The educational attainment of African-American males as well as their overall economic and social well-being demand researchers’ attention. This work requires careful consideration of the structural inequalities that plague black men’s lives. At the same time, such analyses must not obscure and ignore the multiple ways in which black girls and women are also marginalized.
Not only are the challenges faced by black women and girls given short shrift because of metrics that show participation rates higher than those of their male peers, but black females are also obscured when the disadvantages they face relative to their white counterparts are left unexamined. Black women routinely fall between the cracks of reports on black men and reports on women. There’s truth to an old black-feminist adage: All of the women are white, and all of the blacks are men.
Unfortunately, the truth about risks facing both black men and women often falls through the cracks as well.
Many of the racial disparities in higher education stem from conditions in elementary and secondary schools. And on any number of measures, black girls and women face wide disparities in relation to their female peers. For example, when it comes to suspension and expulsion from school, the racial disparities between girls are equal to or greater than those between boys. Recently released data from the Department of Education reveal that, in the 2011-12 school year, black girls were suspended six times as often as white girls, while black boys were suspended more than three times as often as white boys.
African-American girls are also less likely than any other group of girls to graduate from high school with college credit and high scores on college-entrance examinations.
Racial and gender factors continue to shape income even among those with college degrees. Although college completion is a predictor of future earnings, women over all make less than men, and black women make less than white, non-Hispanic women among full-time, year-round workers at almost every education level. In 2013 an African-American woman with an associate degree was less likely to be employed than a white man with less than a high-school diploma. Black women, including those who are college-educated, have made the least significant gains of any group during the national economic recovery.
The problem with gender-exclusive frames is that they minimize the consequence of structural inequalities that affect African-Americans in general by elevating two competing narratives. One characterizes black males’ level of achievement as a reflection of their own failings, then tries to use interventions to overcome those failings. The other suggests that racism targets black men especially.
The first narrative reinforces the relative silence about black women and implies that girls and women are faring well. The second acknowledges the role of racism but narrows the scope of its ostensible impact.
The convergence of the two narratives creates a research-and-policy environment inhospitable to those who understand educational disparity as a legacy of unwarranted racial power with consequences for both men and women. That policy environment reinforces narrow and tepid responses to inequality while measures like affirmative action, school integration, and equitable support for public education fade as national priorities.
Black students have become disproportionately subjected to zero-tolerance policies, high-stakes testing, crumbling public-school infrastructures, and curricular choices that fail to meet the minimal requirements for their states’ most selective institutions. Those conditions undermine achievements and opportunities for both boys and girls.
While college enrollment and completion are obvious ways to measure achievement, they are shaped early in the educational process for boys and girls. The disparities begin with the youngest and most vulnerable students, with blacks accounting for 48 percent of multiple preschool suspensions, although they make up only 18 percent of total preschool enrollment.
The growth of the wealth gap between races ensures that educational disparities will probably continue unless broader structural interventions are made. Blacks are overrepresented among the poor, the cohort in which achievement rates are lowest. From 2007 to 2011, only blacks (25.8 percent) and American Indians/Alaska Natives (27 percent) had poverty rates that exceeded the U.S. poverty rate of 14.3 percent by 10 percentage points or more. For comparison, the poverty rate for whites was 11.6 percent and for Asians 11.7 percent. In fact, the wealth gap between blacks and whites tripled from 1984 to 2009. The disparity reached historic highs in 2009, greatly exacerbated by the recession and real-estate crisis. That year the median white household wealth reached 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Latino households. Shockingly, the median-wealth figures for black women and Latinas were $100 and $120, respectively, a factor that has surely affected their own access to education as well as their children’s.
Clearly, the educational crisis doesn’t affect only black males. Black boys and girls grow up in the same families, live in the same neighborhoods, attend the same schools, and face similar economic barriers. As a consequence, most, if not all, of the recommendations that the Black Male Achievement Research Collaborative proposes to improve academic success among African-American males would also help their female counterparts.
Not only must the scope of these interventions be broadened to include girls, but research and policy initiatives that address girls’ challenges must not be delayed based on the false inference that their needs are less pressing or that they are somehow thriving. An intersectional perspective reveals that converging disadvantages affect groups in ways that are both similar and distinct. In the struggle to address racial disparities in education, that is an insight that we cannot afford to lose.
