First, there are large-scale institutionalized barriers that these students have already confronted, before they ever made it to higher education. It's what's referred to as the "Matthew effect" in educational literature: the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, specifically in terms of reading skills. What happens is that, absent actual disability, more literate homes produce more literate children--while less literate homes produce less literate children. This has nothing at all to do with "valuing education" or "caring": it's all about concrete knowledge and skills and parents' ability to pass along what they know--or don't know.
The "Matthew effect" bears upon this question in two ways. I explained to my students that really it makes no sense for them or their friends to concern themselves with the racial or ethnic demographics of a college because, the purpose of college study being to prepare themselves to take on certain worldly burdens no one can carry without a trained intellect, they should think of a school primarily in terms of the rigor and breadth of their own program and its professors, and in general of the intellectual opportunities and resources any school affords and provides. But they think in racial terms because they've never learned that, in the best cases, a common passion for a topic of study and disciplined pursuit of an independent intellectual life can go a long way towards overcoming the social alienation that comes from dealing with people from different ethnic backgrounds.
In other words, students who come into college with the developed attitude that intellectual intensity and serious,
disciplined conversation are always timely, and are (or can be) the bases for friendship, romance, employment, or just breaking the ice, will be able to turn an increasing intellectual capital into an increasing social capital; but students who don't have the habit of socializing their intellectual capital, and emphasize the wrong sort of social capital (by "wrong" I mean something good twisted to self-defeating ends--my students talked about the fact that, at PWIs, the black students were self-segregated), will find themselves frustrated and alienated because they think of "the rest" of the student body as predominately "white" (agreed, this is probably demographically inaccurate) and that the administration doesn't "care."
Now, I can't speak about all HBCUs, but certainly it's clear that, as an institution, my school isn't really set up at all to help students turn intellectual capital into social capital--that's not this school's "culture." I don't mean that professors don't talk to students, or that there aren't clubs or internships; but lectures, symposia, conferences, and so on, are appallingly few, so that, by and large, students aren't being socialized into the habit of turning intellectual capital into social capital, aren't connected to professors who are always showing them bridges between academics and affairs at large. My department is a mess; several serious majors discuss their ideas in ways that show they aren't really grounded at all; and in general I'm judging from the 120 students or so I've seen in only a short time, out of a student body of just over 1,000--and, of course, from the many things I
never find while walking on campus, reading the school newspaper, or looking at bulletin boards, but which are commonplaces at "PWIs."
The "official" line, of course, is that the school is turning out "leaders." Their idea of "caring" is to exhort students "to make a difference in the community." As far as I can tell, there are no official efforts to get students any of the intense intellectual remediation they don't know that they need. So these students are paying through the teeth to fall further behind; to "death at an early age" one can add "more death at a later age."
So, given that the Matthew effect is not just part of the student's personal history, but also of the institutional ethos, and particularly of the ethos of the administrators, one would think that "caring" about minority students would express itself in institutional efforts to make sure that they learned both how to overcome deficiencies in their intellectual capital, and how to turn their intellectual capital into social capital.
My "HBCU" is then an institutionalized barrier to the progress of many of its students, though I wouldn't say it contributes to racism.
