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...