SOUTHAMPTON, Bermuda — The crisis that Black males face has to be viewed and confronted from a global and international perspective, according to scholars from across the world who are gathering this week in Bermuda for the fifth annual International Colloquium on Black Males in Education.
They argue that creating a space to exchange ideas and perspectives concerning the global dynamics of Black males in the educational pipeline is essential if long-term progress is to be made on a global scale.
“We want to improve and reconsider how policy and practice makes a difference,” says Dr. Jerlando F.L. Jackson, the Colloquium Chair and Vilas Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and director of Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We want to share the research with the communities we engage in.”
Here on this British territory just 600 or so miles from North Carolina that boasts a population of about 62,000, the issues that confront young Black male are visibly daunting.
In recent years, Bermuda has been plagued by staggering high school dropout rates of Black males, as policy makers have been struggling to recruit and retain Black males to Bermuda College, the nation’s only institution of higher education.
“This is a problem I deem to be a crisis for our island,” says Dr. Duranda Greene, who has been the president of Bermuda College, a two-year institution, for the last decade. “Time is not on our side. We must act and we must act now.”
Greene says that of the 800 students enrolled at BC, only about 237 are Black males, while the number of Black males incarcerated has risen to about 200.
