Saturday, September 24, 2016

What Racism Has To Do With The Cost of College



A few days ago, I posted a video of a young Black woman expressing her frustration with how Black college students are often viewed, even by each other. Today, I'm posting another video about race and higher education. It explains how White Supremacy as an ideology has paired up with public policy in the United States to gut everything public and most especially public universities.

Be careful not to misunderstand what they say at the end of the video, though. When they explain that racism in the public sphere hurts everybody, they don't mean Black students and White students are equally affected. In fact, they say quite clearly at one point that Black students are more negatively impacted by racist public policies than White students are. But when the Powers-That-Be use racism to send tuition and student loans sky-rocketing, everybody gets sucker-punched.

What they're trying to get across is that White students shouldn't let the public policy decision-makers fool them into believing that attacks on the public sphere only hurt Black people. If teachers -- and students -- form a solid front, we can stop the neo-liberal bulldozer in its tracks.

2 comments:

veganelder said...

Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America is working on putting together a series of video lectures that explains how various public policies which support and uphold structural racism work in tandem.

The video you shared fits well with their project. Thank you.

Link to the Brown University effort: https://www.brown.edu/academics/race-ethnicity/how-structural-racism-works

changeseeker said...

Thank you, Veganelder, for this link. I'm going to forward it to some other folks.