More evidence to suggest that majority white colleges and universities are becoming more effective at education African American students:

Exduco.net reports that during the 2005 – 2006 school year Georgia Tech was the top producer of African American engineers in the United States, graduating 120 Black students from their undergrad engineering program. This figure represents a slight increase over the previous school year, when 117 African Americans completed bachelor’s degrees in this field.

During the same school year, Georgia Tech was also the number one producer of Black engineering Ph.D.s, with 11 Afrfican American students completing their doctorates, up from 4 during the previous year.

The Exduco.net article also lists the other top producers of Black engineers, at both the undergraduate and doctoral levels:

Other top five degree producers at the undergraduate level include North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina State University at Raleigh, Southern University and A&M College and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
[…]
Other top five producers of African-American doctoral engineering graduates include Morgan State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Florida and North Carolina A&T State University.

Georgia Tech faculty and administrators attribute their success at both recruiting and retaining African American engineers to strong co-curricular programs aimed at both drawing strong Black students to engineering and supporting those African Americans who pursue degrees in that field.

In particular, I would like to call attention to the FACES program (at http://www.faces.gatech.edu/2007/), which encourages undergraduate engineers to consider doctoral study and careers in academe, and the FOCUS program (http://www.focus.gatech.edu/friends/), which encourages high school students with and interest in math and science and undergraduates in engineering to pursue further study in this field.

Kudos to Georgia Tech! When it comes to Black students in engineering this institution definitely “gets it.” While pundits and think tanks debate the value of affirmative action and ethnic diversity as though Black college success is an as-yet unproven abstraction, universities like Georgia Tech proceed with a belief in the ability of all students to reach their academic goals.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

L to R: Brittany, Ashley, and Courtney Henry, Dartmouth Class of 2007 

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports:

For the first time in the school’s 238-year history, this June Dartmouth College graduated its first set of triplets. The three graduates are African-American sisters from San Diego, California.

Ashley, Brittany, and Courtney Henry, age 21, are identical triplets. They are graduates of a Seventh Day Adventist school in California where they shared honors as valedictorians.

All three girls will return to San Diego and take a year off before beginning professional school. Ashley, a history major, is going to medical school. Brittany, who majored in religion at Dartmouth, will enter law school. Courtney graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in American history. She plans on a career in dentistry.

The College marked this unique occasion by offering Olivia Willis-Henry, the triplets’ mother a choice seat from which to enjoy the commencement exercises, beside Susan Wright, wife of the current president of Dartmouth.

Prior to Dartmouth, Ashley, Brittany, and Courtney attended a small Seventh-Day Adventist high school where the three shared valecdictorian honors.

Diversity and the opportunity to broaden their experiences was an important factor in the Henry sisters’ decision to matriculate at Dartmouth. Said Brittany, “I just felt that, before coming to Dartmouth I had a very sheltered outlook. I was surrounded only by other Seventh Day Adventists and didn’t get to mingle with other groups.”

Ashley echoes this sentiment, explaining that, I feel it is important to be exposed to a lot of different outlooks, a lot of diversity, people of different ethnicities, different religions and socio-economic groups, “Dartmouth is a place that lets you do that. It would have been a lot easier on our mother if we stayed in California, but she wanted us to have the opportunity to receive the best academic and social education we could get.”

All three women look forward to returning to the San Diego area. Family is important to the Henry sisters, and they are happy to be moving closer to their mother, described as a speech pathologist who is divorced from their father.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

History and Overview: The first students arrived on the campus of Indiana University in 1824. The first Black student to earn a degree from this institution graduated in 1895. Since then over 13,000 African Americans have graduated from IU.

As of fall 2006 IU enrolled 29,828 undergraduates and over 8500 graduate and professional degree students at it’s flagship campus in Bloomington, for a total enrollment of approximately 38,200. 1,699 of those students are Black.

