According to Forbes.com, statistics from a publicly-available U.S. Department of Education database reveal that six-year graduation rates (a commonly-used metric in higher education) for Black students are higher at Harvard and Princeton than they are for the overall student body (equal at Ivy League sister school Yale), as well as at other highly-selective private institutions like Cal Tech, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Case Western Reserve University, and Wake Forest University.
To quote the article:
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled race-conscious college admissions policies and practices unconstitutional. Affirmative Action opponents have long argued that admitting presumably unqualified applicants of color to highly-selective institutions sets those students up for failure because they can’t do the work.
If completing a bachelor’s degree is a reasonable measure of whether someone has what it takes to succeed in the Ivy League or at another highly-selective university, then federal data from the three institutions where admission slots are among the most coveted in the world confirm that Black students are indeed more than capable and deserving of the opportunities they earned.
At Harvard, it’s 98% for undergraduates overall and 99% for Black collegians. It’s also 99% for Black students at Princeton, compared to 97% of bachelor’s degree seekers there overall. Additionally, 98% of Yale students graduate within six years – the exact same for Black Yalies.
This week, Apple announced its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative (REJI), a long-term global effort to advance equity and expand opportunities for Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous communities, has more than doubled its initial financial commitment to total more than $200 million over the last three years.
Since launching REJI in June 2020, Apple has supported education, economic empowerment, and criminal justice reform work across the U.S., with recent expansion to Australia, the U.K., and Mexico.
Apple launched REJI at a pivotal moment in the U.S., as protests against racial injustice in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor swept the nation.
“Building a more just and equitable world is urgent work that demands collaboration, commitment, and a common sense of purpose,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are proud to partner with many extraordinary organizations that are dedicated to addressing injustice and eliminating barriers to opportunity. And we’ll continue to lead with our values as we expand our efforts to create opportunities, lift up communities, and help build a better future for all.”
Apple has reported that REJI’s education grants have reached more than 160,000 learners through in-person courses and out-of-school offerings, while committing over $50 million to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) to support science, technology, engineering, arts, and math opportunities.
With a focus on economic empowerment, REJI funds financial institutions — including venture capital firms, Community Development Financial Institutions, and Minority Depository Institutions — that support Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous entrepreneurs and businesses.
As part of its expanding work, Apple also announced a new partnership with the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance (MBKA), a program of the Obama Foundation. Through this strategic partnership and funding, Apple aims to help close opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color by supporting training for community leaders and MBKA staff, expanding programming for boys and young men of color, and strengthening the MBKA network through targeted community impact microgrants. The program plans to train more than 500 leaders and engage over 50,000 youth across the U.S.
“Apple’s continued support of the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance empowers the foundation to develop and implement new initiatives that create opportunities for our young people,” said Valerie Jarrett, the Obama Foundation’s CEO. “Together, we are building a more inclusive educational system that nurtures creativity, fosters innovation, and transforms the lives of boys and young men of color across the country. We are grateful for their partnership and look forward to our continued collective efforts to ensure all youth can reach their full potential.”
REJI’s criminal justice reform grants are reported to have supported providing legal services, safe housing, identification services, healthcare access, and other vital reentry services for more than 19,000 justice-impacted individuals.
To combat systemic racism, REJI and Apple have partnered with several community colleges — including the Los Angeles Community College District, Delgado Community College in New Orleans, and Houston Community College — to implement programs to help incarcerated and paroled individuals learn new skills, prevent recidivism, and create economic opportunity for parolees and probationers.
Apple has also made meaningful contributions to various nonprofit organizations that advance equity and justice, including the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Defy Ventures, Vera Institute of Justice, and The Last Mile.
To learn and read more about Apple’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, check out its REJI Impact Overview.
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson, GBN founder and Editor-in-Chief
Well, here we are, once again. Forty seven years after February was officially recognized by the U.S. government as Black History Month, and ninety seven years after Negro History Weekwas founded by Carter G. Woodson, “The Father of Black History.”
We are also, once again, deeply distressed by the murder of a young Black person (Tyre Nichols) at the hands of police officers. The fact that the officers and the police chief are Black this time around doesn’t complicate but instead amplifies the grotesque, stark, ironically colorblind reality of systemic racism — it is a pernicious construct of power and oppression that can be upheld or enforced by anyone of any color or gender or creed.
