In the wake of President Barack Obama’s
declaration of the challenge of helping young men of color succeed as a “moral issue for the country,”
Cuyamaca College recently held a workshop led by two San Diego State University
professors highlighting the issue’s
relevance to community colleges.
Frank
Harris III and J. Luke Wood are faculty members in SDSU’s College of Education,
co-directing the Minority Male Community College Collaborative, a program
affiliated with SDSU’s doctoral program in Community College Leadership. The
workshop was part of Cuyamaca College’s Diversity Dialogues, a semester-long
series of free workshops focusing on a variety of diversity awareness and
social justice topics.
The collaborative partners with colleges
across the United States, providing the data so that decisions can be made to
serve students of color effectively and equitably. Included in the Cuyamaca
workshop were recommendations they presented last October to Assemblywoman
Shirley Weber, who convened the Assembly Select Committee on the Status of Boys
and Men of Color in California.
“Much of the research on these men
indicates that disparate outcomes between men of color, in comparison to their
female and white counterparts, are a result of systemic and structural
challenges that must be addressed through federal and state policy
interventions,” Harris said.
He added that the president’s recent
unveiling of a privately funded $200 million initiative called “My Brother’s
Keeper” has great relevance to community colleges because campuses like
Cuyamaca are the entryway for a vast percentage of young men of color pursuing
higher education.
“The president talked about how,
across the board, young men of color are also always at the bottom, in terms of
graduation from high school and college, and on the top when it comes to
engagement in the criminal justice system,” Harris said. “This has real moral
and economic implications – a real significance – for our country.”
