Where Everybody Looks Like Me: At the Crossroads of America's Black Colleges and Culture

Journalist Stodghill (interdisciplinary studies, Johnson C. Smith Univ.; Redbone) paints a vivid portrait of the vitality and importance of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) despite examples of myopic, misguided leadership and societal shifts away from the notion of segregated education. Interview material provides the most riveting narratives surrounding failures both large, and largely public, as well as small and private, that have chipped away at the success and impeccable reputation these historically significant institutions once enjoyed. The interview subjects further bob and weave throughout the book, lending a novelistic sense of character fleshed out by the compelling experiences conveyed. Overall, scholarship here does little to refine facts and figures; citations could be useful for Stodghill's numbers regarding aspects of African American education rates. Or, if it is all gleaned from government data, a bit more illumination on specifics would have been appreciated. Nonetheless, this work, which is evocative of Lawrence Otis Graham's insight in Our Kind of People, compellingly portrays a necessary bastion that must collectively right ways to maintain its very existence.