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Racial Justice Beyond Credentials: The Radical Politic of a Black College Dropout

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Abstract

The scholarly paper explores how racial justice and college credentials have become conflated despite the higher education system being a site of anti-Blackness. The argument is advanced through analyzing critiques of higher education—stratification, lack of support, un(der)employment, and consumerism—on Kanye West’s first album The College Dropout. I argue that a focus on college dropouts or the uncredentialed allows for a more evidence-based analysis of how higher education fails to be an equalizer for poor Black urban communities and provides lessons for how to imagine a radical education praxis not based on who has a degree but on human needs and Blackness as valuable.

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  1. Department of Education and Counseling, Villanova University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Jalil Bishop Mustaffa

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Mustaffa, J.B. Racial Justice Beyond Credentials: The Radical Politic of a Black College Dropout. Urban Rev 54, 318–338 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-021-00612-3

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