So, how do we reconcile the two — the celebration of Black people and their achievements while constantly experiencing injustice, inequity and increasingly, erasure?
As Editor-in-Chief of Good Black News, a site which for over a decade has literally been dedicated year-round to the celebration of Black people and their achievements, I have been wrestling with this question for a while, particularly in the last eight months.
After the murder of 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY by a white supremacist in May 2022 and the continued downplaying of racially-based domestic terrorism, I felt depleted and bereft. Of hope, of faith, of purpose. It didn’t seem to matter how much Black people achieved or prospered or protested or suffered in America — we couldn’t even buy our groceries in peace.
And once again, the narrative of the “lone, mentally unstable shooter” was trotted out. One person was (rightfully) punished, but the racist political and economic system he embraced in its most violent extreme? It remained (and remains) steadfastly in place. As did the onus remain on the shoulders of Black people to be seen as worthy of basic human rights.
America quickly got back to the business of forgetting and moving on, even after experiencing only two years before what seemed like a watershed moment of racial reckoning after the police murder of George Floyd.
But here were are again today, literally TODAY, with civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump saying during his call to action during Tyre Nichols’ funeral: “Why couldn’t they see the humanity in Tyre?… We have to make sure they see us as human beings worthy of respect and justice!”
We do?
I’ll admit in many ways, I understand where Crump is coming from. “Show the humanity” has essentially been the GBN operating philosophy since 2010 — to create a site and space where we can see and celebrate our humanity, while offering access to anyone else who wants to take a gander.
But now, in 2023, I must push myself to dig deeper and firmly challenge why it should it ever be the responsibility of any human being to convince any other human being of their humanity. To state the obvious, once, and for all:
BLACK PEOPLE ARE HUMAN BEINGS.
If the words above are not inherently understood to be true, why is that? Why does this have to be shown? Proven? Over and over and over again?
My answer, also obvious, is that they don’t. Not ever.
So, while I absolutely respect and still intend to celebrate the legacies of people such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier and the like, going forward I also need for GBN’s Black History Month and GBN in general to engage more actively in the interrogation and disempowering any systems, institutions or public policies that do not recognize or uphold this truth and all the basic rights that should flow from it (e.g. respect, freedom, safety, equality).
Maybe I’m not giving enough credit to GBN in its past and present form — I acknowledge that GBN has been helpful and appreciated by many for the way we offer information via the lens of celebration and positivity.
What I’m aiming to add to our existing ethos is more critical thinking and opinion about cultural topics and cultural content, boosting political, economic and social policies that are truly about protecting, serving and uplifting Black people, and working to upend those that don’t.
The College Board creates and administers the AP program. Join us in demanding that they:
Reject the narrow interpretation of Florida law that contradicts principles of academic freedom and autonomy in determining what to teach in classrooms.
Take swift action to make sure Florida does not modify the curriculum of the proposed AP African-American Studies course designed with the help of respected Black scholars, but rather, maintains the integrity of the proposed curriculum.
Florida’s current agenda of political interference in the AP African American studies curriculum directly conflicts with the values of equity, fairness, and justice. Our students deserve better.
Additionally, I want to highlight Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Projectseries now streaming on Hulu as well as promote the excellent “Intersectionality Matters” podcast by law professor Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw whose name is among the writers expunged from the AP African American studies curriculum.
I also want to give props to Beyoncéfor officially announcing her 2023 Renaissance World Tour! A definite bright spot on this first day of Black History Month, the efforts Beyoncé and her team are making via the Verified Fan system and its tiers of engagement (first priority given to the BeyHive!) to ensure real fans get access to tickets over usurious resale entities is for sure worth a shout out.
Frankly, I am tired of us being caught out there, and I want GBN to do more, offer more, share more and speak out more. In our tweets, reels, stories, posts, playlists, comments — however.
Maybe I’ll get it wrong sometimes, but with deep love for this community as my true north, may my faith, purpose and hope never again be broken.
The 2023 calendar’s official drop date is Tuesday, November 1, and if you pre-order now at Workman.com using the code: CALENDAR22 from now until December 31, you will receive 20% off.
A Year of Good Black Newsoffers fun Black facts about inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, musicians, comedians, historians, educators, athletes and entertainers.
