Hello Reader,

I hope this special Juneteenth day message finds you well. I hope you got the day off and even if you did not, that you take some time to reflect on what this means for the United States and its people.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865 when General Gordon Granger of the Union Army ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation thereby freeing the remaining slaves in Galveston, TX, after the end of the American Civil War. It had been celebrated since then by some Americans and had been a holiday in some states and was called Freedom Day or Black Independence Day.

It was not until 2021 that it became a recognized national holiday by the U.S. government when then President Joe Biden signed into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. On this Juneteenth Day I am reflecting on three things as a political scientist, a college admissions coach, and a human being.

First as a political scientist, it is not lost on me the tense political environment we are in marked by polarization and hyper partisanship often fueled by the inflammatory rhetoric of a contentious president. Five years after the murder of George Floyd there is a backlash against the racial progress of recent years and any attempt to deal with racial injustice -- historical and contemporary -- in the United States. It has taken the form of removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from work places and educational institutions, banning books, and fights over how Black history is taught in public schools.

Second, as a college admission coach, my Juneteenth reflections take me to the racial wealth gap in this country. A recent analysis shows that the median wealth for White Households in the U.S. is $285,000, $62,000 for non-white Latino/Hispanic households, and about $45,000 for Black households. The majority of wealth in the U.S. is also held by White households. This of course affects how families plan and pay for college.

Black families and Black college graduates are disproportionately affected by the student loan crisis. On average, Black graduates have about $53,000 in student loan debt, which is about $25,000 more than their White counterparts. So my work as a college admissions coach comes into sharper focus.

Our mission remains to democratize access to higher education by helping particularly historically excluded (first generation, black, indigenous, other people of color, immigrant, etc) students gain admission into college and graduate school with full funding and avoid debt so that they can start their professional lives on a firmer financial footing.

Finally as a human being, as a Black woman who is an African immigrant and also a postcolonial scholar, the connection between American slavery and the European colonial project in Africa and elsewhere, and their role in the kind of persistent economic inequality and racial wealth gap we see in many parts of the world is clear to me.

So every student from a historically excluded background that we help get into college and avoid debt produces a generation-changing impact -- closing that racial wealth gap, one student and family at a time. Happy Juneteenth.

Dr. Faith Okpotor Founder and CFF Head Coach National Center for Higher Education Access Award-winning academic and tenured professor

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