Black Milestones at Indiana University:

• 1893 — Preston Eagleson integrates IU athletics by becoming the first Black student to play sports for the University (football, 3 seasons).
• 1895 — Marcellus Neal becomes the first African American student to graduate from Indiana University (B.A. in Mathematics).
• 1906 — Preston Eagleson becomes the first African American to earn a master’s degree at IU (M.A., Philosophy).
• 1911 — On the evening of January 5, Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc. (the nation’s second oldest African American fraternity) is founded by then Indiana University students Elder Watson Diggs; John Milton Lee; Byron K. Armstrong; Guy Levis Grant; Ezra D. Alexander; Henry T. Asher; Marcus P. Blakemore; Paul W. Caine; Edward G. Irvin and George W. Edmonds (the Reverend Founders).
• 1919 — Frances Elizabeth Marshall becomes the first African American woman to graduate from Indiana University (B.A. in English).
• 1947 — IU’s Bill Garrett becomes the Big Ten’s first African American basketball player.
• 1959 — Richard Johnson becomes IU’s first tenured African American professor (Music). In the same year undergraduate Nancy Streets becomes the first African American “Miss IU.”
• 1960 — Thomas Atkins becomes IU’s first Black Student Body President and the first African American in the Big Ten to hold that post.
• 1981 — Edward High becomes the first African American president of the IU Alumni Association.
• 1997 — Cora Smith Breckenridge becomes the first African American on the IU Board of Trustees.

Marcellus Neal and Frances Elizabeth Marshall,

the first African American man and the first African American

woman to graduate from IU

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Introduction: This is the second post in a series of posts I’m writing to pay tribute to those African Americans whose pioneering presence on U.S. college campuses opened doors for subsequent generations of Black people.

As I compose the entries for this series I am struck over and over again by two things, 1) the high level of academic achievement of so many of Black America’s pioneering scholars, and 2) how many of these Black “firsts” have taken place during my lifetime. These observations lead me to two corresponding conclusions, 1) that African Americans have accomplished much more in U.S. higher education than we give ourselves credit for, and 2) that far too many institutions, departments, and graduate programs remain largely closed to Black participation, either intentionally or unintentionally.

By the way, if you are a Black “first” on your campus, in your department, etc., please let me know so that I can include you in this series (when your campus and/or alma mater comes up) and in my Black Milestones in Higher Education timeline at the Twilight and Reason website.

History and Overview: The University of Michigan was founded in 1817 near Detroit, on what the U of M Campus Information Centers describes as “1,920 acres of land ceded by the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi people.” In 1837 the University of Michigan moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor where the 7 enrolled students were taught by 2 professors.

The University of Michigan enrolled its first Black students in 1868, two years before it would welcome women students onto the campus. At the time that Black students were first admitted, the University was experiencing unprecedented prosperity. Enrollment in 1867 had reach a historic high of 1255 students, taught by a faculty of 33.

Today the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor has an undergraduate enrollment of 25,555 undergraduates , including 1,709 Black students. The current graduate enrollment is 14,470 graduate students, including 571 Black students. The U of M employs 2,891 tenured and tenure-track faculty,  of whom  146 are Black.

Timeline: Black Milestones at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor

• 1853 — Samuel Codes Watson becomes the first African American student to attend the University of Michigan.
• 1870 — Gabriel F. Hargo becomes the first African American student to graduate from the University of Michigan. Hargo studied law and was a sargeant at arms in the Lincoln Debating Society. He earned a bachelor’s degree.
• 1872 — William Henry Fitzbutler becomes the first African American to graduate from the U of M Medical School.
• 1880 — Mary Henrietta Graham becomes the first Black woman to graduate from the U of M (Bachelor of Philosophy, Literature).
• 1890 — Ida Gray graduates from the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, and in so doing becomes the United States’ first Black woman dental school graduate.
• 1918 — Elmer Samuel Imes becomes the first African American at U of M (and only the second African American in the U.S.) to complete a Ph.D. in Physics.
• 1925 — U of M students organize the Negro – Caucasion Club in order to improve race relations on and off campus.
• 1949 — Marjorie Lee Browne earns a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the U of M, becoming one of the first two Black women to earn doctorates in this field, both in 1949 (the other is Evelyn Boyd Granville, at Yale University).
• 1952 — Albert H. Wheeler joins the Michigan faculty as an assistant professor microbiology and immunology. Wheeler would go on to become the first Black professor to earn tenure at UM.
• 1969 — Niara Sudarkasa (born Gloria Albertha Marshall) becomes the first African American appointed to the  faculty of the University of Michigan Department of Anthropology. She would go on to become the first African American woman to earn tenure at the U of M.
• 1970 — Hon. Harry T. Edwards joins the faculty of Michigan Law School. He would eventually become the first African American law professor to earn tenure at U of M. In the same year, Michigan’s Center for Afroamerican and African Studies is established.
• 1971 — The William Monroe Trotter House is founded as a Black student cultural center.
• 1972 — Willie Hobbs Moore completes her Ph.D. in Physics at UM – Ann Arbor, becoming the first Black woman in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in that field. In 1958 Willie Hobbs Moore became the first Black woman to complete an undergraduate degree in Engineering at UM. In the same year, Henry Johnson becomes Michigan’s first African American administrator (Vice President for Student Services).
• 2003 — On June 23 the U.S. Supreme Court rules that while diversity remains a “compelling interest” in higher education, the admissions system employed by U of M undergraduate admissions is unconstitutional. The Court upholds the whole-file review process used at the U of M Law School