We’re introducing new monthly categories for 2023 like “In The Paint: Black Artists,” and “Hit The Books: Black Authors,” along with established ones like “Lemme Break It Down: Black Lexicon,”“We Got Game: Black Trivia,”“Get The Knowledge: Black Museums and Landmarks” and “You Know We Did That, Right?: Black Inventors.”
Here’s a sneak peek inside:
Although I’m biased because I wrote it, the A Year of Good Black News calendar is an awesome way to get inspired every day by the good things Black people do (and have done) for centuries, but haven’t always been widely known or shared.
It’s also a great gift for family members, friends, teachers, children and loved ones. Did I mention if you use the code: CALENDAR22 at Workman.com, you get 20% off?
Or, if you prefer, you can also order from the retailers below:
The College Board has announced it will begin offering an Advanced Placement(AP) African American Studies course at 60 high schools across the U.S. this fall.
The AP program, which traditionally gives high school students an opportunity to take college-level courses before graduation, currently covers 38 subjects, including U.S. government and politics, biology, chemistry, English, European History and art history.
The AP African American Studies course is the College Board’s first new offering since 2014, according to TIME, and the multi-disciplinary course will cover over 400 years of African American history, literature, civil rights, politics, the arts, culture and geography.
Though a pilot program currently, the aim is by the 2024-2025 school year for this AP offering to be the first course in African American studies for U.S. high school students that is considered rigorous enough to allow students to receive credit and advanced placement at colleges across the country.
The plan for an Advanced Placement course is a significant step in acknowledging the field of African American studies, more than 50 years after what has been credited as the first Black studies department was started after a student strike at San Francisco State College in 1968, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., a former chair of Harvard’s department of African and African American studies and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
“In the history of any field, in the history of any discipline in the academy, there are always milestones indicating the degree of institutionalization,” said Dr. Gates, who is a consultant to the project along with a colleague, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. “These are milestones which signify the acceptance of a field as being quote-unquote ‘academic’ and quote-unquote ‘legitimate.’”
Students will take a pilot exam but will not receive scores or college credit, according to the College Board.
Harvard University-based historian and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be the editor-in-chief of Oxford’s new dictionary entitled the Oxford Dictionary of African American English.
This dictionary, slated to debut in 2025, will provide a comprehensive collection of words and phrases created and used by Black Americans, past and present.
Gates Jr., Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, announced the project officially in an interview with the New York Times.
“Just the way Louis Armstrong took the trumpet and turned it inside out from the way people played European classical music,” Gates Jr. said. “Black people took English and “reinvented it, to make it reflect their sensibilities and to make it mirror their cultural selves.”
“The bottom line of the African American people, these are people who love language.” I am proud to announce I will be the editor in chief for the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. Read more here: https://t.co/fUakIdNo45
— Henry Louis Gates Jr (@HenryLouisGates) July 21, 2022
“Words with African origins such as ‘ ‘goober,’ ‘gumbo’ and ‘okra’ survived the Middle Passage along with our African ancestors,” Gates Jr. said. “And words that we take for granted today, such as ‘cool’ and ‘crib,’ ‘hokum’ and ‘diss,’ ‘hip’ and ‘hep,’ ‘bad,’ meaning ‘good,’ and ‘dig,’ meaning ‘to understand ’— these are just a tiny fraction of the words that have come into American English from African American speakers … over the last few hundred years.”
Resources could also include books like “Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: a Hepster’s Dictionary,” a collection of words used by musicians, including “beat” to mean tired; “Dan Burley’s Original Handbook of Harlem Jive,” published in 1944; and “Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner,” published in 1994.
Researchers can look to recorded interviews with formerly enslaved people, Salazar said, and to music, such as the lyrics in old jazz songs. Salazar said the project’s editors also plan to crowdsource information, with call outs on the Oxford website and on social media, asking Black Americans what words they’d like to see in the dictionary and for help with historical documentation.
“Maybe there’s a diary in your grandmother’s attic that has evidence of this word,” Salazar said.
In addition to word and phrase definitions, the Oxford Dictionary of African American English will also provide also where they came from and how they emerged.
“You wouldn’t normally think of a dictionary as a way of telling the story of the evolution of the African American people, but it is,” Gates said. “If you sat down and read the dictionary, you’d get a history of the African American people from A to Z.”
The United Negro College Fund is offering the Pierre and Tana Matisse Scholarship for New York City students of Black, Latinx or Indigenous descent.
