By snoadmin
When resources get tight, the solution seems to be to restrict opportunity for those who have the quietest voices. Not long ago, Cal State Long Beach President F. King Alexander visited local black churches to encourage and invite African-American youth to apply to our university.
The African-American population in the city of Long Beach indicates disproportionate numbers to the actual black enrollment at CSULB.
We don’t have a great pattern of growth with black students. As a matter of fact, black student admissions have declined from 5.9 percent in 2003 to 5.7 percent in 2007, according to CSULB’s website. These dismal figures come at a time when CSULB is experiencing significant overall growth.
Going from 2,038 to 2,094 African-American admissions as the rest of our campus population expands substantially is hardly growth. Especially if Census 2000 shows that the city had a 20 percent African-American population (which certainly has grown in the past eight years).
It’s obvious that California is in an economic struggle, and that the California State University system is going to be one of the governor’s budgetary whipping boys. There’s a lot of financial pain coming down the pike and we’re not the only ones who are going to carry the bruises and brandish the scars.
Even so, the state of the economy can’t be the only reason black youth isn’t streaming onto our campus in larger numbers.
CSULB has a terrific black studies department that invests its energies in black student development. Black student activism has a rich legacy on this campus, and the vibrant student groups like the African Student Union, the Africana Studies Student Association and the Student African American Brotherhood expand the possibilities for black student involvement.
Obviously, something else is missing in the attraction and it’s time to fill in the gaps.
We should be thinking in advance not only for our children but for our children’s children – you know, the voiceless ones. The youngsters we hope to tuck in at night, to learn the meaning of life and, yes, to protect from the dangers of the streets, prisons and the poor house, are counting on us long before they know how to count, prior to their first heartbeats.
We’re not curing that problem, folks. Instead, we’re perpetuating the misery future generations will be forced to endure. Our babies will have a tougher struggle than us, too. This tends to be the eventual outcome when we circle the wagons and try to preserve a status quo, with no regard for tomorrow’s students. We seem to take the stance that the future is not on our shoulders.
Is it in our best interest to pucker our asses and withhold already scarce resources to preserve a dominant ethnocentric enclave? If we put it that way, it reads pretty selfish, doesn’t it?
Well, that’s our reality.
Rather than raising a white flag of surrender, though, we, at all levels of education, should be putting our heads together to solve these problems. Administrators, faculty, employees and university students should be focusing our energies on regaining control of the destiny of California’s educational future. Alexander’s public invitation for African-American youth to attend CSULB should not go unheeded.
Cutting each other at the sociological, economical, political or cultural Achilles tendons solves only one thing: It stops us from progressing as an inclusive community.
It’s time we take off the sunglasses and figure out why more black students don’t go to The Beach.
