Skin in the Game: The Cost of Striving for Black Excellence at HBCUs Under White Supremacy

Photo by Eric Dekker on Unsplash

Dragonfruit has such a distinct color. The rich purple hue stands out against the drawers of my freezer (I say “my” because I use the fridge in my rental apartment, but I don’t own it. I don’t own much). The melted cubes of the frozen fruit I intended to use to make smoothies have created a stream from the top of the freezer to the bottom that pours into different sections, coating whatever it touches in its purple goo. 

The fridge is awfully quiet. I begin to miss the irritating hum that I usually try to ignore. The absence of its hum and the obvious irony of frozen food melting in the freezer can only mean one thing. One of my worst fears has finally come true. It’s almost like my fear was so mighty it manifested itself. The fridge isn’t working, and most of the groceries have inevitably spoiled. I can’t afford to buy groceries this week, so I have to salvage what looks and smells okay and toss the rest: mostly meat and seafood. I fill a garbage bag with packs of beef and chicken, a bag of tilapia, some salmon steaks, some of my mom’s homemade pasteles that I know took her hours to make, and throw a milk carton into the recycling. Once filled, I carry the bag down to the garbage bin in the alley outside of my apartment building, taking breaks at each landing of the three-story walkup to catch my breath. Maybe now I’ll really consider going vegetarian. 

Starting this post at 2am, the rumbling in my stomach reminds me that I “forgot” to eat dinner. In reality, I’ve given myself a quota to make what’s left in the fridge last longer. I write this not seeking pity (I’m tough, I’ll ride it out. Always have) but to share one reality of being a low-income graduate student teetering the poverty line.

In the last five years, I’ve survived by working 2-4 jobs at a time, the kindness of loved ones, relying on Medicaid (thank goodness for Medicaid), at one point using SNAP (thank you, SNAP), and keeping the lights off longer than I should while writing papers in the dark convinced that that would help me lower my electricity bill enough to cover groceries. That’s not to say I don’t try to treat myself once in a while. But it’s usually at the expense of something else I had to budget for.

I’m proficient in the “Howard hustle”: ask for what you need, take what you can get, and hope that there’s enough funding to help keep you above water. And if there isn’t, pray. And if that doesn’t work, pray harder and continue to ask for what you need.

Well, praying for my fridge to work didn’t . . . work. So, I had to make do with what I had. A week and a visit from a repairman later, the fridge is still broken.

What now?

I would not want to get my PhD in English with a specialization in Caribbean literature and my training in Afro-diasporic literature from any other university or graduate program than Howard's. My graduate program is extremely rigorous and has many dedicated, phenomenal faculty members. I’ve made lifelong friends who have become family, found mentors that are guiding me through the long and back-breaking journey to the PhD, and am experiencing two of my life’s greatest passions: writing and serving as an educator. So, while I rest my palm on one of the room-temperatured shelves in my fridge, I remind myself of how grateful I am to be at Howard doing what I love and that things will get better. Things will eventually cool down.

But when? When will I be able to confidently pay my rent? When will I be able to pay my tuition? When will I be able to not choose between buying a bed or paying for a moving truck without maxing out my credit card. I’m strong, but taking two heavy suitcases on an Amtrak at 7:30am in the morning every weekend for the next four weeks is not what I want to call “achieving excellence.” 

When will Howard, a renowned HBCU (the Mecca), be able to afford to pay its graduate students livable stipends across departments? When will graduate students not have to scrape by to achieve excellence, or at least pay rent, or buy groceries?

The problem

When will HBCUs receive the endowments they deserve for the research, faculty, and graduates that they contribute to the U.S.’s academic system (James V. Koch and Omari H. Swinton 2023)? For example, according to Howard University’s 2022-2023 annual report, the University’s endowment was $865.3 million (Howard University). The University served, at the time, approximately 10,000 undergrads and roughly 1,700 grad students. Per the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Howard was ranked the second best HBCU in 2025 after Spelman. Let’s compare this to the PWI (Predominantly White Institution) ranked second best in the country (Forbes). Columbia University’s endowment in 2022-2023 was 13.64 billion. Columbia served 6,668 undergrads and 25,880 grad students. The average annual graduate stipend at Howard for the academic year, across departments is $24,000 (Howard University Graduate School) whereas the average annual graduate stipend at Columbia is $42,970 (Columbia Student Benefits). The cost of living in New York is (not surprisingly) higher than in DC, coming up to $125,000-$154,000 (FCNY). Specifically, North Manhattan (where Columbia’s campus is located) comes up to $137,000. However, the nation’s capital doesn’t fall too far behind at around $92,000 (Jennifer Schurmann). Ultimately, both universities are ranked second but on different lists because of the racial identities of the students they predominantly serve. 

