hen was the last time you heard Black street hustlers and ivory tower White boys singing from the same hymnal in perfect harmony? Both of these groups have been taking a public piss all over college for the last few years and it is well-worth taking a minute to figure out why. To quote Keith Sweat, one of the breakout R&B sensations of my youth, something-something, something-something just ain’t right.
TWO SIDES, ONE CONSPIRACY
I confess to having a little sweet-tooth for conspiracy theories. Nothing too serious or dangerous that could, for example, end up with me scaling the walls of The Capitol with zip-ties and a Rambo knife tucked into my utility belt. My conspiracy tastes are more along the lines of the entertaining, low-impact, slightly buzzed conversations at an average late Friday afternoon happy hour with the geeks from IT and the hotties from the marketing department. Who doesn’t love to sound sharp and insightful in that setting? But since being a rational actor is a cornerstone of my brand, that foundational identity keeps me steady regardless of how far afield the discussions drift.
Still, after a few stiff drinks I can lead an excursion down a conspiracy rabbit hole with the best of them. I almost always climb out of the hole squeaky clean, but this multi-front attack on higher education is really hard to shake. Unlike the UFO theorists and the September 11th inside-job nuts, the seemingly coordinated attacks on higher education can actually do lasting damage to real people in real time. Especially for people who look like me.
There is a coin-flip’s chance that we will be rebuilding our society on top of the smoldering ruins left behind after the Trump Riots of 2025, so we should decide what role college education will play in our new world. If these two sides are well coordinated on any one message, my antenna goes way up.
THE BLACK BATTLE
I refuse to tag the names or drop the links to the clips here and draw any additional attention to this garbage, but YouTube and Instagram are lousy with videos of Black people (almost exclusively men) trashing the value of getting a college education. In damned near cosplay level street vernacular, these guys drone on and on, and on and on, about how broke everybody is that they know who went to college. Whoever it is that they claim is confiding in them the details of their personal finances is never disclosed, but why bother injecting rationality into a dumb-ass discussion?
Then they drone on-and-on, and on-and-on some more about the big money they have made, and are making, without pursuing a college education. They got ‘rich’ ,allegedly, by just hustling ‘in the streets’. Or hustling on YouTube. Or hustling anywhere, just so long as they are not hustling in traditional mainstream corporate America. And I get it. Particularly for all of us who are born outsiders, traditional mainstream corporate America can be a very rough and wild ride; one with high entry costs, tons of frustration and no guarantees. I completely understand the temptation to avoid it like the plague; and the desperate attempt to repackage that avoidance as the evidence of greater personal valor and third-eye-vision.
With that understanding comes the wisdom to know that these guys are bullshitting their viewers and bullshitting themselves. Even worse, what they are doing is the political equivalent of giving an Only-Fans-style solo-porno performance to every white supremacist douche bag out there who hates the very idea of a Black student walking to class on a college campus that neither he nor his dumb ass kids could get into. Any performance or presentation that discourages Black students is, for this racist, an instant remedy for his erectile dysfunction.
I doubt that any of these cyber-performers know that their spiel is just the revival of an old Eddie Murphy joke from his Saturday Night Live days in the early 80s about doing well in school. After saying that his high school teachers could kiss his rich ass, Eddie called his chauffeur to come up to the stage from the audience. When the gangly White guy with a Serpico beard, Coke bottle glasses and Jew-Fro jumped in front of the camera, Eddie threw his arm around his shoulder and announced to the crowd; “This here is Sammy. Sammy here works for me. Sammy went to Harvard.”
Both guys beamed huge smiles as the audience applauded. The joke was a hit. It was Eddie Murphy so of course it was funny.
But what these Black men are doing now is not funny at all. They are actively discouraging any impressionable young person who may be watching from going to college. Those who are most likely to be moved by such a message are those who look like the men speaking. So they are devaluing and disrespecting higher education amongst Black youth. And to any Black man willing to do that and to publicize that to the world I have a specific message: Go fuck yourself and put your back into it.
