Brandelyn: Lyrical Contradiction

            Last night I went to the poetry spot and had a great time. My girls were there with me and the sexy rasp I have from this battle with laryngitis I have going added a nice affect to the poem I read on the mic. So as the various poets were going up, one brotha got up, a recent UCLA grad and started speaking about the genocide on black intellectuals that were going on. Now, I personally was merely enjoying myself and the nice little buzz I had from the apple martini + shot I had just consumed, so I was slightly thrown when the entire vibe of the room had changed and this rather angry black man got on the mic, until I started listening to him. He was expressing his anger toward the declining numbers of Black students applying and enrolling in college. As he continued to speak, spitting out various statistics and numbers, I realized that he was absolutely right. There is a genocide happening on the Black intellectual, and the sad thing is that it is so cleverly masked that people aren’t even aware that it is going on.

            Throughout the UC system specifically, there has been an astoundingly drastic decrease in the number of black students being admitted. They say its because students are applying, but I can say that that is absolutely not the case. Within the past two years there have been numerous programs created (my own job included) that have been designed to combat this, but of course, this is under the assumption that students are actually getting what they need in high school, but that is a whole other topic in itself. But yes, there are less and less black people in college for whatever reason, and no one seems to be worried about it. It seems that the thinking has shifted to “as long as this child graduates from high school, I’m satisfied.” But when did that become enough? Now, of course, I understand that college is not for everyone; I get that. But people need to realize that college is not specifically about the classes and the book knowledge you will gain. College, for me, was about learning how to hustle, learning how to never take no for an answer and how to fight for what I wanted. College was about milking my connections to get where I needed to be. The relationships I have made (shout out to the class of 2004), with all of this countries future lawyers, doctors, actors, actresses, teachers, writers, philanthropists, earth changers; relationships that will last for the rest of my life. College is about learning who you are, what you will accept, what you will not, and how everything else fits in between. College is a door opener. Having alumni, people that you have no other connection with except for the fact that you went to the same school (many years apart from each other I might add) who are willing to hook you up with that job and get you connected so you can help out the next. But if these numbers continue to dwindle down that way they have, who will be left to help? We already have white students infiltrating the HBCU’s and taking advantage of our specific scholarships because there is no one there to fill in the blanks. If things continue in the direction they are going, we’ll be back to the days when the schools were just desegregated and there were only 5 black students in the school.

            Now, let me get off my soap box and say that there are things being down to change this trend, but my fear is that it is too little too late. An alumni I met recently told me that her incoming freshman class had over 900 people in it!!! I don’t think that there have been 900 black students at Cal since then, period! Now we are lucky to get 100 black incoming freshman, and this is less than 10 years after that particular class came in. Currently, numbers have not been this bad since the 1960’s…um…right. So, I think, that as a people, we need to continue to be more aware of what is going on around us and not let things get to the point of desperation before we actually try to do something about it.