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Talk on diversity kicks off black history celebration
3:18 p.m., Feb. 19, 2007--“Blacks have used education as a central tool to dismantle the barriers of discrimination. Education has been a way for blacks to see their lives go forward,” Manning Marable told those attending the first event in UD's black history celebration on Feb. 15 in the Trabant University Center Multipurpose Room. Sponsored by UD's Center for Black Culture and Black Student Union, the event opened with music by a UD student jazz ensemble, songs by the UD Gospel Choir and a buffet. Considered one of America's most influential and widely read scholars, Marable is professor of public affairs, political science, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He has written or edited 12 books on the politics and sociology of being black in America and writes a column, “Along the Color Line,” that is carried by 400 newspapers around the world. Marable said that during the last 15 years educational multiculturalism has suffered defeats in the courts and in politics making higher education a less accessible tool for progress for blacks. He said the new domain of racism is hidden in the form of mass unemployment, mass incarceration and mass disenfranchisment. Blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 49 percent of those in prison, he said. “One-third of all prisoners were unemployed at the time of their arrests. We have linked fate with these people,” Marable said. “There is nothing more important in the 21st century than prison disenfranchisement.” With 800,000 people in the prison system, the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 might have turned out differently if those in prison had voted, Marable suggested. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Hopwood v. Texas in which a white woman sued the University of Texas law school claiming she was denied admission despite being better qualified than many admitted minority candidates. It was the first successful legal challenge to racial preferences in student admissions in 18 years, setting the stage for other legal actions that have since all but outlawed affirmative action or compensatory justice, Marable said. In 2003, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that states had a compelling interest in fostering programs that enhanced diversity, so while race could be a factor, it couldn't be the main factor. The court said a university had to accept students as individuals, and that they could not be identified racially, Marable said. “In the last three-and-a-half years, there has been a fundamental transformation in the nation's colleges and universities,” he said, noting that racially exclusive programs designed to give disadvantaged students extra help have abruptly stopped. “Increasingly, higher education diversity has been redefined to open minority programs to whites,” he said. “Affirmative action as we knew it five years ago is dead.” Marable said that in 1973, states contributed about one-half the operating budgets of public colleges. Today that figure is 23 percent. "That means that lower income families are expected to assume a greater share of the cost of higher education,” Marable said. Federal and state governments have made it more difficult to finance education through loans, and “25 years ago, a maximum Pell Grant paid 80 percent of college expenses for four years,” whereas “today it covers less than half the cost,” he said. In many states, students convicted of felonies, even seemingly minor offenses, become ineligible for state-based college loan programs. “Black males are especially hard hit,” Marable said. High school advanced placement, widely available in white schools, is virtually unavailable in black, brown and low-income schools, Marable said. “If you look at elite institutions of higher education, only about 6.1 percent of the faculty is African-American. African-Americans continue to experience apartheid in higher education. We have a long way to go before we democratize the ethical and cultural character of institutions of higher education in the U.S.,” he said. Marable said this change of direction away from compensatory justice in this nation began in the 1980s with a move toward the right ignoring the historical under representation of blacks and erasing the memory of the past. “From 1882 to 1968, 3,600 people, mostly African-American, were lynched, decapitated or burned at the stake in an attempt to intimidate the African-American community,” Marable said. In June 2005, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its past failure to make lynching illegal. Marable said it passed on a voice vote with only 85 of the senate's 100 members cosponsoring the resolution. All of those refusing to sign were Republicans and white, Marable said. “You should take all of this personally,” he said, “because you are linked by history. I remember what it was like to buy a hamburger at a Dairy Queen, but not to be allowed to eat it inside because I am black,” he said. “But those of you too young to have lived it, need the historical context to know who you are.” Article by Barbara Garrison |
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