Promoting HBCUs
Black colleges provide a superior education; they just need to toot their horns a little louder.
BY ROBERT T. PALMER
Asession presented at a national higher education conference discussed the implications of internalized racism in Blacks. According to the presenter, this sense of self-loathing serves as a factor in preventing Blacks from attending historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) because they perceive those institutions to be inferior and less prestigious than White colleges. This is not the first time that I encountered this issue of Blacks’ forgoing HBCUs because of concerns about the educational quality of these institutions.
In 2005, T. Elon Dancy II expressed a similar sentiment in an essay, “Madness or Elitism? African Americans Who Reject HBCUs.” This article was based on a qualitative research study and published in what was then Black Issues In Higher Education. Although Dancy did not link Black students’ unwillingness to attend HBCUs to internalized racism, he suggested that participants preferred White colleges to Black institutions because they were perceived as more elite.
