Affirmative Action and the Path Forward Rodney D. Coates* On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that race could no longer be considered college admissions in two separate opinions. This ruling will impact all institutions of higher education across the country. According to some pundits, Black and Hispanic students are the most affected. Affirmative action has done little to impact diversity across our colleges and universities. Affirmative action will not fix the problems faced by colleges and universities. A 2020 U.S. Department of Education study reveals that in many states, where Black students make up 20-50% of high school graduates, their enrollment at public flagship universities within the state ranges from 8 – 17 percent. These data demonstrate that Affirmative Action has not worked in our universities. The strange reality is that while much of the concern has been on race-based affirmative action, Higher education faces some real fiscal challenges in the f
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The Great Migration and the Birth of the Ghetto As early as the 1900s, Blacks responded with the greatest mass exodus our country has ever seen, called the Great Migration. But rather than a new day, they were greeted with new forms of racial violence. What guns and violence could not do, then redlining and white flight did. In the process, newly created racialized zones came into being. These zones, characterized as ghettos, where the over-policing, underfunded schools, and limited social mobility served to create the cradle-to-prison pipeline, extreme levels of poverty, and isolation. These truths account for the increasingly frustrated, violent, and hopelessness frequently witnessed in these racialized zones. My Grandfather was part of the Great Migration. Born in rural Mississippi, he had been a sharecropper working on the same land that his grandfather had been a slave. Even with 5 sons and 2 daughters and a wife laboring in the fields, he was barely able to sc
Juneteenth and the Premise of a Promise - Rodney Coates In 5 days, we shall celebrate yet another Juneteenth here in America. This is a celebration of what many consider the end of slavery for Blacks in this country. Two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, this celebration was accomplished as federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865. But as with all historical events, this one is filled with ironies and paradoxes, hopes dashed and dreams unfulfilled. This event, to many, represents the duplicity of power, the cruelty of complacency, and the willingness of many to forestall, deny and ignore the plight of the enslaved person. Consequently, as I will argue in this talk, the so-called freedom of the enslaved person was a check that continually has come back -marked insufficient funds, they were offered the premise of a promise yet unfulfilled. Let me begin. The first question is why the news of freedom took two and a half year