Can the Obamas' Commencement Speeches Stop the HBCU Hate?

President Obama and Michelle Obama spent Mother's Day weekend engaging in an age-old academic tradition: the commencement address. Obama spoke to Virginia's Hampton University, while his wife addressed the graduates of the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff. Both schools are part of a long line of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that cropped up across the nation during the 19th century to educate black students — who weren't welcome at many traditional universities at the time. Most of these schools still exist in some form today, despite questions about why some black students still prefer a segregated education.

The answer may very well lie in the choice words the First Family chose to impart to the young men and women. According to the New York Times, Obama used his speech at Hampton to emphasize the need for educated blacks to give back, saying, “All of you have a separate responsibility — to be role models for your brothers and sisters, to be mentors in your communities and, when the time comes, to pass that sense of an education’s value down to your children.”

Michelle Obama offered similarly targeted advice, telling the crowd to look to her example for inspiration. She talked about it was like to be a young black girl growing up on Chicago’s south side, a place where "well-meaning, but misguided folks questioned whether a girl with a background like mine could succeed at a school like Princeton."

The fact that the two could each address a room full of African-American graduates and deliver that kind of tailored message is why I believe black schools still have a purpose in our higher education landscape.

After all, education isn't just learning arithmetic principles and grammar rules. Who you learn from and who you learn with are equally important to what you learn. Black colleges, like my alma mater Howard University, aren't all places where black students are shielded from the cold, white world — as is the consensus among some detractors. Like this commenter, who replied to a story on local HBCUs in the Virginia Times-Dispatch by declaring that "times have changed," that "HBCU’s coddle their children," and that someone who attends a traditional school is "exposed to a more diverse and realistic view of the world. The entire world is not full of African Americans."

That comment pretty much sums up how anti-HBCU people view these institutions, along with other critics who question their academic quality and whether blacks should "still" desire to study together. All of these opinions hold little weight to me. I've definitely met students from smaller HBCUs who seemed coddled, but I've also met students from smaller PWIs (predominately white institutions) that were treated in similar ways. The entire world isn't black, but it isn't entirely white either. Does that stop white people from attending schools like Princeton — which is nearly 80% white — or the University of California-San Diego, where the student population is less than 4% black? A sprinkling of black, Latino and Asian students doesn't make many of these schools exactly diverse, especially when communities there are so susceptible to voluntary segregation already. Why is majority whiteness acceptable and even preferable to majority blackness?

And as far as the diversity of black schools goes, it's there. There are more ways to be diverse than ethnicity alone. Howard University, for example, boasts a student body from dozens of different countries, a wide spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds and regions within the United States. This type of richness of experience — in which your freshman dorm can represent the entire African diaspora — shouldn't be discounted because the faces are all black. After all, Americans have no problem attending segregated churches, joining segregated sororities and fraternities and — for the most part — being racially selective in whom we marry (only 7% of marriages are interracial). Simply because some institutions are more racially homogeneous than others doesn't necessarily indicate individual intolerance or unwillingness to congregate with other ethnicities.

Black colleges aren't for everyone, but they shouldn't be discounted as a group simply because they are black. Just like white schools, there are great HBCUs and not-so-great HBCUs; diverse HBCUs and homogeneous HBCUs; HBCUs that graduate Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Prize laureates and HBCUs that don't. No one would propose that students stop attending and supporting institutions like Princeton or UCSD, even as they still struggle to racially integrate campuses. We should all, collectively, give HBCUs the same consideration — and not cast aspersion on campuses with little to go on beyond a school's racial makeup.

Photo Credit: meghan_kathleen