by Ijeoma Oluo
My partner reflexively gripped my hand.
The car stopped. We were at our destination. My partner opened his door to exit, and I just sat there. I decided, even though my opinion hadn’t been asked, to take a page out of this dude’s playbook and give it anyway. “Obama didn’t focus too much on Black issues,” I said. I continued:
If he did, we would have been able to make a lot more progress on issues facing the Black community during his presidency than we did. Obama’s presidency meant a lot to me and other Black people, but he was a centrist who would have been impeached if he for one moment had tried to lead as a Black president dedicated to Black interests. Try to think of how many “Black” policies he put forth, and you’ll have trouble finding them. Try to find how many “Black” speeches he gave outside of February, and you’ll find a few very carefully worded and deliberately inclusive speeches given during times of increased unrest over issues of police brutality. Obama’s crowning achievement was health care reform, which benefitted everyone, including millions of white Americans. And nobody voted against Obama because he focused too much on Black people. It was because after hundreds of years of white presidents primarily looking after the interests of white people, white Americans couldn’t imagine that a Black president was capable of looking out for the interests of everyone. But if you care about addressing racial oppression in this country, you should want a president who will give far more focus to issues facing communities of color than our past presidents have.
I thanked the driver for the ride and got out of the car as he thanked me for the “great conversation.” I took a few deep breaths as we walked from the car to the dining hall, and my partner said softly to me, “You know, love, you didn’t need to give all that education for free.”
“I know,” I sighed. “But I just couldn’t leave ‘Trump won because Obama ignored white people’ hanging out there like that.”
And I still can’t leave that harmful, racist assumption alone. None of us should. The reflexive narrative on the left after the election of Donald Trump is that years of focusing too much on Black people, on gay people, on transgender people, on women was why Trump won. Black Lives Matter was why Trump won. Transgender bathrooms were why Trump won. Barack Obama was too focused on all of that to pay attention to what was really important: the suffering of working- and middle-class white men.
We had been in a time when the economy was growing steadily, when millions of people who had lacked health insurance were finally able to afford it, when the housing market was recovering steadily from earlier crashes, when the average white American was more prosperous and secure than they had been in the previous few decades. What “special focus” did the queer community get? The same right to marriage that straight couples had enjoyed for hundreds of years. White House Pride celebrations that were free of open hostility. The ability to debate with cisgender strangers over their right to safely use public restrooms. What “special focus” did the Hispanic community get? The first Hispanic and Latina Supreme Court justice in the history of the country. Record deportation numbers. And what “special focus” did the Black community get? We got news headlines and speeches rife with respectability politics when we were murdered by cops. We got the same concentration of poverty. We got the same school discrimination. We got the same mass incarceration. We got rising infant and maternal mortality rates.
Oh, and for eight years we got to know that someone who looked like us could be president of the United States.
And for that, we’ve had to pay with the most ignorant, hateful, and incompetent president in this country’s history.
Along with many other people from marginalized groups, I strive for a day when we will see more people from our communities in leadership and more of the issues impacting our communities addressed by those in power. But I have never had the luxury of shunning everything in our society that does not appear to be built 100 percent for me.
I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime.
I have had to find a way to work in offices that don’t see me as management material while still believing that there is a chance I can get a promotion anyway.
I’ve had to study history that erased my culture from its pages and know that it did not actually erase me.
I’ve had to learn laws that weren’t written to serve me.
I’ve had to learn to write and appreciate words in a language that was forced on my ancestors.
Not only have things in America not been built for me; they have never been built for me. And although that has been physically, financially, politically, and psychologically disastrous for my community, I have come to see that it is also damaging to be led to believe that everything should be built for you and that anything built with the consideration of others is inherently harmful to you. It is harmful to the individual who believes it, and it is harmful to every system they interact with that is supposed to be built on coalition.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, as with the 2016 election, we were drowning in talk of how we were going to make working- and middle-class white men feel included in order to defeat conservative forces. But I must honestly ask: What exactly do people who aren’t white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? We do not have control of our local governments, our national governments, our school boards, our universities, our police forces, our militaries, our workplaces. All we have is our struggle. And yet we are told that our struggle for inclusion and equity—and our celebration of even symbolic steps toward them—is divisive and threatening to those who have far greater access to everything else than we can dream of. If white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn’t meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem?
