Documentarian Janks Morton has a simple message when it comes to statistics that portray African-Americans in a negative light: Go to the source and fact-check the figures for yourself.
This is the message that reverberates throughout Morton’s new movie, Hoodwinked: We Can No Longer Doubt Our Greatness, which is being premiered in the coming weeks and months in various venues, including at 7p.m. on Oct. 11 at Howard University, where parts of the documentary was shot.
In the piece, Morton visits Howard and other campuses in the Washington, D.C. area to revisit a question for which he previously gained notoriety: Are there more Black men in college or in jail?
And he introduces another question that exposes the gap between what people believe the high school dropout rate is for Black males as opposed it really is.
On the question of whether there are more Black men in jail or in college, one Black student after another offers a ready answer that comports with the notion that more Black men are engaged in criminal behavior than are in pursuit of higher learning.
But the reality, Morton maintains in his movie, is that there are more Black men in postsecondary institutions than who are incarcerated.
Specifically, according to figures Morton said he retrieved from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice, the number of Black men in college is more than 1.4 million versus the 824,340 who were incarcerated.