I super-sized that one and put some stank on it for the brothers putting this trash out there for our young people because however unexposed or unsophisticated they may be, or whatever the personal demons they are battling, and whatever other motivations are driving them, they surely have enough sense to know that throughout the history of this nation, there has been an aggressive and targeted effort to keep Black people away from education at every level.
I simply reject any suggestion that they are too stupid to know that. And as a general proposition, anything that White folks were willing to kill us to keep us from doing is something that we probably ought to be doing if we ever want to become full equity partners in the American enterprise. That’s a learned Black man’s way of saying “free.”
In this country, White men have killed Black men to keep us from voting. So it stands to reason that free Black men should be voting and doing so with great enthusiasm. In this country, White men have killed Black men to keep us from gaining a formal education. So it stands to reason that free Black men who possess the will and the skill to obtain a formal education should do so with great enthusiasm. In this country, White men have killed Black men to keep us from having sexual relationships with White women. So it stands to reason that…. wait a minute, that one doesn’t fit.
Ok, so it turns out Black men do indeed possess the historical awareness to direct our energies in a manner that turns the tables on our former tormentors. If only we could appreciate the allure of voting and schooling as much as we appreciate the affections and attention of White women who accept us as intimate partners, we could actually manifest our most vivid visions of equality into reality. Thus far, it appears that is asking too much.
Were I inclined to extend an olive branch of peace to the brothers who are guilty of the capital crime of encouraging stupidity amongst our people (and I am so inclined) I would do so based on the following: I understand perfectly well that there are many ways to make a living without going to college. Not only do I understand that, but as far as I can tell, every single person that I ever had an in-depth conversation with during my 8 years of higher education understands it as well.
There may be some idiot elitist somewhere out there pressing the long-expired and always false narrative that the only road to an aspirational life must run through a college campus. But however loud that idiot elitist may be, they do not represent the general population of the scholastic community. Some professions absolutely require a college degree as part of the cover-charge to get into the club. But that is a small slice of a huge pie. And unless the dream driving a young person into adulthood is being a doctor, a lawyer, or a professor, they could eventually hit pay-dirt without the years and expense invested in a college education.
If the point is not to discourage scholarship, but to be encouraging to our young people who are not academically oriented then that is an effort worth supporting. If a young person does not like school and does not want to go to college, then they need guidance identifying the right path for them, not shitting on the path that many of their peers have taken by going away to college. That feeds a division in the country at large and especially in the Black community that is unsustainable if we intend to keep the boat afloat that we are all sailing on.
Gentlemen, I wish the teacher or coach or parent or friend that told you that you couldn’t make it because you were not capable of getting into college had not said that. I wish your jerk-off cousin did not come home from school on holiday breaks bragging is ass off about his campus exploits at the University of Hold-My-Beer, sucking up all the oxygen and light in the room. I wish employers had not used your lack of a degree as an excuse to exclude you from a great gig, even though the work itself did not seem to really require it. All of that stinks to high heaven, and everybody who ever marginalized you because school just wasn’t your jam needs an examination of their own methods and motives.
But stop hating higher education because of it. That’s like hating whatever God you believe in because organized religion is a mess. Well, organized religion is a mess because a lot of preachers are crooks and a lot of parishioners are creeps. That’s like hating government because so many congressmen are corrupt. Well, congressmen are corrupt because the rules controlling campaign finance have warped the access and accountability structures.
So, my spirited brothers, if you have it in you to see the world from a perspective that is not your own, please, pretty please, with sugar on top, shut down your end of the anti-college campaign. Once you do that, it will be a lot easier to dismantle the other side, the White side, of this issue. And we need to dismantle it quickly because while you brothers have been merely dumping on college, these clowns are burning it down. I am confident you can guess who the first casualties of the fire will be.
