Why Black Boys Aren’t in College; And Why That’s Not the Real Crisis

Every few years, a new report or headline wonders aloud why Black boys are “missing” from college campuses, especially at HBCUs. But these questions are rarely asked with full memory or full honesty. In this piece, I respond to the latest New York Times article on the gender gap in higher education and argue that the real crisis isn’t Black boys disappearing, it’s the systems that never intended to keep us in the first place. What we’re witnessing isn’t absence. It’s abandonment. And it’s time we told the truth about it.

---

For the life of me, I cannot understand the rapid response to this essay that seems more invested in igniting a gender war within the Black community than in engaging the actual substance of what was written. Between the tweets and TikTok posts, there’s been a flood of dense, unsound noise masquerading as critique.

I remember after graduating from college and stepping into the so-called real world, what hit me hardest wasn’t just the weight of new responsibilities. It was the quiet, corrosive judgment. A constant, passive expression hanging in the air that whispered: You’re nothing if you didn’t play a sport.

People didn’t see resilience. They didn’t see someone who survived the worst years of the Great Recession. Someone who lived in his high school’s group home while balancing FAFSA deadlines and GPA stress. Someone who learned the meaning of adulthood far too early because his parents couldn’t find work.

None of that mattered.

All they saw was my size 6’6”, over 350 pounds. To them, I was either a failed lineman or a walking disappointment who refused to use his body the way America had planned.

Even the insult “big for nothing” was a form of commodification. A dehumanizing brand that stamped my body as a failed investment. You were made for the machine, and because you don’t serve it, you’re disposable.

That’s when I realized something chilling: This country doesn’t just love Black athletes. It loves Black bodies on its terms, trained, tamed, and profitable. If you’re not making someone money, you don’t matter.

What struck me most wasn’t just the cruelty, but the narrative. One I never chose, but one written around me before I ever had the chance to speak. And as I wrestled with that reality, I saw the American Dream for what it truly is, not a dream, not even a nightmare, but an industrial complex. One is meticulously designed to possess minds and exploit bodies.

Sometime last year, I wrote an article arguing that the NFL is primed to power a new transatlantic slave trade importing labor directly from the continent and commodifying African bodies for entertainment, all repackaged as global opportunity. A system that refines its exploitation with each generation, adjusting just enough to remain palatable.

This brings me to Clyde McGrady’s recent New York Times article about the decline in Black male college enrollment. The response has been a chorus of concern, but much of it rings hollow, like smoke signals sent long after the fire has consumed the house.

We keep citing the percentage of Black men on HBCU campuses like it’s a mystery that fell from the sky. However, the reality is that our bodies are filtered long before college applications are even filled out. A 19% enrollment rate at Howard isn’t the root; it’s the residue. It’s the echo of every suspension handed out in kindergarten for being "too active," every classroom stripped of a Black male teacher, every counselor who steered us toward sports instead of science.

We’ve got more non-Black students than Black men in institutions built for us. That’s not a coincidence. That’s design. That’s the long tail of disinvestment, standardization, and respectability politics converging on boys who were never expected to survive, let alone thrive.

The article hints at causes such as cost, discipline, and discouragement, but refuses to name power. The truth is: Black boys are policed before we are taught, taxed before we are trained, and tested before we are trusted. That’s not a lack of motivation. That’s a lack of protection.

Let me be clear: college is no longer the only path to the middle class. But we cannot pretend this conversation exists in a vacuum. Before we panic over enrollment numbers, we must interrogate the structures that push Black boys out long before they ever apply.

Take Howard University, for example. As someone who lives in D.C. and holds a master’s degree from Howard, I have deep respect for what this institution represents in terms of its legacy, brilliance, and the generations of Black scholars and change-makers it has nurtured. It is, undeniably, a crown jewel in the landscape of American higher education.

But even jewels need polishing.

For many first-generation students, especially those navigating financial instability, Howard can feel less like a dream and more like a maze. The cost of tuition, housing shortages, food insecurity, and overburdened support services can make the college journey feel more like a struggle for survival than a season of transformation. We must ask: Are we nurturing students’ full humanity, or are we simply helping them survive another system?

