Credentialing as Gatekeeping: A Historic Pattern in a Contemporary Push to Devalue Black Achievement

There’s a distinct pattern here—one that’s too consistent to be a coincidence. Every time Black Americans begin to substantively integrate a profession, the rules change. The bar gets raised. The hoops multiply. The gatekeepers get busy. And now, in a twist that feels both familiar and insidious, we’re witnessing a new wave: the push to remove college degrees as a requirement for federal jobs, especially in law enforcement starting with the premier law enforcement agency in the country, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is quietly dropping its four-year college degree requirement while scaling back its academy from sixteen to eight weeks. It’s being sold as reform, as inclusion but not the DEI type, as a way to broaden the applicant pool. But peel back the banana, the rhetoric, and what you find is a race (pun intended) to the bottom—a calculated effort to devalue the very credentials Black folks fought tooth and nail to earn.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about merit. It’s about access. Historically, if your immigrant father was a trade unionist, you got in—whether it was the union or a tuition-free city or state college. No bar exam was required in many states until Black law schools started producing graduates. Based on historical records, written bar examinations became widespread between 1890 and 1920, replacing oral exams and diploma privilege systems that had previously allowed law school graduates to practice without testing. This shift coincided with Post-Reconstruction where there was an emergence of Black law schools and, concomitantly, increasing presence of Black lawyers in the profession. There was no licensure exam for psychology until 1965, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement when Black psychologists began demanding space. Public colleges were free until Black students began enrolling en masse. Being from New York I remember famed City University of New York (CUNY), which (called Brooklyn College, one of its “senior”colleges the "proletarian Harvard" for its accessibility and academic rigor) only ended its tuition-free policy in June 1976. Retirement age used to be 65 until Reagan pushed it back to 67, taxing and cutting back benefits just as more Black workers began to fully qualify. These aren’t isolated facts—they’re coordinated responses to Black advancement.

Let’s get into the weeds walking deeper through the professions:

Law: Apprenticeships were the norm. But as Black lawyers emerged from newly founded law schools between 1890 and 1920, written bar exams became standardized. The American Bar Association, slow to lift its racial exclusions, helped institutionalize these exams just as Black legal professionals gained traction during the Post-Reconstruction period.

Medicine: The AMA excluded Black doctors from its chapters. The 1910 Flexner Report, backed by the Carnegie Foundation, shuttered most Black medical schools under the guise of “standardization.” This wasn’t reform—it was restriction, enacted precisely when Black physicians were entering the field.

Psychology: The first Black Ph.D. in psychology came in 1920, but licensure didn’t become widespread until the mid-1960s—right when Black psychologists began asserting their place during the height of the Black Power Movement. The timing isn’t coincidental; it’s strategic.

Dentistry: The first Black dentist graduated in 1869. The NDA was formed in 1913 because the ADA wouldn’t let Black dentists in. Licensing and experience requirements tightened in regions where Black practitioners posed a competitive threat.

Engineering: Granville T. Woods, “the Black Edison,” held dozens of patents in the 19th century. Yet engineering societies kept Black professionals out, and licensure or P.E. requirements—especially supervised experience—were weaponized to block access.

Education: Black teachers thrived in segregated schools. But integration brought new credentialing demands—advanced degrees, standardized certifications—that disproportionately excluded Black educators from promotion and leadership.

Social work: Social workers started being licensed in the mid-20th century, with Puerto Rico in 1934 being the first to enact regulation, followed by California in 1945. The main surge in state-level social work regulation, however, came during the height of the Civil Rights/Black Power Movements in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and today, all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and several territories have some form of social work regulation in place.

The move-the-goal-post shenanigans has always been the blueprint. When Black excellence becomes visible, the system resets to contain it. Now with Black Americans generally and Black women particularly holding degrees in record numbers, the narrative shifts again. Suddenly, degrees are “elitist.” Suddenly, practical skills matter more than academic achievement. But this isn’t about skills—it’s about pushing back the finish line. It’s about making room for underperforming, undereducated white ethnics, who want to see only other whites in these professions, naively believing it is their birthright, and resenting the accomplishments of those descendants of formally enslaved Africans who climbed the ladder of success with a ball and chain strapped to their leg.

DEI was never the threat. It was the scapegoat. A red herring. The grievance isn’t against diversity—it’s against the visibility of Black success. Trump’s administration is a rogue gallery, a showcase of photogenic mediocrities, camera-ready incompetents who couldn’t manage their way out of a suburban strip mall. So, they shamelessly foster an anti-intellectual zeitgeist that seeks to erase the very tools Black folks used to achieve upward mobility.

This is not just a policy shift. It’s a cultural regression. A deliberate attempt to discount Black achievement by devaluing education itself. The credentials that once served as shields against discrimination are being stripped of meaning. And in their place? Subjective criteria, informal networks, maddeningly redundant, often duplicative certification requirements. The same old gatekeeping—just dressed down in baggy jeans, sneakers, and a well worn pullover.

So no, this isn’t progress. It’s backlash. It’s a systemic adaptation to preserve the hierarchy of white male patriarchy. And if we don’t name it, challenge it, and expose it, we risk losing the hard-won ground our ancestors fought for. The fight has evolved. The tactics have changed. But the goal remains the same: to stymie Black upward mobility “by any means necessary.”