From Pet to Threat | How HBCUs Can Stop Losing the Black Women They Need Most

In more than twenty years moving through the landscape of Black education—as researcher, theorist, and full-throated cheerleader—I’ve seen wonders. I’ve watched students who were once counted out push across commencement stages with degrees that no one believed possible. They’ve gone on to good jobs, raised healthy families, and sent handwritten notes that begin, “You told me I could.” I cling to those memories because they speak to a quiet truth: extraordinary things emerge from modest classrooms, powered by chronically under-resourced and overworked people.

Dr. Crystal A. deGregoryYet behind those miracles lies a cost few are willing to name. Outsiders rarely understand that Black student success—especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)—is forged in fire. Perfection is a mirage. And the ideal of “just do the work and the work will speak for itself” has become a bad-faith promise. Millennials feel it most: that childhood advice to work hard, keep your head down, and play by the rules has become a blank check the workplace no longer honors.

“Higher ed is not for the faint of heart,” warns Dr. Ebony Gallagher, who studies educational leadership and serves as the founding director of the Black in Business initiative at the University of Miami. “The politics will swallow you whole and imposter syndrome you to death.”

I’ve led two research centers at historically Black colleges. I know this sermon well. I’ve preached it. And I’ve lived the blowback.

Many institutions—HBCUs included—deploy a mix of love-bombing, trauma-bonding, and classic gaslighting to protect bad actors at the top. Once drawn into temporary circles of favor, even victims, once loved on, often become quiet collaborators. They shield the very systems that harmed them or look away when someone else is targeted.

I lacked a name for this cycle until I was heckled from the floor at a national HBCU convening—Ritz-Carlton ballroom, no less.

I’d been invited as a panelist. I expected debate, even disagreement—not dishonor. But midway through my remarks, a fellow Black woman rose and interrupted: “Someone has clearly hurt you, and I’m sorry for that,” she said, with a tone of staged pity. Then she assured the room that I was wrong. “Bring value to an institution,” she insisted, “and you will be honored, praised, prized.”