We're Having the Wrong Conversation About Black Men and College...Again

In fourth grade, I ran for class president and won. After a rousing campaign speech to my classmates, I had earned their votes. Even the girl I defeated congratulated me. But my teacher, Mrs. Richards, had other ideas.

She called the girl to her desk and told her she would be class president. I was crushed. When I asked Mrs. Richards why I couldn’t be class president, she snapped, TAKE YOUR SEAT! That’s the last I would hear from her about it. I never told my mother about this and other incidents because I feared she would take the teacher’s side, and other kids felt the same in dealing with their moms. Thus, humiliation from this teacher for the other Black boys (and some girls, if we're being honest) was commonplace.

A couple of years later, I was with my mother in a mall when we ran into Mrs. Richards, who recognized me. She said she remembered how well I read and what a good student I was. My mother thanked her for the compliment. As we walked away, I quickly dried the tears in my eyes, remembering the sting of her treatment and how I hated that chain-smoking, barrel-shaped ogress.

By this time, though, I was in sixth grade and an awful student. I was doing poorly in several subjects, with the exception of gym. I looked at school as a daylong prison for kids where I was subject to spiteful teachers, bullies, and chipping lead paint. This was the result of years of teachers who made me feel inadequate, despite my gifts, rather than understand their own incompetence.

What threw me back to my wayward days of being the short kid in class, trying to figure out my place in the world, is the current discussion about Black men and our presence, or lack thereof, on college campuses.

A Conversation in Reruns

A New York Times article discussing the male-female ratio at Howard University is dire – only 30 percent men, 19 percent Black men out of a total student body of nearly 11,000. While the quip that there are more Black men in prison than in college has been soundly debunked (it was also pretty stupid), Black men have been following the trend of men in general disappearing from college life. According to one study, Black male presence on college campuses has declined by 22 percent since 2010, and 26 percent at HBCUs. Overall, Black colleges have seen a 38 percent drop in Black males since 1976. The result of this is, of course, fewer degrees being conferred for us – 8.8 percent of all degrees awarded to men, compared to 61 percent given to whites.

So the discussion, which seems to emerge every few years, about Black men in college has surfaced again. My fellow scribe, Touré, spelled out his thoughts and said we were “wildly undereducated.” There are others who speculate that Black men find themselves in a hip hop-fused culture that does not emphasize higher education, but rather “grinding” and hustling. 

Still others point out stats in which Black students find college debt overwhelming, and young men feel extreme pressure, thus facilitating an exit. At least a few subscribe to the fallacious notion that overall Black men do not have the aptitude to pursue college, one that was expressed to me during my own undergrad years.

It's important to note here, though, that masculinity and education for Black men have never been mutually exclusive. I find no evidence of this in any conversation I've been part of during many years of writing about the Black diaspora.

I was suspended from school several times. Only once was it for fighting. All the other times it was because I profanely called bullshit on the history books they were teaching us from. Being in school for me, until I started getting male teachers, meant being in conflict.

This was the experience of pretty much every friend of mine who was Black and male growing up. All of us were so used to it that it didn’t even upset us. But our behaviors still reflected the psychological abuse. There were other factors, too. Some kids in other neighborhoods were subject to daily gun violence. Others had to step over junkies lying in the sidewalk to get to school. Every boy had to adhere to a sort of unspoken street code that helped us survive in dangerous, even predatory environments.

In seventh grade, my parents got me a tutor, Mr. Jones, a 28-year-old math teacher – a young Black man who made me feel confident in myself. Suddenly, I was on the honor roll again, and I did well through high school, eventually following a professional path as a journalist. My buddy Mike, who lived across the street, was dealing with poor grades, too. His parents hired Mr. Jones as well, and the same effect took place. Mike is now an HBCU graduate and an airline pilot.

So I Didn’t Get Locked Up…

During my chaotic grade and middle school days, I don’t remember higher education conversations being a part of it, but I do remember many people predicting I’d be an inmate. The one group that I didn’t know was predicting it was the criminal justice system itself. There are dozens of studies connecting low literacy rates to prison incarceration. Even though my reading level was far ahead of my grade level, I was still bunched in with other boys in the expectation that I was destined for mugshots instead of matriculation.

Anyway, I managed to avoid going to jail – sometimes I think through divine intervention – but largely because the dudes I spent most of my time with were on the same basic track. There were some who were in the streets, some fully, others partly. But a lot of the others wanted to find their way into college and eventually, a degree. Many got in on athletic scholarships, while more than a few went on academic scholarships, full or partial. There was some message that all of us got by twelfth grade that said, “go to college.”

My point here is that, somehow, despite teachers who didn’t think of me with any kind of potential, there were thankfully interventions along the way. But there are countless Black boys who never get any kind of intervention, and the subject of Black males missing from college campuses continues.

All this means we are having the conversations about college and Black men far, far too late. The time to have it is when Black boys are eight, nine, or ten years old, when they are beginning to imagine what life will be like when they grow up. Perhaps they are also experiencing their own Mrs. Richards trauma or worse. You might think that her vindictiveness, when it happens to us, is superficial. Trust me, it is not. Boys have a keen sense of justice and fairness. When they feel an adult has betrayed that, it could change the course of their lives.

But not every teacher was awful to me. I had multiple teachers from middle school through college who were extremely formative for me. They were fair and they understood how their behaviors could affect a pupil. Because of them, I lost my fear of school. And let's be clear: We need good teachers and we need to pay them well.

What happened to Mr. Jones, though, I may never know. One day he went ghost. Neither Mike nor I ever heard from him again. I tried to find him, but couldn’t. I just hope that he knew that he took the damage that the school system did to two Black boys and repaired it, making a real difference for two families.

So if we want to see more Black men in college, we need to go to them as boys and send them on that path because our journey to manhood starts in boyhood. Just like with the billionaires in this country who were born on third base, maybe we can start guiding Black boys to the right course instead of expecting them to magically find it themselves.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.