Why students at historically black colleges aren’t protesting

Earlier this week, the New York Times asked an intriguing and surprisingly overlooked question: why aren’t black students on historically black college campuses protesting against Israel and marching for Palestine? It’s an important query — made all the more urgent by President Biden’s commencement address this coming weekend at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities.  

Considering the seemingly endless ways African Americans have pledged their allegiances to the suffering in Gaza — and Palestinians in general — America’s 107 HBCUs should be exploding with anti-Israel rancor.  But they’re not — in fact, notes the Times, there have been no Columbia-like encampments and few students marching while draped in Palestinian flags. Why not?

As the Times sees it — much as they see everything — black students are simply too poor and historically marginalized to risk violently protesting in public. Black students — who comprise the vast majority of HBCU scholars — enter higher education “lower on the economic ladder and are more intently focused on their education and their job prospects after graduation,” wrote the paper. 

Black young people are likelier to have student debt upon graduation than their white counterparts; HBCU students — which have included everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Vice President Kamala Harris to my own grandparents — “understand that they have some different kinds of stakes,” explains Walter Kimbrough, the former president of Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans.

The stakes are different at HBCUs, but not just because of black students, but because of Jewish students, as well. Or, more precisely, the lack of Jews studying at HBCUs. While the Times may speak to the very real economic and cultural pressures keeping black campuses quiet, the equally (if not more) meaningful reason they’ve remained protest-free is because HBCU campuses are also nearly free of Jews.

Harvard, Columbia, New York University and UCLA all feature Jewish student bodies far, far beyond their percentages of the general American population. Columbia, in particular, is 23 percent Jewish — nearly ten times the Jewish numbers for the entire US. Little wonder Columbia has seen the most virulent anti-Israel protests since the October 7 Hamas attacks. 

There’s little question anymore that college protesters chanting for Palestine are actually chanting against Jews and Israel. But the accompanying bullying, violence and intimidation only makes sense when there are actual Jews around. Why chant “from the river to the sea” at an HBCU when most students probably could care less?? Far better to scream it at terrified Jewish kids blocked from getting to class by keffiyeh-clad junior-jihadis. 

And it’s not just black colleges that have seen scant Jewish student numbers translate into equally minimal anti-Israel vitriol. Schools with strong Christian roots — and, accordingly, modest Jewish student bodies — have also mostly avoided protests. Utah, for instance, not only has few Jews, the state’s colleges and universities — like Utah itself — are disproportionately Mormon. 

Not only does this mean less Jewish students for the Gaza crowd to imperil, but “Mormon heritage is traditionally Zionist, and adherents claim a strong kinship with Judaism,” wrote Axios last month, bravely daring (unlike the Times) to link the lack of Jews with lack of protests. What’s more, Axios noted, Utah’s traditional piousness has resulted in a population and culture that are “non-confrontational, conformist and deferential to authority” — and this has trickled down into campus protest efforts. In November, for instance, organizers of a pro-Palestine walkout at the University of Utah saw their school sponsorship revoked within twenty-four hours. 

A quick look at the sixty-plus schools across the US where pro-Palestinian protests have broken out reveals almost none of them to be Christian-affiliated — and none are HBCUs. True, Catholic schools such as Chicago’s DePaul University and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana have been hit by pro-Gaza actions. But the church has advocated on behalf of Palestinians for decades as part of its larger social-justice messaging. 

No major media outlet has reported on the fractures now splintering blacks and Jews than the Times, Which makes their omission of Jews here feel all the more deliberate. The Times was right, however, to highlight the economic factors at play here. It’s not just that black students must contend with economic uncertainty — HBCUs must as well. Their average endowments are less than half those of non-HBCUs, which leaves them far less willing (or able) to tolerate costly protests. Moreover, while HBCUs may graduate the “black elite,” that elite is still black — an arrest while protesting could quickly derail their entire futures.  

The real elitists here are the moneyed marauder ransacking campuses such as Columbia’s who are privileged enough to not have to think about their futures. They’re also not thinking about Hamas or Gaza or even the Palestinians. They’re thinking about Jews, because without them the entire protest movement reveals its fragility and folly. Jews know this, but so too do blacks — the majority of whom are remaining at the sidelines of the Israel-Hamas fracas, despite what the Times may say.

When President Biden addresses Morehouse College this weekend he’ll likely be met with a comparatively subdued and sympathetic crowd. Part of the reason is because the Morehouse has warned students not to protest. And, of course, because that crowd will include very few Jews.