Review: The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--and How to Set Them Right
The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal--and How to Set Them Right by Adam Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
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My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The depth to which white culture and citizens have gone to deny Black people equal opportunity has been well-documented in the realm of housing, criminal justice, primary education, and many other spaces. Intentional calculations about how to legally avoid, subvert, and manipulate policies are a hallmark of white supremacy in the United States--and, of course, when that doesn't work, mob violence in the form of lynching, riots, and even storming the Capitol are practices white people are willing to take to assert their supposed right to feel mightier than Black people. Harris's book brings another well-documented and critical look at how these practices and policies also played out in higher education over the history of the US. Harris balances a complicated argument quite effectively as he follows the legal policies that expanded colleges and universities across the US (from the Morrill Land Grant Acts to the G.I Bill and beyond) while also tracking the ways politicians and communities worked to take the money and land and prioritize white students and exclude black students--to the point of closing or moving schools. He also delves into the various legal cases that slowly attempted to chip away at the centuries-old racist assumptions and precedence that kept Black people out of white colleges and universities or continually underfunded and undersupported Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs). Meanwhile, he also traces the ways that HBCUs rose to the occasion advancing education, research, and community in powerful ways, despite always needing to fight for every resource and opportunity. The book is a powerful reminder of the lengths to which the US has been structured to disproportionately advance white privilege at the cost of Black opportunity and that even today, as Harris notes, these practices, the unequal funding and support for institutions with more BIPOC students still experience and creating unequal outcomes in education.
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