Race and University – Why they Called a Spade a Negro?

ACCRA — “Neither of my parents had a degree, so I went and got one for each of them.” Another tweet followed: “Black scientist: graduate from UT pursuing my PharmD. First generation college student.” The next tweet cut even deeper: “People really think black people get into colleges based upon race like its unfathomable that we have brains due to our skin.” Finally, a young black girl asks: “What level of white privilege is thinking someone took your spot as if you were inherently entitled to it by birth?”

They hailed it ‘Black Twitter’ as the black community in the U.S. took to the social media platform to fight Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the nine Supreme Court Judges in the country, over what should have been a usual nonmatter of a young lady not getting admission to university. However, this case has birthed a big racial matter, uniting the black population in the U.S. under one Hashtag: #StayMadAbby.

The case is a simple one: A young white lady called Abby Fisher is unsuccessful in securing admission to the University of Texas. She suspects that an affirmative action policy that favours black applicants had kicked her out. She sues the university that her denial was based on race and that minority students “with lower grades who weren’t in all of the activities I was in” were accepted in her place. The matter goes to the Supreme Court where Justice Scalia tells the world: “Black scientists don’t come from schools like the University of Texas; they come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.”

Incidentally, in the same week, Michelle Obama, the American First Lady, launched a video with rapper Jah Pharoah to promote college education for American kids. “You should go to college,” Mrs. Obama is seen forcefully gesturing away–in the idiosyncratic style of the professional rap artists. It was also in the week that former Oklahoma City police officer, Daniel Holtzclaw, was found guilty for serially raping more than ten black women, including a 57 year old daycare worker. That same week, a white supremacist group resolved to rescind an award to popular writer and lawyer Ann Coulter, after discovering that she posed for photographs with Jimmie Walker, a black comedian.

Rock a bye, lullaby, bye-bye. “Africans are lazy. They are only good at eating, lovemaking and thuggery.” These were Donald Trump’s words a few weeks ago. It does matter if you are black or white, contrary to the lyrics of a Michael Jackson song. From the days when the spade was synonymous with the Negro, race relations have improved just by the length of the spade. That is, if we are calling a spade a spade.

For the Scalias, the Negro is still a spade. Those are the origins of the popular expression “calling a spade a spade.” Well, as Oscar Wilde writes in The picture of Dorian Gray, “The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.” Did Justice Scalia jut call blacks a spade by suggesting that we do not have the intellectual capacity to think quickly and follow quicker-track degree routes? If we follow slower-track degrees and graduate with good passes, should we be employed by organisations where quick thinkers are not needed?

Now, let me share my experiences as an international student who studied in white-populated universities on two continents in the Western hemisphere. To be fair, I did not attend a first 10 university in England. My university was good but I wish I had Oxford to my name, just like President J. A. Kufour or Nana Akuffo Addo. Well, even if Nana did not complete his studies at Oxford, he tasted what was then, and may still be, the best of English education. I studied at the Middlesex University in North London.

I was the only Ghanaian in the Master of Law Class of 2006. Actually, there were two of us. Genevieve Afra Abebrese was the other international student from Kumasi. The rest of the class were students from Nigeria, Lebanon, Hong Kong, India, Mauritius, Pakistan, China and Canada. I wondered why there were no English (white) people in the class, even though most of the lecturers were white. The Canadian student was black. One of the lecturers was Nigerian, Emelia Onyema, a brilliant lawyer who also taught part-time at another university in central London.

There were a lot of international students in my university and my friends who studied at Buckingham, Loughborough, Warwick and Cambridge, made me feel they were in a better university. Indeed, a few students transferred from Middlesex to other universities. There were some universities which were not necessarily Ivy League (Britons do not care about Ivies) but were noted as excellent places for particular courses. Southbank University was good for law. There were also bogus universities and colleges that dished out dodgy degrees to qualification-hungry international students. Well, it was only Africans who fell victim to these degree scams.

Did I think I was in a slower-track university because it was not as good as University of Texas? Before Middlesex, I had taken a few courses at Westminster University in central London, where a Nigerian student asked me a question after a lecture: “Oga Ben, do you notice that the lecturer is favouring the oyibo people. Every answer they give is correct while he finds ways of correcting what we say. I think the case you cited was correct but he said it was wrong.” Well, the lecturer was black. Whose interests was he serving? “Oga, he only looks blackoo, he is a coconut. He speaks like oyibo.”

In Canada, I found that their poorly ranked universities were just as competitive as McGill, University of Toronto, Queens and Simon Frazer. I took courses at a university in Ontario and found a big immigrant population there. There wasn’t any talk or suspicion of slower-track institutions or affirmative action policy to favour black or minority applicants. Of course, the world of work was another thing. Employees always have ways of weeding out slow-trackers.

Americans place a lot of premium on their Ivy League institutions. While it matters that Obama graduated from Harvard and “where will Malia go to college?” is news, David Cameron needn’t be Oxford to be Prime Minister. Well, it helps that he was. The American Ivy-League obsession underlies Justice Scalia’s slower-track bollocks. With his personal honour abused and his legal scholarship deflated, Scalia says of himself: “I was an Italian boy from Queens, not quite the Princeton type.”

From the slower tracks of Queens, how did he end up at the Supreme Court of the United States of America? Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, recalls that as a black boy, “Teachers would say, ‘Don’t you want to be an athlete?” Thank God nobody told young Scalia to sell pizza. #StayMadAbby.