Student Debt is a Racial Issue. That's Why Cancellation hasn't Happened.
Yes, student debt is about race. As are most things in this country. For some reason, people bristle when you “play the race card,” even if the race card is every card in the deck. Unfortunately (for Black people usually), it is what it is. The implementation of our student loan system has been guided by racism, and the resistance to rectifying this system is as well.
Black and brown students are stuck between a rock and a hard place. We have to “work twice as hard” in order to get the same opportunities. Why? Because we walk into situations fighting stereotypes and working against the burden of entrenched anti-Blackness. We have to show that we are “articulate” and intelligent – we are assumed NOT to be so by virtue of our skin. When we attend upper echelon schools and gain certain accolades, it makes the burden of assumptions that limit our opportunities less heavy.
I’ve seen it play out in my own life. I say radical things, I talk with a country ass accent, I am a young Black woman with kinky hair and not one but two nose rings…but the moment that I tell people I graduated from Harvard Law School and practiced law at a top law firm, Covington & Burling, for 6 years, everything shifts away from the “errr” to the “oh!” Black people trying to propel our lives forward, upward, and outward, often find that we need that extra level of validation behind us. What I can do with a Harvard degree, a white man can do with a Boston University one. As a matter of fact, at my old law firm, at one point I think about 60% of all the Black lawyers there had gone to a top 3 law school, mostly Harvard. My white colleagues? They had graduated from a variety of law schools of which I’d never even heard. But my firm actively refused to go recruit for Black students at those same schools.
So then we go to the top schools so that we can have a chance of competing for the same opportunities. But we don’t have the money to get there without taking on debt. I was completely floored when I got to my law firm, was debating over loan repayment options, and learned that the majority of my white colleagues had much smaller or even no student debt. Their parents had written checks for them to go to schools that cost $70k a year and I could not even fathom that…my parents didn’t give me a red cent to go to law school. They couldn’t. They didn’t have generational wealth derived from pillaging land and resources and extracting unpaid labor. They didn’t even have 40 acres and a mule. All they had was what their families and they had been able to eek out despite deeply racist systems that continuously attempt to strip Black people of any accumulated wealth, or stop the accumulation in the first place.
I left law school with about $275,000 in student debt. Yes, you read that correctly. TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS. For context, here is a home currently for sale in the neighborhood in which I grew up in Savannah, GA.
It’s $220,000.
My options when I left law school? Well, first and foremost, I had to think about my student debt every day. I walked through the same spaces as my white colleagues, but what I had to do, what I had to give up, what I had to sign away to get there? So much more than them.
As my classmate at Harvard and friend, Derecka Purnell wrote for The Guardian, “Student debt helps to subsidize financial and legal firms by ensuring that people go there after graduation, and restricts the agency of lawyers, scientists, engineers and others who could do more interesting or justice-oriented work in our communities.”
But more than just my lawyer friends and those of us who went to graduate and professional school, across the country, Black students suffer more under the burden of student loans. More than 44 million Americans owe nearly $1.75 billion in student loan debt, according to a 2020 NAACP report. “Put simply, Black borrowers both acquire more debt and, due to wage and employment inequities in the labor market, are in more precarious positions when it comes to their ability to repay,” the report states.” PBS reports that “Among 2016 graduates, nearly 40 percent of Black students left college with $30,000 or more in debt, compared with 29 percent of white students, 23 percent of Hispanic students and 18 percent of Asian students. Additionally, 86 percent of all Black students graduated that same year with debt of any amount, compared to 70 percent of white students, 67 percent of Hispanic students and 59 percent of Asian students.”
Not only do Black people have less generational wealth to pay for school, which means we take on more debt – we make less money over our careers, so have a lowered ability to pay back the debt. Black women make just .64 cents for every $1 that white men make.
So, knowing that the student debt crisis impacts Black students and borrowers more than anyone else, what is the result? Well, the proposals to address it are castigated, deprioritized, and mischaracterized by both the right and the “left” alike. We see many arguments from white people who paid their (statistically lower) debt already with their (statistically higher) salaries that it isn’t fair for debt to be forgiven for others if it weren’t for them. No one seems to care about the fairness of the situation that Black borrowers find themselves in. The “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality shows in full force.
And ultimately, even though it would be good for the economy, it would be a tiny inroad to rectify the racist wrongs done to Black people in America, and it would free a generation of borrowers to create a better society rather than worrying about repaying debt, student loan forgiveness is unlikely to happen the way it needs to happen. At the end of the day, that is because forgiveness would benefit Black people more than anyone else, and when has this country ever done that?