In an increasingly diverse country, white men can only demand to be the exclusive focus of our political systems for so long. Looking at how unfavorably some liberal white men view our small, occasional shifts in focus away from white maleness, I am afraid this will be a painful transition. But it doesn’t have to be. It is possible to have a different expectation for effective government besides one in which everyone in it looks like you and centers your needs above all else. I know this because my community has always had different expectations of government. Politics that does not always center white men is something that white men can get used to—and they must.
CHAPTER 3
THE IVY LEAGUE AND THE TAX EATERS
White Men’s Assault on Higher Education
Back in the day, when I was in college, when Facebook was still mostly a chat room for college students, when we were still picking out background colors for our Myspace pages, and before anybody had integrated “tweeting” into their lexicon, we still had fake news. The war of ideas and information was being fought over what was taught in American classrooms, and the internet was being used to sow misinformation about the “dangers” of higher education. I clearly remember the one Black teacher in our entire political science department who let any students who had signed up for his class under false pretenses know that he was aware he was being monitored by conservative groups for his “un-American” teachings on race and politics, and that he was not going to be intimidated. No misleading headlines about his “reverse racism” or “anticonservative bigotry” had yet cost him his job, but student operatives were welcome to do their worst, so long as they turned in their assignments on time and didn’t disrupt class.
I remember being as shocked by the gall of the misinformation campaigns as my professor seemed resigned to them. College was not supposed to be like this. Higher education was supposed to be the place where the strength of your work and ideas triumphed over race, gender, class, and political party. Yes, as a poor Black woman, college was still my best—if not only—chance at achieving the financial s
ecurity for myself and my family that I desperately sought. But I had yet to learn how much smaller that chance was for people like me than it was for white men. And although when lost in my books, or in the middle of a class debate, I was able to see glimpses of the intellectual utopia I had been promised, I had yet to fully see the racist, sexist, and classist system I was deeply immersed in.
After graduating, I forgot much of what I had learned. I didn’t really utilize my political science degree in my jobs in tech and advertising. Along with arguments on the pros and cons of Keynesian economics, my memory of the monitoring and intimidation of college professors by conservative operatives was largely forgotten.
It wasn’t until I watched the state legislature punish Missouri State University for not cracking down on the protests of Black students and football players that I began to see the clear line of assault on American higher education by the political right that had spanned decades. Jokes have long existed about the supposed “stupidity” of conservatives. Plenty of articles are eager to point out that you are more likely to watch Fox News and vote Republican if you lack a college degree. Plenty of observers on the left have lamented the “dumbing down” of America that many feel is represented by the political right. In these arguments, higher education is often held up as a paragon of American intelligence and virtue. The college campus is allegedly the place where the pure love of knowledge is king, where people succeed based on their talents and efforts alone. A place where racism and sexism wither under the gaze of academic scrutiny.
But the history of American education is far more complicated than that. Our institutions of higher education not only contain the same basic bigotries as the rest of society; they have also been the place where many of those prejudices were legitimized through deliberately biased study. Our college campuses may not have been terribly concerned with elevating the poor white man over the poor Black woman, but they were definitely obsessed with preserving white male elite power at the top of the social and political ladders.
And in light of that history of elitism and bigotry, those who want to undermine the value of a college degree in order to preserve broader white male power are given plenty of justification for their disdain for higher education.
While conservative Republicans and the Trump administration have cornered the market on the political attack on higher ed, they are certainly not the only groups who see political benefit in attacking college campus environments and claiming that such places are harmful to white men. In recent years, in campuses around the country, left-leaning white male students and professors have decried efforts to teach racial sensitivity, to be inclusive of transgender students and staff, and to prevent sexual harassment and assault as attacks on all white men and as examples of progressivism gone “too far.” And as angry white male professors from schools like Evergreen State College find themselves the darlings of Fox News when they warn of PC culture run amok on college campuses, while their most vulnerable students feel betrayed and even more vulnerable, we see the danger of not recognizing where the attack on American higher education originates from.
The truth is, those behind the attacks on higher education came from higher education. The vast majority of the politicians and pundits who appear on your television screens trying to convince you that a college education will brainwash your children into hating America have a very good college education themselves. They wouldn’t for a minute dream of allowing their kids to skip college. It is on those campuses where they first learned how our political systems and our political identities work. And it’s on campuses where they learn that those systems and identities can be used to consolidate political power for those who are willing to play on the base racist and sexist fears of white men and of those who benefit from their proximity to white men.
