A Yale Daily News reporter provides the essential background for this video decrying the starkly racist policies of UCLA, one of the United States’ largest colleges.
Last week, Sy Stokes and 11 other black male students from UCLA uploaded a YouTube video of a spoken word poem called “The Black Bruins.” The poem attacks the university for its lack of racial diversity, specifically its incredibly small percentage of black male students. Overall, only 3.3 percent of the male population of UCLA is black. Of the 2,418 entering male freshmen, only 48 were black.
The poem goes on to cite several other statistics about black males at UCLA. The graduation rate for black males is 74 percent, while the overall graduation rate is around 90 percent. Additionally, 65 percent of the 660 black males at UCLA are undergraduate athletes. UCLA also holds 109 NCAA championships, more than double the number of black male freshmen.
Stokes interprets the meaning behind these figures with the lines, “When we have more national championships than we do black male freshmen, it’s evident that our only purpose here is to improve your winning percentage. So now black high school kids can care less about grades, just as long as the number on the back of their jersey doesn’t fade.”
Read UCLA’s Daily Bruin coverage of this issue.