In June, as the nation’s highest court handed down a predictable and yet devastating ruling striking down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, the Center for Journalism & Democracy announced its inaugural Visiting Professorship for Investigative or Data Journalism at Howard University.
Here is why this matters.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
The nation’s oldest private and public universities respectively, both were financed by profits from the enslavement of African-descended people. Both educated the progeny of slaveholding families. And UNC, specifically, was built largely by the labor of enslaved people. Founded in 1789, UNC would not admit its first Black student until 1955, and only under the force of a federal court order. Founded in 1636, Harvard would largely exclude the formerly enslaved and their descendants until after the great civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Affirmative action, a program designed to make universities take affirmative, race-specific steps in admissions to help mitigate centuries of race-specific exclusion, increased the percentage of Black students at these and other historically white institutions. And yet even with affirmative action, Black students have remained significantly under-represented in higher education, particularly at the most selective schools, while being over-represented at predatory for-profit colleges.
Only for a few short decades did we make any concerted and intentional effort to include Black Americans specifically, and students of color generally, in institutions we pretend are about meritocracy and social mobility. The Supreme Court in its landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, called education a centerpiece of democracy. Yet at a time when democracy is under attack, this affirmative action ruling strikes a blow at multiracial democracy by ensuring many of our universities will look less like America.