Mary Henrietta Graham, Michigan’s first Black female graduate (Literature, 1880)

For Further Reading: Slater, Robert Bruce. “The First Black Faculty Members at the Nation’s Highest-Ranked Universities.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 22. (Winter, 1998-1999), pp. 97-106.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

History and Overview: The University of Illinois, Champaign – Urbana first opened its doors to students in 1868 as the Illinois Industrial University. Renamed the University of Illinois in 1885, U of I is one of the 37 original land grant universities established by President Abraham Lincoln.

African Americans first entered the U of I campus as employees. Existing records show that the first Black worker at the University  was Mr. L.H. Walden, who was first employed as a maintenance worker for the Military Drill Hall and Men’s Gymnasium (now Kenney Gym) in 1880.  The first African American student arrived on campus seven years later. Black students enrolled and graduated at a trickle throughout the first half of the 20th century.

In March of this year, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education issued the following assesment of the current Black student population at U of I:

Blacks make up 6.6 percent of the 31,000-member undergraduate student body at the University of Illinois. But the black student graduation rate of 65 percent is 21 percentage points below the rate for white students.

U of I is a member of the Big 10 athletic conference, and it’s sports teams play under the name “The Fighting Illini,” a name that the University has been allowed to retain, though it has been prohibited by the NCAA from using the image of its former mascot Chief Illiniwek, an imaginary native American figure whose appearance at intercollegiate athletic events was banned by that governing body.

Timeline: Black Milestones at the U of I, Champaign – Urbana

• 1887     Jonathan A. Rogan becomes the first African American to enroll at the U of I. 
• 1900     William Walter Smith becomes the first African American student to graduate from the U of I (bachelor’s in Literature and Arts). He would go on to earn two more degrees from Illinois, a second bachelor’s degree in 1907 (B.S. in Civil Engineering), and a master’s in Civil Engineering in 1913.
• 1904     Walter T. Bailey becomes the first African American to student to graduate from the University of Illinois School of Architecture (B.S. in Architectural Engineering).
• 1916     St. Elmo Brady becomes the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the U of I and in the U.S.
• Maudelle Tanner Brown becomes the first African American woman to graduate from the U of I, taking only 3 years to earn a bachelor’s in Mathematics, with honors.
• 1936     Beverly Greene becomes the first African American woman to receive a bachelor’s degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Illinois Schoool of Architecture. She would go on to receive a master’s degree in City Planning from the U of I.
• 1969    Clarence A. Ellis completes the U of I doctoral program in Computer Science and becomes the first African American in the history of the U.S. to receive a Ph.D. in that field.
• 1974     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign establishes an African American Studies and Research Program.

William Walter Smith, the first African American

to graduate from the University of Illinois 

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Jafar Abdul-Hafiz, Merrillville High School’s first Black male valedictorian, entertains his class with an unconventional commencement address.

Kudos to each of these outstanding Black 2007 Graduates for their exceptional performance as scholars and leaders:

Karen Morris, featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show as the first grandmother ever to graduate from Yale Medical School.

Jonah Brown, president of the University of Kentucky student government for the 2006 – 2007 school year, and chosen as this year’s student commencement speaker. University of Kentucky News describes Brown as “a political science major from Richmond, Ky.,” with an “extensive record of involvement during his four-year career at UK”:

Among several positions of leadership Brown held on campus, he served as a student ambassador for the university as well as the College of Arts and Sciences; he was a residence hall student president and president of the Resident Student Association; he served as vice president of his fraternity and as a delegate to the national Pan-Hellenic Council.

