I recently read A Rap on Race, the book-length transcript of a conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, recorded in
the summer of 1970. As I noted last week it’s a fascinating book, and I’m going to be posting excerpts every Wednesday for the next while.

Here’s the first, from the third page of the book:

MEAD: I recall a boy whose father married again, married a woman who had a son about the same age. They weren’t related, of course, they were stepbrothers. And then that father and mother, the father of the first boy and the mother of the second, had a child. And the first boy said, “Now I feel differently about it. We have a brother in common.”

BALDWIN: Ah, that makes a great deal of difference.

MEAD: You see, this is true in a sense. Because as far as I know — and this is all any white person in the United States can ever say — as far as I know, I haven’t any black ancestry. But you’ve got some white ancestry.

BALDWIN: Yes, yes.

MEAD: So we’ve got a brother in common.

BALDWIN: So we’ve got a brother in common. But isn’t the tragedy partly related to the fact that most white people deny their brother?

One of the crucial ideas that I try to get across to my students, when we’re talking about how race was constructed in the United States, is that it was designed to be a one-way valve. Whoever you were, whatever your race, you could produce black kids by having them with a black partner, but if you were black you couldn’t produce white kids by having them with a white partner. Race flowed in the direction of blackness, never the other way.

And this was, of course, a matter of politics and economics, not of biology or genetics. If the child of a white slaveholder and his black slave was white, that child would be free, and have a claim on the slaveholder’s estate — an estate which would include that child’s own mother. For this and a hundred other reasons, American racism could not operate in the absence of the one-drop rule and its many variants, and so that rule had to be invented.

Racism depends on white people denying their brothers (and their sisters). So much of American history flows directly from that fact.

For-profit colleges have boomed in the last decade, spurred largely by success in hoovering up public money — for-profit college students now account for a quarter of all Pell Grant disbursements, although they only make 12 percent of all college students. Between grants and loans, federal programs provide some 90 percent of all for-profit revenue.

All this would be fine if the for-profits were providing consistently strong education at a reasonable price — but they’re not. Many are no more than diploma mills, preying on uninformed students and providing them with worthless degrees while burdening them with major long-term debt. As a result, nearly half of all student loan defaults come from the for-profit sector.

This hurts the students at the for-profits, of course, but it hurts needy students at more reputable institutions too. Every Pell Grant dollar funneled into the pockets of a for-profit college shareholder’s pocket is a dollar that’s not available to a public community college student who could really benefit from it. The for-profits are gaming the system in an incredibly harmful way.

In light of all this Obama Department of Education announced plans for new regulations last year, promising to crack down on the worst of the culprits and cut off their access to federal money. As the New York Times reports today, the colleges fought those rules, hard, with a huge and expensive lobbying push … and won:

Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case. …

In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.

The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which schools would be stripped of federal financing.

There is one silver lining to this story, however. Though federal oversight has been scaled back, students are beginning to wise up on their own. New numbers released this August show huge declines in for-profit enrollment, with similar reductions in revenue. The last thing folks need in an economy like ours is an expensive, worthless, loan-burdened degree, and in spite of the government’s shameful inaction, Americans are figuring that out.

Even in the wake of recent criticism of the University of California’s use of violence to break up nonviolent demonstrations, one fact has gone largely unquestioned — that student occupations are unlawful, and may be properly ended by police.

Across the Atlantic in Britain, however, the opposite belief prevails. There, student occupations are considered lawful unless a court specifically rules otherwise, and an attempt by one university to declare all occupations presumptively unlawful is meeting with growing criticism.

From the Guardian:

When and in what circumstances students have the right to protest on their own campuses is a question of law and policy that has no one simple, universally applicable answer. The bounds of what is possible and permissible vary over time and from place to place.