Dr. Elwood Watson, PhD

Mental illness in African American communities is a real and ongoing crisis. According to the American Association of Suicide Study, suicide is the third most common cause for young Black people between 15 to 24 years of age.

To all those Whites who make the lame argument that they did not enslave anyone or that they and their relatives never owned slaves guess what? So what?! The cold, hard undeniable truth is that you and your forebears have and still do benefit from past and present day retrograde institutional policies that had/still have a disproportionate negative impact on many Black people. Case closed.

Higher education has always been an institution that has evolved over time often expanding access to a broader portion of the populace. No one who is astute to the dynamics in higher education can deny that higher education has undergone a dramatic change over that past 25 years.

it also tarnishes the brands of those schools as having lowered their standards to allow in unqualified students; ironically that’s what’s been said about qualified students of color when they began getting into these schools.

To claim that you are the victim of lynching whether high tech or otherwise is the height of foul behavior and the ultimate insult to those whose ancestors (perhaps some of your own) who were casualties of one of many intensely horrific forms of sadistic violence perpetrated on untold numbers of Black Americans (and a few non-Black people) in American history.

Virility and toughness aside, the fact is that society has historically categorized Black men as violent, aggressive, oversexed, dishonest and juvenile. Black men have largely been viewed as sexual in an immature manner, jive talking, living to embrace violence, routinely living outside the realm of legality, willing to fight at the drop of a dime and having a distaste for embracing any form of law and order. In short, in the mindset of those more unenlightened folk, Black men are as primitive as cavemen.

While troubling, one can likely understand why Kelly's legal team and hanger on's are acting like barbarians at the gate, rushing to defend him. He is their livelihood, meal ticket, financial repository. If he is weakened or indicted, so are their financial pocketbooks. Thus, he has to be protected at all costs, no matter how vile, untoward and unethical it is for them to do so.

this is a president, who has been so careless with his rhetoric that he has emboldened xenophobes, racists, White supremacists, anti-Semites, misogynists and others filled with hate. More than a few people are/have been watching in both anger and disbelief as we see an administration that is virulently hostile to people of color and proudly says so without apology.

should students and professors prohibit themselves from discussing the brutal and violent history of American slavery if their course is disproportionately made up of African American students? The inhumane and horrific atrocities committed during the Holocaust if the class is composed of predominately Jewish students? The violent, sexist and misogynist treatment of American Women in a class where female students are in the majority?