William H. Gray, III, honored at the Princeton Theological Seminary Commencement as this year’s distinguished alumnus (class of 1970). The Princeton Packet describes his achievements:

Mr. Gray is chairman of the Amani Group, a governmental, educational, and business advisory group. He was president and chief executive officer of The College Fund/United Negro College Fund from 1991 to 2004.
   Mr. Gray served in the U.S. Congress from 1979 to 1991, was the first African-American to chair the House Budget Committee, and became chairman of the Democratic Caucus. He was also the first African-American in the 20th century to become majority whip of the House of Representatives, a position he held from 1989 to 1991.
   He is pastor emeritus of the nearly 7,000-member Bright Hope Baptist Church in Philadelphia, as were his father, William H. Gray Jr., Princeton Seminary Class of 1953, and grandfather before him, and he has been a professor of religion and history at St. Peter’s College, Jersey City State College, Montclair State College, Palmer Theological Seminary, and Temple University.
    Mr. Gray earned a bachelor of arts degree in history at Franklin and Marshall College, a master of divinity degree from Drew University Theological School, and a master of theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.

Paulette McRae, who became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Yale University.

Breanna Fields, who on June 21, 2007 will become Teaneck (New Jersey) High School’s first African American valedictorian. She will graduate at the top of her class of 375 seniors, with a 4.87 G.P.A. In the fall she will begin undergraduate studies at Yale University where she plans to study political science. She offers this advice to incoming Teaneck freshmen:

Set your goals high. Definitely take classes that will challenge you. You can always step down if it’s too hard, but you’ll never have to regret saying, ‘I should have tried that class.’ And be involved, even if it’s one club. You can’t get a full high school experience by just going home after school. You don’t have to do a laundry list of things, but be passionate about what you do.

Martha-Elizabeth Baylor, who upon defending her doctoral thesis in August of this year will become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. As an undergraduate at Kenyon College she doubled majored in physics and Chinese. When asked by a local columnist why she chose physics, Baylor responded, “I was never good at English and the humanities. OK, math was a possibility. But, to tell the truth, (physics) was easy for me.”

Jafar Abdul-Hafiz, who recently became Merrillville (Indiana) High School’s first African American male valedictorian. One of six valedictorians (in a graduating class of 505 students), all of whom had 4.0 grade point averages, Abdul-Hafiz was senior class president. He hopes to become a surgeon.

William Chin, Charles H. Flowers High School valedictorian, talks science with fellow classmates.

William Chin, the valedictorian of his graduating class at the largely Black Charles H. Flowers High School in Maryland.  Chin, an Eagle scout, scored 2000 on the SAT and was admitted to Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland at College Park, Howard, North Carolina State, North Carolina A&T, and M.I.T., his first choice. He will attend M.I.T. Chin has many fans, including his guidance counselor, Heather Roberts. Says Roberts, “He kind of reminds me of Bill Gates. You know he’s going to do something phenomenal.”

Dorothy Donkor (valedictorian) and Julian Brooks (third in the class), graduating seniors at California’s Rio Linda High School who also happen to be cousins. Both  students will attend Stanford University in the fall. Dorothy plans to major in chemistry, while Julian plans to study engineering. Both cousins are part of an exceptional class of African American Rio Linda seniors, four of whom are ranked within the top eight students in the class.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

In the 1970s, students attending HBCUs had an 11 percent advantage over their Black counterparts at traditionally White institutions in terms of economic gains. By the 1990s, Blacks at HBCUs were behind 14 percent in terms of salary.– “HBCU Graduates Earn Less Than Black Graduates Of Traditionally White Institutions,” DIHE, 05/17/07

A May 17th article in Diverse Issues in Higher Education reports that a recent study has concluded that African Americans who graduate from majority white colleges and universities earn more money than African Americans who graduate from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The study, conducted by Roland G. Fryer and Michael Greenstone, hypothesizes that the current discrepancy between the salaries of African American graduates from traditionally white institutions (TWIs) and Black graduates of HBCUs could be due to the improvements made by TWIs in educating Black students.

I looked up the abstract for Fryer and Greenstone’s study, published as M.I.T. Working Paper No. 07-12, to get a better sense of their research on this issue. The following passage from the abstract summarizes their conclusions:

Between the 1970s and 1990s, HBCU students report statistically significant declines in the proportion that would choose the same college again, preparation for getting along with other racial groups, and development of leadership skills, relative to black students in TWIs. On the positive side, HBCU attendees became relatively more likely to be engaged in social, political, and philanthropic activities. The data provide modest support for the possibility that HBCUs’ relative decline in wages is partially due to improvements in TWIs’ effectiveness at educating blacks. The data contradict a number of other intuitive explanations, including relative decline in pre-college credentials (e.g., SAT scores) of students attending HBCUs and expenditures per student at HBCUs.

