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I grew up in the South, raised by generations of strong, Black women who always told me I'd go to college. I am the first college grad in my family, but to pay for my education, I'm now in so much debt that I can barely imagine the life my degree was supposed to get me. And the Supreme Court just shattered whatever dreams my family and I had about the life I could lead if I graduated college.
Just days after Juneteenth—a holiday celebrating Black liberation from literal bondage—six people I've never met decided that my economic freedom, and the economic freedom of millions of Americans, especially Black folks, is not worth it. Those people had the power to secure Black futures by allowing President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan to stand, and they failed.
In a country founded on the dehumanization of Black people, I've become completely unsurprised by every new report and statistic that details how Black Americans have been left behind—in education, in politics, and, in particular, in financial security and prosperity. Hopefully, by now, we all know about the extreme racial wealth gap in this country, where white households have, on average, four times as much wealth as Black households. Combine that long-standing reality with the fact that Black, young adults take on 85 percent more student loan debt than our white counterparts and, four years after graduation, nearly half of Black students owe an average of 6 percent more than they borrowed.
I organize Black and brown young people in Georgia on the issues they care about and I speak with borrowers every day about the impact of student loan debt on their lives. Borrowers like Kairos Richardson who had to drop out of his architectural program at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, because he couldn't afford it and didn't want to take on even more debt than he already owed. He's 23 and owes $8,000, which might not seem like a lot, but when you can't rely on anyone but yourself to pay for school and when you need to work 40-plus hours a week on top of your course load, trying to pay down eight grand in debt can mean choosing between rent and default.
Instead of continuing to experience housing insecurity and the financial stress of making ends meet, Kairos decided to leave school with the hopes of returning to finish his dream degree. Biden's plan would have wiped out nearly all of his debt and made that more possible. Now, he can't imagine adding to his debt and still being able to make it out here.
Kairos isn't alone. In December 2021, I graduated from Albany State University, an HBCU in Albany, Georgia. Now, at the age of 24, I owe the federal government $30,000 just because I wanted to go to college. And this is less than what, on average, other Black borrowers owe. According to the Education Data Initiative, Black borrowers have an average of $52,000 in student loan debt and Black college graduates owe, on average, $25,000 more than our white counterparts.
I'm a community organizer, not an economist, but even I can see how that debt is going to continue to hold us back financially, further contributing to the racial wealth gap and keeping us trapped in a personal and systemic predatory cycle of borrowing and owing that we may never get out of. This pattern is compounded by our country's history of racist economic practices, like redlining, hiring discrimination, and the racial pay gap. It's no surprise, then, that for a lot of Black Americans, paying for college on our own just isn't an option. Canceling federal student loan debt is one way to effectively break this cycle and allow Black Americans to do what's currently out of reach for too many of us—buy a home, have kids, save for retirement, take care of aging parents. In other words, live our lives. But I guess that wasn't enough for the Supreme Court.
While not perfect, the Biden student loan forgiveness plan would have canceled an estimated $500 billion in total debt. In Georgia—a state with the third highest level of student loan debt in the country—an estimated 1.5 million people were eligible for relief, with approximately $25.8 billion up for cancellation in our state alone.
What's more, Black voters in Georgia—a key voting bloc in our country's newest battleground state—support student loan debt forgiveness. According to a statewide survey conducted by New Georgia Project last year, 88 percent of Black voters in Georgia support some form of student loan debt forgiveness.
Certainly, student loan debt cancellation is not a silver bullet in a society with so many other racist structures still in place, but it would do a lot to help us build wealth and see that my education—and by extension I—was a worthy investment with a guaranteed return. We know our worth and we know what we are capable of. It's time our society, particularly those with more power than most, caught up.
Maggie Bell is the lead organizer for Cancel Loans for Education and Reparations (C.L.E.A.R) Campaign and Agenda for Young Georgians at New Georgia Project, a civic engagement and voting rights organization that builds power with the New Georgia Majority.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
