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The State Must Provide, my first book baby, a history of racial inequality in higher education, turns five today. I shared some thoughts about it on IG, but figured it might be good to share here, too: First: I wrote the book because I felt like I had to.

I had questions about HBCUs and American higher education and I wanted answers. I wanted to know why things were the way they were. I wanted to write a history of higher ed that did not consider Black students and the institutions they attended as afterthoughts but as central to the story.

I wanted to sit with the fact that this feature of our democracy that is often funded by public money and overseen by states and the federal government; that George Washington and his contemporaries found so important that he included it in his first and last addresses to Congress…

..that this thing we call our higher education system was, for so long, legally unequal. And I wanted to consider how that legacy continues to impact the system we recognize today.

It is a first book in the sense that you don’t know what you don’t know — about the craft of writing or just, you know, life — until you know it. But there is nothing — save a couple of things I’d like to flesh out in the footnotes — that I’d change about it.

Sometimes people expect concrete solutions out of a non-fiction book. Oftentimes I do as well. “Okay, so what do we do about it.” We don’t just let the cancer eat away after the diagnosis without offering treatment plans.

The State Must Provide has solutions, but it was, at its core, my attempt at a diagnosis: It was looking back at the system we created, with no illusions, and telling the truth about it and how it was made. As far as first kids are concerned, I think this one is alright.

I’m truly grateful for everyone who made it a reality, and for everyone who has read, cited, discussed, or shared it.

(I’ve also been advised that I’m supposed to “drop the link cause it wont drop itself” so if you’re interested: bookshop.org/p/books/the-... )