Photo Credit: The Atlantic
A whole lot of white people across the south who don’t want to wear masks are shaping the future of America. Their insistence on personal freedom, their movement within and across state borders are creating spikes in COVID-19 infections that are about three months earlier than epidemiologists originally expected, and more politically charged than southern Republicans imagined.
The working theory among these Americans is that the science is exaggerated and intertwined with liberal agendas to humiliate President Donald Trump and to swing elections in their favor this fall. But in the middle of Dixieland demagoguery and public health emergency is the future of the historically black colleges and universities stationed throughout those states in the fading shadows of confederate values.
Morehouse College has stirred the pot this morning, announcing that it will discontinue all participation in athletics this fall. But the call was a sensible one for Morehouse; coronavirus infections and deaths are spiking in Atlanta and throughout the state of Georgia.
Morehouse took a stand for black lives. Every HBCU would if it could, but they all can’t.
Public HBCUs will have to open in some form this fall and will be compelled to compete in athletics — and they must do so knowing that there will be infections, death, and reversal of reopening policies at an unknown time and unknown scale of impact.
Private HBCUs have more room to take social liberties but face harsher financial penalties if they opt to protect the health and welfare of students, faculty, and staff. Competition with other black colleges and predominantly white institutions for enrollment make every move in the name of public health potential threats to the financial well-being of institutions.
HBCU presidents and chancellors have tried to communicate a simple point in what feels like a hundred different ways over the past few months. None of them want to open in a traditional format, but a lot of them have to at least try.
In an ironic twist, the reopening complications have been made worse by the increased exposure of HBCUs as a result of America’s alleged racial awakening in the aftermath of George Floyd’s lynching in Minneapolis last month. The United Negro College Fund and Thurgood Marshall College Fund have collected millions from individuals and companies planting their flags on the side of countering racism and its disparate impact over hundreds of years, and even being kind enough to apportion financial support representing a nano-fraction of the quadrillions reaped from slavery, Jim Crow, and integration.
These wealthy individuals and companies are basically investing in HBCUs to do work based on teaching and training models perfected pre-COVID-19. In the midst of COVID-19 and beyond, no one knows how such investments, if they continue, will look in shaping black presence in industry, community, or political landscapes. In other words, racism and violence have made HBCUs more attractive than they’ve been since the days of ‘A Different World,’ and that attraction adds more difficulty to how the schools might reopen and shut back down again in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Political and socioeconomic complexities aside, the HBCU community has to understand the basic principle of why our sector is all crossed up; it is not because of incompetence or poor planning from leaders, and not because we don’t have enough resources to make necessary adjustments to whatever form learning and instruction must take this fall.
It isn’t because of a lack of interest or support from HBCU faculty and alumni, or disengagement from black students wanting to attend HBCUs.
It is because white people across the south do not want to wear masks, white people on Capitol Hill want to keep their votes, and we have to find a way to survive them all.
It is the American Way.