Funded by a $1 million grant from this Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, the program provides students attending any accredited two-year community or four-year college in the United States with scholarships of up to $5,000.
The deadline to apply for the 2022-2023 academic year is June 30, 2022. Eligibility requirements are listed below. For more detailed information on the scholarship and to apply, click here.
To see a FULL LIST of other scholarships currently available through UNCF, click here.
Eligibility Requirements
Be Black, Latinx, or Indigenous.
Be a US citizen, permanent US resident, an undocumented student, or an undocumented student with DACA status.
Be a permanent resident of one of the five boroughs of New York City: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, or Staten Island. (See the list of eligible NYC ZIP codes here.)
Applicants who are permanent residents of New York City and attend college outside of NYC may apply if their permanent home address is in NYC.
Have a minimum cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 2.5 on a 4.0 scale.
Be currently classified as a graduating high school senior, or college freshman, sophomore, or junior. Current first-semester college seniors who are graduating in December 2022 may also apply.
Will be enrolled as a full-time freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior at any accredited US 4-year institution or 2-year community college in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Have completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and have a demonstrated unmet financial need, as verified by the applicant’s institution.
NOTE: Undocumented students and students with DACA status will be exempt from Eligibility Requirement #7.
For #JazzAppreciationMonth, we explore the term “bop” — a word often used today to describe a song with a good groove. I
ts musical reference origins however, are rooted in the early 1940s when “bop” was used to describe an new and exciting intricate form of jazz. To read about it, read on. To hear about it, press PLAY:
[You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.comor create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website. Full transcript below]:
Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Tuesday, April 26th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
It’s in the category we call “Lemme Break It Down,” where we explore the origins and meanings of words and phrases rooted in the Black Lexicon and Black culture. Today’s phrase is another one in honor of #JazzAppreciationMonth… “Bop.”
“Bop” is a slang term most currently used to mean a really good song, but originally used to reference the jazz genre “bebop,” “rebop” or “hard bop.”
Invented in the 1940s and 1950s by musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Christian, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams and Thelonious Monk – right now you’re listening to the song called “Be-Bop” by Dizzy Gillespie, originally written, recorded and released by him in 1945.
The “bop” style of playing consisted of intricate phrasings and harmonic improvisations over chord melodies of standards as well as original compositions. Dizzy Gillespie even titled his 1979 autobiography To Be or Not to Bop.
To learn more about the term “bop,” links to sources are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, written, produced and hosted by me, Lori Lakin Hutcherson.
Intro and outro beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
The excerpt from “Be Bop” by Dizzy Gillespie is included under Fair Use.
If you like these Daily Drops, follow us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review, share links to your favorite episodes, or go old school and tell a friend.
For more Good Black News, check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.
Actor and Howard University graduate Taraji P. Henson and former head of the NBA Players Association and NBA star Chris Paul are among the more than a dozen top education leaders, celebrities and athletes President Joe Biden announced he is appointing to his board of advisers on historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the White House said.
The presidents of five HBCUs – Alabama State University, Virginia State University, Norfolk State University in Virginia, Dillard University in New Orleans and Prairie View A&M University in Texas – have also been appointed to the board.
Biden’s move comes weeks after his administration touted a $2.7 billion in funding from the American Rescue Plan that was provided to HBCUs over the past year and as HBCUs continue working to keep campuses safe after dozens received bomb threats in recent months.
The group is made of “qualified and diverse leaders” and appointing them to the board “will allow the administration to build on that financial commitment with continued institutional support,” the White House said.
HBCUs affected by recent bomb threats will be eligible for federal security grants, as more support for HBCUs has part of Biden’s domestic policy agenda since he ran for president. Last year, Biden proposed increased funding for HBCUs but his full proposal was not passed by Congress.
This week, Apple announced its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative (REJI), a long-term global effort to advance equity and expand opportunities for Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous communities, has more than doubled its initial financial commitment to total more than $200 million over the last three years.
With a focus on economic empowerment, REJI funds financial institutions — including venture capital firms, Community Development Financial Institutions, and Minority Depository Institutions — that support Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous entrepreneurs and businesses.
Social scientist and dean of largest University faculty excited to seize “moment of possibility.”
To learn more about the term “bop,” links to sources are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.