"Higher education is not the racial utopia that Republicans are scared of. It is not some bizarro world where students of color wield power over white students and faculty. It is a white supremacist system at its core, like all our other systems are. That is shown in the numbers. Black students, Hispanic students, Indigenous students, and Pacific Islander students all fare worse on college campuses than white students- they are far less likely to be admitted, and when they are admitted, they are far less likely to graduate than white students.
I remember sitting with Black social work students on a campus in illinois. They told me they had chosen social work because of all the ways in which they had been failed in their own lives by social workers and others who held similar positions of authority and local government. They wanted to be able to support people whom traditional social work had left behind, like them. The students shared their struggles to make it out of areas like Ferguson, Missouri, and into college when so many people had told them it wasn't possible. Some students were homeless during their first years of college.
They talked about how all the professors were white, and how in every class their professors pathologized people who looked like them and who came from the communities they grew up in. They talked about how they struggled to make good grades in classes that wanted to teach them that people who looked like them were fundamentally broken. They put up with these insults and hurdles so they would have a chance to be social workers who could tell their community members that they weren't flawed.
I say all of this to make the point that I really hate defending higher education. It is a broken system that can do a lot of harm to marginalized people. Yet it's the best place in America for our young people to formulate their social and political consciousness. How very sad."
Chapter 3- Mediocre, Ijeoma Oluo
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