THE WHITE WAR
Foundational truth: White people who are acting in bad faith are not nearly as dumb as they pretend to be; nor are they as smart as they think they are. The playing dumb part is tied to their insistence on “race neutral” policy-making and the Kabuki theater involved in acting like they don’t know these policies will target Black people for harm by exclusion. The not being as smart as they think they are part is the belief that people of good faith are not seeing through their jive ass like glass. We know damned well what is driving their jihad against the institutions of higher education in this nation. The goal is not destroying the institutions, it is to commandeer them.
And they must be commandeered because bad faith Whites have learned a frightening truth over the last five decades: it is absolutely impossible to make a Black person feel inferior or unworthy who has engaged in the directed study of the history of this country and the specific role of their people in it. If anything, a Black person who has engaged in that formal study in their early adult years may have to fight off the onset of a superiority complex. The story of Black people in America is astonishing and inspiring for us, but for bad faith Whites, it all reads like an indictment. So of course bad faith Whites have decided it has to be erased. Even better, keeping masses of Black students away from the pockets of concentrated information and knowledge we call colleges. Then they don’t have to comb through oceans of records to wash away those pesky, damning realities.
Bad faith Whites are implementing a specific plan: hijack curriculums from coast to coast, assert full control over which students have access to these institutions and for what purposes, and reset the American propaganda campaign based out of colleges. When 45 bellowed that he “loves the poorly educated” this is what he was talking about. Well educated people of good faith simply do not fuck with him, regardless of color or creed. It stands to reason that he needs as many citizens as possible who have been mind-fucked into submission such that they just stop asking questions or expecting accountability.
Churches used to play this primary role but that ship has been sinking since the 80s and there is no hope that it will ever regain the influence over the minds of the American masses the way it once did. Colleges, on the other hand, can be tied directly to the economic viability of the emerging citizenry. And if, at the American college of the future, the students only learn that America was never a racist country, a sexist country, a fascist country, or just a godless corporate enterprise wearing the costume of the land of the free and home of the brave, the future will be secure.
The anti-college campaign being pushed from the White side is, as one would expect, significantly sneakier than what is coming from their accomplices on the Black side. There is one team pushing the terrifying truth about the skyrocketing costs of higher education, while another team tarnishes the appeal from the outside and erodes the quality of that education from the inside. A great many Black scholars experienced their awakening and hit their stride by being exposed to more in-depth study of our history in college. So dispiriting these students who have benefited directly from the curriculums resulting from decades of American social evolution is a key win for bad faith Whites.
Talking heads, mainly White talking heads from the “Conservative” position lambast liberal arts education. They poke fun at the idea of studying history, literature, psychology, sociology, women’s studies or Black studies on the basis that none of these academic disciplines have been designed to train the student for a particular job. For this crowd, college is strictly about workforce participation. And whether they are willfully ignorant or just plain stupid, they could not be more wrong.
College is a place and time for minds to explore and expand. Some of that exploration and expansion is directed at commercial activities, and some of it is directed at developing a broad understanding of the world that we occupy. There is room for all of it there. But the cynical assholes who judge colleges as if they were trade schools either did not have the college experience for themselves or they are just goddamned liars.
The college as commerce or college as trade school mentality is how these bad faith Whites feed talking points and information to the bitter Black guys addressed in the prior section. If everything is reduced to a simple return on investment analysis, it seems logical to conclude that college is bad for you if the costs are unbearable. But that is an issue that can be dealt with from a public policy standpoint whenever the political will of the voters meets the moment. That day has yet to come but there are indications that it may be coming soon.
Ironically, these same bad faith Whites and bitter Blacks oppose the initial solutions to the cost issue almost universally. That is supposedly a core tenet of their anti-college campaign. Student loan forgiveness is one policy proposal from the current administration and cost free community college for another. And the opposition to these proposals, or lack of vocal support for them, exposes everything that we need to know about every voice discouraging young people from exploring college for themselves: They are serving another agenda and for that reason cannot be trusted.
That is a learned Black man’s way of telling Charlie Kirk to shut the fuck up.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of David Saint Vincent's work on Medium.