Education for African Americans - 9.28.2006.2

Continued from part 1...

So the playing field will even out a bit in the future. Of course I do mean a little bit as less than 10% of the student bodies at Harvard and Princeton are African American. In fact a study done in 2004 by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University found that 41% of black students at 28 colleges were immigrants or children of immigrants. By comparison 9% of the entire United States population falls into that same category.

But what does the African American student have to look forward to? When I was in high school, in the Bronx and it was public school, my history book summed up all of African American history as 2 sentences on Egypt, 2 or 3 on Crispus Attucks, and another mentioning that slavery was legal then and will be discussed more in the chapters on the Civil War. That was about it. Perhaps the fact that most of the school books I had were 10 or more years old was a factor [my college-bound physics class had a textbook that was 21 years old, 3 more than me in my senior year] but I think not as my youngest sister (14 years my junior) had a history book that had a total of 2 pages on the subject. So I was interested in taking classes on African American history at my college. Had I gone to Princeton I would have been sorely disappointed. Had I desired to, I could not have majored in African American studies. It has taken Princeton 37 years to create a concentration in the subject.

It’s taken 37 years, and it will still take another 5 to build into a major according to current plans. Some wonder why there is a discrepancy in the highest levels of business, or why the African American middle-class is so small. I think this gives a partial answer to the insensitivities and difficulties of that question. Add to that the fact that in most all colleges and universities the overwhelming numbers of alumni are not African Americans. Recognize that the parents and grand-parents of many students never had the option to go to universities, especially those at the top, Princeton included. For those that could go, we are speaking of a small number of higher income families.

Continued in part 3...