For young Black men already carrying systemic instability, college doesn’t always feel like liberation; it feels like more of the same, wrapped in branding and brochures.

Meanwhile, industries like sports, music, and influencer culture promise quick money and instant visibility. And who can blame Black boys for choosing a shot at being seen over the certainty of being erased?

But while some wring their hands about college numbers, the deeper question remains: What institutions are we building that nurture Black life?

Too often, the very pipelines that are supposed to lead our boys to higher education are dressed up holding cells athletic tracks that prize physicality over intellect. These are not structures of enrichment; they are filtration systems, designed to exploit and discard.

Schools boast about being “the best” because they win championships, not because they cultivate critical thought. In affluent neighborhoods, public schools make quiet deals to import athletes from private schools, not to elevate minds but to boost records. The focus is on performance, not potential.

And for those who don’t “make it,” there’s often only one pipeline left: the one that leads to prison.

This is what we now call the school-to-prison pipeline, and it starts long before high school. In kindergarten, Black boys are disproportionately suspended or labeled “disruptive,” not for violence, but for existing outside the margins of white norms. They’re seen as threats before they’re even taught what a threat is.

By middle school, the system has already handed them a script: Your body is a problem. Your brilliance is dangerous. Your future is someone else’s decision. Classrooms become corridors of surveillance. Counselors are replaced with cops. Grace is replaced with grit that too often leads straight to a cell.

A hoodie, a tone, a misinterpreted gesture becomes justification for removal. And once the system touches you, even briefly, it follows you. Stains transcripts. Shadows opportunities. Shrinks your life.

This is not accidental. This is architecture.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a machine that says: If you can’t entertain us, we will incarcerate you. If you can’t make the system money, it will make your suffering its business.

So yes, some of us are being seen, but we are still invisible. Not because we don’t shine, but because the gaze cast upon us was never meant to recognize our humanity, only our utility.

And before we close, I want to offer a reminder: the Talented Tenth theory, often wielded as a moral barometer for success in Black communities, was disavowed by its very creator, W.E.B. Du Bois. Even Du Bois, in his later years, acknowledged the limitations of elevating a small elite as a strategy for communal salvation.

We also cannot forget the legacy of Booker T. Washington, who, despite his critics, understood the critical importance of learning a trade and securing economic agency, even when political rights were delayed. Both men lived in contradictions. And those contradictions still live in us.

Today, those learning trades, such as electricians, HVAC specialists, welders, barbers, and cosmetologists, are building futures with their hands, skills, and vision. We need to affirm those paths just as we affirm law school or med school. Because access to the middle class isn’t about degrees alone; it’s about dignity, community investment, and sustainable autonomy.

We live in a society where many leaders are peddling rhetoric that sounds progressive but ultimately circles back to a “separate but equal” ethos just dressed in new language. And let me say this plainly: I do not entirely agree with those frameworks. Mainly because so many people have not divorced their vision of liberation from the gravitational pull of whiteness. They still define freedom in proximity to exclusion. Still measure success by how well they’ve imitated a broken model.

So before we replicate systems that never saw us to begin with, we need to ask ourselves: Who are we trying to become? And what are we willing to build that reflects our definitions of value, of belonging, of being fully seen?

And lastly, we must examine the conditioning of Black boys as they are ushered into manhood not through rites of passage designed for their flourishing, but through systems of surveillance, suspicion, and silent trauma. As Darnell Moore reflects in No Ashes in the Fire, the coming of age for Black boys is not merely a transition; it is often an endurance test.

Where white boys are conditioned toward dominion and visibility, Black boys are conditioned through premature policing and forced maturity. Their initiation isn’t into power, it’s into performance, punishment, and perseverance.

We will continue to lose them until we stop mistaking their survival for success.

We are not witnessing the disappearance of Black boys. We are witnessing their displacement—their quiet removal from systems that never intended to hold them with care. And yet, they endure. They adapt. They imagine futures no one ever bothered to prepare them for.

If we’re serious about shifting the numbers, we must stop asking what’s wrong with them and start asking what’s been missing from us: our institutions, our narratives, and our willingness to truly see.

Because Black boys were never the problem, they are the reflection Of what we’ve failed to build. Of what we still have time to create.

They are not broken. They are the blueprint.