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.

Some Ducks Are Decoys

At first glance, this post may not seem to be about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" at all. But I think it is. It's about the "Duck Dynasty" meltdown in recent weeks and the family behind the show. And what could be "Whiter" than "Duck Dynasty"?

Keep in mind that I was born in a house where White women in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky went to have their babies if they could afford it. My mother's family had lived on the same mountain for two hundred years and had owned most of the region for much of that period. I'm a bonafide, dyed-in-the-wool hillbilly. So when I moved to Louisiana six and one-half years ago, I understood immediately what I was looking at. The racist culture, the "good ole boys" driving trucks, the gun fetish, the local power being passed down in families from generation to generation, the rampant political corruption. The whole nine yards.

But another thing I understood was that "outsiders" think "rednecks" are stupid. And I know better.