While Fryer and Greenstone have excluded differences in SAT scores and per-student expenditures as possible explanations for the income gap between Black grads of TWIs and Black grads of HBCUs, I believe that other intuitive explanations remain relevant, like class and acculturation/exposure to the culture and expectations of four-year college education. While the authors of this study go into great detail about the 89 HBCUs that are the focus of their work, they provide considerably less information about the historically white institutions in their research, describing them simply as “comparable.” The question that remains wholly unaddressed, however, is whether or not the students themselves are comparable.

Despite whatever features may link the TWIs and HBCUs examined in this study, the likelihood is that the Black institutions enrolled more GED recipients, more impoverished students, more first generation college students, and more “at-risk” students than the white schools to which they are compared. NAFEO president Lezli Baskerville notes that, “HBCUs educate a significant proportion of low-income, Pell Grant-eligible students,” and asks,  “Did the authors control for similar criteria at TWIs? That would make a difference in outcomes.”

Lezli Baskerville and NAFEO have invited Fryer and Greenstone to elaborate on their research at an upcoming conference (July 2007). It is my  hope that they will seize this opportunity to address the many questions that have arisen as a result of their challenging and provactive work.

 Posted by Ajuan Mance

[Morehouse is a] “refuge from the rest of the world where what race you are doesn’t really matter.”

–Steven Schukei, one of a small number of white almuni of this historically Black men’s college

While the media follows the struggles of majority white colleges and university systems to recruit and retain African American students, the success of HBCUs in retaining, welcoming, and supporting the number of white students who attend rarely makes the news.

That is why the May 29th AP article “White Students Being Recruited at Black Colleges” by Katrina Goggins is so refreshing. In it Goggins provides an overview of the current state of white recuritment, admissions, and enrollment at Black colleges. “In the 2005-06 school year, nearly 10 percent of [HBCU] students were white, according to her association’s data,” an impressive figure given the challenge of competing with nearly 30 times the number of majority-white colleges, many of whom have higher budgets and greater name recognition.

Part of Black colleges’ success in drawing more white students can be attributed to significant increases in their efforts to recruit non-Black undergrads, including scholarship and minority affairs offices aimed at addressing the needs of whites and other non-African Americans on campus.

Public HBCUs began actively recruiting white students in the 1980s and 1990s, a period when those public institutions with race- and gender-based missions originally crafted to serve the interests of marginalized groups (people of color and women) were forced to integrate (VMI, the Citadel, Texas Women’s University, and various HBCUs).

According to Goggins, “White students say they’ve taken valuable experiences from their time at black colleges. Skin color, the students say, is much more of a factor away from the campuses than it is on them.” Michael Roberts, an white undergraduate at South Carolina’s Benedict College echoes this sentiment, explaining that “[at Benedict] you should get to know people based on who they are,” Roberts said. “You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

This capacity to see race, but to experience people as more than just their ethnicity is becoming an increasingly necessary skill for white students. Lezli Baskerville, the president and CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education believes that white students who choose to attend HBCUs are preparing themselves for

“[an] increasingly Brown and Black world.  If you want to know how to live in one, you can’t grow up in an all-white neighborhood, go to a predominantly white school, white cultural and social events, go to a predominantly white university and then thrive in a world that is today more black, more brown than before.”

In the coming years I expect to see more white students attending HBCUs, as popular culture phenomena ranging from the televising of Black college football games to films like Drumline and Stomp the Yard to HBCU-based reality shows combine with increasing reports of the browning of America to make it increasingly clear that white students who have isolated themselves in all white schools located in all white communities are truly being left behind as the nation races ahead into a truly multicultural future.

Read Katrina A. Goggins’s AP report at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18914514/

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Calvin C. Hernton

(1933-2001)

My last post about Black feminism reminded me of Calvin Hernton, his scholarly and academic achievements, his personal and intellectual transformations, and his exceptional body of work. What better time to commemorate his legacy than on a day like today, when he and his work are so present in my mind.

I first became aware of Calvin Hernton while I was writing my dissertation. Part of my project involved exploring the strategies used by African American women to write past the persistent gendering of Blackness as male (by people of all ethnicities). His exploration the interactions between gender and race in U.S. Black literature in The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers  was very helpful to me.