The campuses that many white men are made to fear as a direct threat to masculinity and white supremacy are the same places where white men learn to ascend to the throne of white male political power. The right’s political attacks on higher education, and the failures of higher education that open it up to such attacks, are based in the same compulsion to retain white male status above everyone else. Lost in this debate are the people of color and women who depend on college degrees for any chance at financial security. If we fail to understand how white male supremacy has been woven through the entire fabric of higher education, then our colleges and universities—and the debate over the value of higher education itself—will continue to place marginalized people at risk.
ELITE RACISM IN EARLY HIGHER EDUCATION
[It] is altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.
—Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, to a Black man inquiring about admission, 19091
In 2015 a group of Princeton students were afraid to leave Nassau Hall. They had occupied the hall earlier in the day and were planning to stay.
Nassau Hall was home to the university president’s office, and school officials had locked the doors shortly after students occupied it. “We are concerned that once we leave, we will not be able to re-enter in the morning. Thus, we are not planning to leave,” student organizer Wilglory Tanjong told the Washington Post from the phone of the school president’s office. The students stayed for thirty-six hours in the hopes that the university would meet their demands.
Their principal requests? They wanted all teachers and staff to undergo cultural competency training, they wanted required classes on marginalized groups and cultures, and they wanted Woodrow Wilson’s name removed from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs.2
Before he became president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University. He is credited to a large extent for the university’s status as one of the top institutions of higher learning in the world. But until recently, Princeton didn’t talk much about the less savory aspects of Wilson’s legacy. The fact is that Wilson was a racist. He refused to allow a single Black student into Princeton during his tenure. Wilson was open about his segregationist views, even directly discouraging Black students who inquired about admission from applying, and he would go on to become a segregationist US president as well. Wilson personally oversaw the destruction of integration efforts made during the post–Civil War Reconstruction, resegregating federal departments after white department heads complained of having to share workspaces with Black employees. Wilson also fired a majority of Black supervisors, and many Black workers were subsequently let go from federal jobs across the country and replaced with white workers. Wilson was strongly against Black suffrage, and he was a defender of the Klan. His words about the Klan even made it into the infamously racist film Birth of a Nation: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern Country.”3
Wilson was widely recognized as racist even in his time. While it isn’t a surprise that popular culture wouldn’t want to draw attention to a US president’s racist past, universities are where history—accurate history—is supposed to matter.
When students took their concerns to university officials in 2015, they were effectively told that “everyone was racist” back then—as if it were a popular dance craze and not the violent oppression of people of color. Princeton refused to meet the students’ demands, and memorials and departments named for Wilson remain unchanged.
If by “everyone” they meant “most of our elite educational institutions”—they were right.
Universities in America began as religious colleges in the colonies whose purpose was to train wealthy young white men to enter the ministry. This was not necessarily the quiet, humble calling we might think of today. Colonial America was a very religious place, and joining the clergy was the fastest track to social and political power. Although the liberal arts were always an important part of early American religious education (because a well-rou
nded training supposedly bred true “gentlemen” who would be more fit to lead the common people), after the American Revolution, the religious colleges broadened their fields of study to include areas like medicine and law.
Fewer students overall were entering colleges to join the clergy, but the vast majority of students were still white men from elite families. Universities were seen more as finishing schools for wealthy white men on their path to inheriting leadership than places for practical education. In fact, early degrees were often awarded in graduation ceremonies that recognized the students not by order of achievement or even field of study but by family rank.4 These students were indeed learning how to lead. Their studies of philosophy and politics, as well as the strong connections they made with other elite and powerful families, prepared the young men to take their place at the helm of American society.
As colleges expanded beyond religious education and began to standardize their admissions processes, wealthy and ambitious families who had previously been denied access to the religious universities began to send their kids through the doors of institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This burgeoning diversity created a problem for elite universities: many of the new students were Jewish. By the early 1920s, approximately 21 percent of Harvard’s students and 40 percent of Columbia’s were Jewish.5 This was particularly distressing to Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell. It was hard enough for Harvard to accommodate the lower-income white students they were now allowing in, he argued. The school didn’t need all these Jewish and Black students scaring away the wealthy white Christian students who paid Harvard’s bills.
Lowell got to work on fixing the problem. First, he banned Black students from dormitories and dining halls, so wealthy white parents would no longer have to worry about their children fraternizing with Black ones.6 Next, he made it a priority to stop the smart Jewish kids from getting in.