This past week at the University of California Los Angeles, UCLA’s Black Male Institute hosted the 2010 Think Tank. The two day conference consisted of thought provoking, sincere and unapologetic talk focused on African-American males and their educational development. Having a platform to speak candidly about the educational and social disparities between black males and their racial counterparts provided me with an opportunity to hear from a select group of brilliant and inspiring speakers that are committed to a) identifying problems for why young black males are not succeeding and b) developing adequate and lasting solutions to increase the number of black males that are graduating high school and are college ready.
Speakers varied from principals and professors to community activist and PhD candidates. It is important to note that these accomplished, yet concerned and committed individuals were all African-American, and all were male, except for one. Why is this relevant? The fact that there were black males leading a discussion on the issues black males are facing demonstrates that black men are not only concerned about the future welfare of their younger brothers, but also want to find immediate solutions to help them knock down the educational and social barriers. This is extremely important for the young black males in California, in which African-Americans perform far worst academically then any other racial group, and are consistently out-performed by their female counterparts.
The event’s keynote speaker was Dr. Shaun Harper. Dr. Harper has done extensive research on black males in education and is currently on the faculty in the Graduate School of Education, African Studies, and Gender Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Harper began with the question, “What do we need to do improve Black males access to college?” and then focused his talk around what actions need to be taken to answer that question. Dr. Harper took serious issue with how research is being done to even answer that question. He believes that we need to re-frame and restructure the way in which research is being done and spend more time talking with individuals who have beaten the odds and are now doing successful things (i.e. Edward Smith Lewis – a West Oakland native that overcame tremendous obstacles in his pursuit towards academic and professional success ). Dr. Harper also believes that more needs to be done to help prepare the black males who are moving on to higher education. He illustrated that there is a college culture that black males often struggle adjusting to and as a result often leave school. Dr. Harper’s address ended with him emphasizing the importance of there needing to be just as much effort to get more African-Americans into graduate school as there is for undergraduate. He insisted that for there to be real systematic changes there needs to be more African-American’s in powerful positions to address the concerns of African-American’s in education.
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