Indies. His published his first poem at the age of 14, and by 19 had already published two volumes of his work (25 Poems [1948] and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos [1949]). He was educated at St. Mary’s College in St. Lucia and the University of the West Indies.

During the last 60 years Walcott has published many collections of poetry, including:

• 25 Poems, Port-of-Spain: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948
• Epitaph for the Young, Xll Cantos, Bridgetown: Barbados Advocate, 1949
• Poems, Kingston, Jamaica, City Printery, 1951
• In a Green Night, Poems 1948 – 60, London: Cape, 1962
• Selected Poems, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1964
• The Castaway and Other Poems, London: Cape, 1965
• The Gulf and Other Poems, London: Cape, 1969
• Another Life, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux: London: Cape, 1973
• Sea Grapes, London: Cape; New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976
• The Star-Apple Kingdom, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979
• Selected Poetry, Ed. by Wayne Brown. London: Heinemann, 1981
• The Fortunate Traveller, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981
• Midsummer, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984
• Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986
• The Arkansas Testament, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987
• Omeros, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990

In 1957, Derek Walcott was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study the American theater. Since that time he has written a number of plays, including: The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His plays have been produced throughout the United States.

Over the course of his career, Professor Walcott has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry and, in 1992, the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Derek Walcott has been a professor in the English department at Boston University since 1981.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

(Source: Methodist Adventures in Higher Education by Jay Stowell, 1922)

President-elect Barack Obama

This week’s JBHE bulletin provides a point-by-point description of President-elect Barack Obama’s plan for higher education. To summarize, his plan will address many of the obstacles that have traditionally limited low-income and minority students’ access to educational opportunity.

Obama’s proposal for higher ed reform includes:

• A simplified federal financial aid for.
• Funding to create partnerships that will aid community colleges in transferring greater numbers of students to 4-year institutions.
• Early assessment programs to determine whether low-income and minority high school students are being adequately prepared for post-secondary education.
• An increase in the maximum Pell Grant award.
• A $4000 credit for college students.

To read the JBHE article in its entirety, click on this LINK.

I applaud Obama’s efforts to increase low-income and minority student access to higher education. In our rapidly changing economy, a college education is fast becoming a necessity for any level of upward mobility and financial self-determination.

I would also encourage the President-elect to consider the following additional proposals, each of which would expand access to higher education even further, by addressing some of the hidden issues of access, funding, and equity that have come to light in more recent years:

• Eligibility for federal financial should be expanded to include those undocumented young people who completed all of their formal (K -12) education in the United States. A growing number of young people are facing the difficulty of having crossed the U.S. border with their parents, as babies or pre-schoolers, and then educated and raised in the public school system, but without ever acquiring permanent resident or citizenship status. A number of such students are not even aware that they are undocumented until they attempt to apply for federal financial aid, at which point they find themselves in a type of financial and educational limbo. Without citizenship or permanent resident status, such students are subject to the same financial aid guidelines that are applied to international students, a label that contradicts how such students understand themselves, as American students with immigrant parents.
• Institutions a) whose endowments total either $1billion dollars or more, or b) with endowments of more than $1 million dollars per students should be required to offer tuition-free education to students whose family incomes are less than 5x the annual cost of tuition, room, and board. Such institutions’ non-profit status will be conditional, pending their adoption of this policy.
• Young men would no longer be required to register with Selective Service as a condition for receiving federal financial aid. The various branches of the armed forces would, however, have the same rights (no more and no less) to recruit on college campuses as corporations and other government and non-government employers.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Glenn Loury

Something we never imagined happened, and now the system is open and malleable. Reform now seems possible….[But] One in seven adult black men are in prison, and that didn’t vanish last night. The ghettoes in Chicago and Detroit did not disappear last night. The fact that African-Americans are underrepresented in elite universities, law schools and scientific institutions didn’t change last night.

–Glenn Loury, quoted in the Brown Daily Herald

Glenn Loury is Professor of Economic and Public Policy at Brown University. He is also the Merton P. Stultz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown’s Alfred A. Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions.

***

While all of Dr. Loury’s statistics are correct, I disagree with the subtext of his statement. Loury seems to suggest that our enthusiasm and exhiliration at the election of an African American president should be tempered by the reality that many African Americans are still living very much at the margins of society. If anything, the fact that disproportionate numbers of Black people a struggle under poverty, within the criminal justice system, and within/or against the social services establishment should give us all the more reason to celebrate Obama’s  victory.

You see, Obama won because he entered the presidential race as a candidate whose Blackness coexists with and informs his political vision, but does not define or limit his political agenda, his goals, or his rhetoric. This poses an interesting model for how we as a Black community might in the future approach issues like incarceration, drug dealing and addiction, poverty, and academic underperformance.

These isssues and challenges can impact all types of communities, regardless of ethnicity. This is not to say that the social ills that plague a given neighborhood or region cannot take on a racial or ethnic dimension (when a family member who is addicted to heroin, for example, his or herher participation in certain racially- or culturally-specific activities or roles will be compromised). Still, though, there is nothing specifically “Black” about poverty, drug abuse, incarceration, etc. Thus, the lesson of the Obama campaign may well be that race-specific approaches to cross-racially occurring issues like incarceration, poverty, and illegal drug use and sales  have exhausted their usefulness. The lesson of Obama’s successful campaign might be, in other words, that when there is a common and pan-racial interest in addressing, say, the problem that confront convicted felons who attempting to re-enter soceity, the most fruitful approach could well be the one that is rooted in the common threads that link all ethnic and racial communities that are impacted by the inability of newly released convicts to find work and housing.

I would be very interested to see what would happen if the Obama campaign catch phrase, “Yes We Can,” became the ethos that informed the new administration’s efforts to address those issues that disproportionately impact communities at the economic margins. Just as in Obama’s political campaign, the we in “Yes We Can” could become an expression by the new president’s supporters of their willingness to privilege their common belief in their candidate’s ability to lead over any other identity category (including race, gender, class, faith, or region), at least in terms of their political interests. Thus, the identity category Obama supporter comes to trump all other identity categories as that special interest group that defines their political goals and desires. As such, the needs of one sub-group among Obama supporters (Black people, for example, or Latinos or women or gays) would become the need and interest of all members of that group.

Stay tuned…

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Anything is achievable, never say never. Obama exemplifies what Ghandi said –– to ‘be the change you want to see in the world.’

— Alan Henderson, a Howard University senior and architecture major, as quoted in the Howard U Hilltop.