We probably need to do something that professional educators are loath to do, and that is to lower expectations for DNC politicians (with a few notable exceptions) and the commercial news media community for not calling the current actors of the Musk-Trump-GOP neo-fascist axis by their true names, Resegregationist, Reapplying-Apartheidist, Racist-Bigots; and their actions, which are all designed to respond to their grand white folks being replaced hypothesis obsessions.

In today’s political environment “normalization” is not calling things as they are, like saying Trump voters supported him for reasons of food prices. No, this was privilege-nostalgia, for those pre-civil rights, pre-LGBTQ rights, pre-women’s rights, the era when all of the previously stated groups were statutorily and often violently secured in their disenfranchised places. China was not a military, economic and political power, and those American factories in places like Viet-Nam were in the US territory, and it hits these people hard knowing those factories are never coming back.

Courage then, is not getting angry only when the Musk/Trump/GOP gangsters unfairly eliminate (your) jobs, opportunities and liberties for white Americans, it’s when you see all US citizens as worthy and valuable. The bottom line then, as Black Americans, we have observed time and time again throughout history, that many want to harm us, and that no one is coming to save us. So, how many times do we need to relearn this critical people survival and developmental lesson?

Which brings me back to our original question about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) skills development. The challenge is, must we forever soley wait on the kindness, which albeit well-intended, can often be inadequate or paternalistically poorly applied. Having been part of a highly-successful grass-roots STEM skills development organization (Science Skills Center, Inc.) that received large amounts of governmental and corporate funding, I am very much in favor of private and governmental entities contributing to the strengthening of America’s STEM skills capacity. But I wonder if those same agencies could support us today, since clearly stated in our mission statement is our desire to expand STEM opportunities for those children, who have been traditionally, sometimes through malice or through ignorance, excluded from even the opportunity to explore a STEM related career.

Mabey we need a plan A+B = STEM Progress strategy, where community based STEM organizations help government and cooperate entities help America, by receiving funding to lengthen (go younger) and expand (go wider) the STEM pipeline of young people of color who are very capable, and as I learned at SSC, inc. and as a public high school principal, are very eager to engage in STEM projects and activities. Perhaps our independently inclined faith-based institutions could help.

This anti-DEI objective of nullifying Black students STEM aspirations and disqualifying them from even reaching a STEM college major and career-decision moment; will surely hit and hurt this educationally worthy population hard; but this is the very kind of short-sightedness approach driven by traditional US attitudinal racial meanness; that will severely and equally damage the perpetrators, as it damages the innocent victims. There is enough research evidence to prove that a nation choosing to self-harm its potential (children’s education) capacity is always a recipe for under or damaging development.

Many years ago, a People Republic of China (PRC) principals and superintendents’ delegation once visited my high school. I found this interesting, since they purposely avoided the elite “specialized high schools” in the city. So, I asked, “why us?” The answer spoke both to their level of American schools profile research knowledge and their aspirational (now actual) national STEM skills development goals. I paraphrase here: “We know that students with a lot of parental and school resources, will do well in STEM, but we see that you have overperformed in STEM with students (Title-1 my term) who are not traditionally heavily populated in the STEM areas, we want to do the same thing with our rural schools students.”
Growing up in Brooklyn we had a childhood saying, “it takes one to know one,” but maybe in the matter of expanding a nation’s STEM capacity, it takes another outside-of-one to know what must be done by one to win.