I missed Morehouse’s graduation ceremony this year, but that Sunday morning my social-media feed lit up with post after post from my Morehouse network about something incredible that had happened at the ceremony: Billionaire CEO Robert Smith announced he would repay the student loans of the entire graduating class. He had freed 396 black male graduates of approximately $40 million in student debt.
The news spread quickly. Soon media organizations, members of Congress, and pundits were using Smith’s gesture as their next talking point. Many of their responses were laudatory, but many argued that, while Smith’s gift was welcome, college students should not have $40 million of debt in the first place.
Most Morehouse men would agree. The institution has led the way on progressive issues, from its founding to the eras of students Martin Luther King Jr., Maynard Jackson, and contemporary activists Lee Merritt and Shaun King. Morehouse alumni and other black Americans have been on the right side of progress for all, which includes the conviction that economic security and education are fundamental human rights.
But some commentators found fault with two passages of Smith’s speech:
“Because we are enough to take care of our community. We are enough to ensure we have all the opportunities of the American Dream.”
“Success is only real if our community is protected, our potential is realized, and if our most valuable assets — our people — find strength in owning the businesses that provide economic stability in our community.”
New York magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice complained that Smith was promoting the “notion that overcoming racism is a matter of personal resolve or communal resilience,” taking the onus off of the system not to be racist and placing it on black people to overcome that systemic racism.
And Smith’s urging of those graduates to likewise help those who come after them envisions a future of more wealthy black people with a commitment to cultural philanthropy — which is not a “counterweight” to the racism that perpetuates inequality, Cheney-Rice argued.
No Assumptions
But this encouragement of black philanthropy is not a repudiation of structural change or an endorsement of current systems. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that structural change has historically not been effective, or even aimed at redressing the damage done to black people by previous systems.
Indeed, so-called reforms have often been shaped specifically to exclude blacks from benefiting. In his 2017 book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein details example after example of “progressive” housing policies that intentionally left out African-Americans.
Some laws, for instance, withheld federal funds from developers of affordable housing unless they put in the deeds that the homes could not be sold to black people. More recently, many African-Americans welcomed the legalization of marijuana in the hope that once it could no longer be weaponized as a way to send black people to prison for years, it could serve as a means of business development.
But while African-Americans continue to make up a disproportionate number of marijuana-related arrests, 81 percent of the new marijuana business owners or founders are white, while only 4 percent are black, according to a study last year by the Marijuana Business Daily website.
The fine print was that if you had previously been arrested for cannabis-related crimes, you could not own a legal marijuana business.
Even Cheney-Rice acknowledged the U.S. government’s history of broken promises to African-Americans — “from the reneged-upon promise of land to freed slaves to the denial of New Deal benefits to black domestics and farmworkers” — in accusing Smith of glossing over structural barriers to black people’s success.
Does he believe that the policies implemented to change the reality of higher education in America would be created by a “different” government?
While we have worked, and will continue to work, to create a better system, black people can never assume that the improved system will work for us.
So while it would be great to make college affordable for all, we understand historically in America there has been “fine print” for our community. Therefore while we work to make these systems and structures better, we also realize, to borrow a phrase from New Jack City, “We all we got.”
Why We’re Business Majors
Morehouse’s student body is 70 percent business majors. Not because we are sons of Wharton graduates and have family companies to take over but most often because we are first-generation college students and have been told by our grandparents and parents that we need to control our own destiny, whatever our society throws at us.
Many of us see mastering business as a way to do that. My Morehouse network viewed Smith’s gift as an unexpected and welcome gesture that charged us to do more in the spirit of the Morehouse College hymn, “So to bind each son the other into ties more brotherly.”
When major gifts like this serve as public events or major news stories, it is important to understand the context in which those gifts were given and what they mean to the people to whom they were given. At Morehouse last weekend, what Smith’s gift meant was, as he said, we are enough to take care of us.
Nashid Sharrief graduated from Morehouse College in 2006. He is founder and chief executive of My Higher Self, which designs education and development programs for specific types of students, and he serves as global learning and development manager at Habitat for Humanity International.