My high regard for Hernton’s legacy, however, is more deeply influenced by my encounters with Black men who knew him as a teacher and mentor.  Hernton touched the hearts and minds of many students during his 28-year career as an African American Studies professor at Oberlin College, but he holds a special place in the hearts of his former Black male students, many of whom experienced him as the only Black man to ever teach them at the college level.

As a Black woman professor, I am especially touched by how deeply his views on Black women writers influenced some of the young Black men in his classes. A Black attorney I know spoke reverently of the influence Herton’s own story of transformation from a male-centered view of Black politics and anti-racist activism to a broader more inclusive vision that recognized the value of Black women writers’ critiques of sexism in novels like The Color Purple, The Women of Brewster Place, and The Bluest Eye.

Another Black former student, now an economist and researcher,  includes this passage from The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers, on a tribute page he has created in memory of his professor, explaining that, “One thing that stands out in my memory of Calvin was his unwavering and principled stand against sexism, especially that ‘within the race,’ as he would say”:

Because much of the writing of contemporary black women is critical of black men, both in the literary sphere and in real life, the men find it unpalatable. But black writing owes its very nature to the oppressive conditions under which blacks were and are subjected in America. The function therefore of black literature has always been, as Langston Hughes so declared, to illuminate and elevate the condition of black people. It is altogether consistent with the heritage of black writing that black women write about the meanness they have experienced and still experience at the hands of black men as well as white men. It is inescapable that women writers seek to illuminate and elevate the condition of black women, their whole condition. How is one to participate meaningfully in the struggle between the races if one is the victim of subjugation within the race?

–quoted on Caliban, a blog created by Dr. Thomas G. Mathews, a former student

I want to underscore that I never actually met Calvin Hernton; and for years I knew little of his work beyond his writings in my scholarly field. As my knowledge of his impact as a teacher has grown, however, I find myself feeling closer and closer to him, aligning myself with his legacy, aspiring to use the relationship between teacher and student in much the same way that he did, to create, challenge, and transform myself and my students, always with integrity, and always for the better.

Calvin Hernton Links:

• Remembering Calvin Herton by Dr. Mathews
• Calvin C. Hernton (1933-2001) — short bibliography
• Calvin Hernton — short biography
• Calvin Hernton — detailed biography on Answers.Com

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Never one to bring a particularly complex analysis to her engagement with issues of race, Debra Dickerson has now turned her focus to Michelle Obama’s decision to scale back to a 20% workload at her own job in order to be more available to assist in her husband’s presidential run.

Though Michelle Obama herself “expresses no regret about scaling down her job,” commentator Dickerson is in a state of mourning: “My heart breaks for her just thinking about it. Being president will be hard. So will being first lady for the brilliant Michelle — imagine, having to begin all your sentences with ‘My husband and I…'”

And Dickerson has a lot more to say on the subject. If you would like to read her entire article, you can access it at this link on the Salon.com website.

I am especially offended by this statement: “Most important, though, I hope Michelle will bring feminism to black women.”

If we go all the way back to Isabella Baumfree (a.k.a. Sojourner Truth), we could say that she invented Black feminism, and she did so as a former slave living in the 19th century. And what about the great numbers of African American feminist women (and some men) who have written books (like Ain’t I a Woman) and essays (like “A Black Feminist Statement“) defining their own Black feminism as woman-centered, socio-political discourse wholly distinct from privileged white women’s feminism. And Black feminism is not simply the domain of African American writers. Dickerson also overlooks the scores of  Black women who have disseminated their feminism through activist work in the classroom, on the streets, in their art, music, and dance, and in their work both against and within the houses of state and federal legislatures.

If Dickerson is unaware of the existence of large numbers of Black feminists, then she is certainly not likely to call attention to the womanists, those who follow Alice Walker’s lead by naming their Black woman-centered politics with a term whose distinctness is in and of itself a statement of African American women’s rejection of the narrow terms and concerns of white bourgeois feminism. A key component in all forms of Black feminism

The problem with Debra Dickerson is that her own deeply conflicted feelings about being African American cloud her perceptions of Black people. She does not see what is actually happening in Black communities. Rather, she processes all data that she takes in about Black folks,  Black opinions, Black progress, and Black shortcomings through her lens of guilty/repulsed/confused/alienated/sometimes embarassed curiosity.

Posted by Ajuan Mance