Keeping location in mind, a more helpful comparison would be to a PWI in DC—to remove the cost of living gap between NYC and DC. So, I looked at Georgetown University. Both Howard and Georgetown are prestigious and are designated R1 schools. Georgetown’s endowment in 2024 was $3.6 billion (The Georgetown University Investment Office), leaving a roughly $2.7 billion dollar difference between both universities’s endowments.

So . . . 

I find myself romanticizing my less-than-favorable economic conditions, pretending like I’m in the first act of a film about a quirky graduate student who eats canned chili at the kitchen counter for dinner because it outlasts whatever's about to spoil in the fridge before she kicks adversity in the butt and eventually leads an economically stable and satisfying life at the end. I do this because if I truly face the weight of all that I have been carrying to achieve Black excellence (i.e. graduate with my PhD at the Mecca), the weight of my financial reality might just take me down. The truth is I deserve better. We deserve better. And there is an undeniable behemoth of a racial hierarchy that undermines the power of HBCUs and Black cultural production to protect whiteness as a political ideology under the guise that white is "right," white is "deserving," white is "pure," white is "proper," white is "better," white is . . . "excellent." Problematic race science comes to mind here (Sholnn Z. Freeman). 

The term “Black excellence” reckons with the aforementioned status quo. It reinforces the reality that excellence isn’t white. And Black people have proven time and time again that Black excellence isn’t an exception; it’s a standard and a right (part of the whole “pursuit of happiness” tenet). Note: this should not mean that we can’t just be and that we can't make mistakes. To think otherwise is to force an expectation of perfection that can be all too exhausting to uphold (i.e. employers that belittle an employee for making a small mistake, leading to a disciplinary sit-down talk that is actually a power trip. Been there). Happens to POC much too often. 

What can't be neither re-written nor forgotten

Despite the harmful stereotypes that Black people are “lazy”, “incapable”, and "cheat" the system (the very system that disenfranchises us), Black people are forced to work that much harder within this modern capitalistic system. Colonial greed birthed a monster: chattel slavery. Julia Ott refers to this system as such: “Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism” (2015). And Emma Mandella says, "Chattel slavery was the foundation for capitalism in America, and the extreme impact it has had on economic development of the nation has made American capitalism into a system uniquely cruel to its working class" (2020). The system of chattel slavery violently forced enslaved ancestors across the diaspora to do unpaid labor, to be mutilated into fragments, to survive, to reproduce the slave system, and then to proceed through time without reparations, without meaningful apologies (not that that would magically fix generations of trauma and inequity), and go nameless in history books as is the case of many of the 12.5 million enslaved Africans that were trafficked throughout the Americas. 

Chattel slavery was a cannibalistic system that fed on Black bodies. Enslaved Africans were thrusted into the abysses of the slave ship, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and the plantation (Glissant). In his essay “The Open Boat” in his collection Poetics of Relation (1990) Édouard Glissant says:

What is terrifying partakes of the abyss, three times linked to the unknown. First, the time you fell into the belly of the boat. For, in your poetic vision, a boat has no belly; a boat does not swallow up, does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all the coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death. 6

Emancipation didn’t pull our ancestors out of the abyss. It created new rules for how to live in it. The abyss continues to stir, churning out disembodied voices that have not been given justice. 

Our past informs our present

Due to inequity, Black excellence requires more resources that prove harder to access. Not because we aren’t just as capable of excellence but because the ground out of which success and excellence grows was paved unevenly. Because of slavery, our ancestors across the diaspora were stripped of their resources, abducted from the only homes they knew, forced to contort onto ships, coerced into altering their mother tongues and cultures, and make due with what they had. And let’s not forget that Native Americans endured a very similar violent process on their lands. While African slavery began approximately 400 years ago and emancipation was granted in the United States and other countries almost less than 200 years ago (not including Haiti/Ayiti which achieved it 222 years ago and the state of Vermont 249 years ago) (Reuters), the afterlives of slavery and colonialism remain in forms such as the prison-industrial complex, disenfranchisement, increased Black maternal mortality due to racial disparity, dismantling of affirmative action, and other nefarious and traumatizing iterations. 

Black excellence isn’t impossible to achieve. We know this. But it can be harder to achieve, especially for folks coming from low-income backgrounds. Black excellence is vital for advancement. But it comes at a cost: financial, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. 

It’s getting late. So, I remove my palm from the fridge shelf and reluctantly close the door knowing that I will return several more times tomorrow hoping that it will work again even though the fan in the freezer is broken and it needs to be fixed. 

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