Jasmine Crockett’s Error About Highly Educated Black Women Handed The Anti-DEI Mob Exactly What It Wanted

Do y’all remember back in 2007 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said, “We have more work to do when more young Black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America?”

That emotionally powerful statistic went viral and kept being repeated for years across social media and beyond even though it wasn’t true. In fact, Howard University professor Ivory Toldson pulled the receipts and found that more than 1.4 million Black men were enrolled in college compared to around 840,000 who were incarcerated.

You would think folks would have learned from that episode to fact-check and stop repeating catchy statistics just because they make us feel good or because they fit a certain narrative we want to believe.  

But here we are again.

Flash forward to the 2026 National Urban League Conference being held in Nashville, Tennessee. During a panel focused on voting and civic engagement, U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett argued that Black women have been disproportionately harmed by the Trump regime’s attacks on DEI in the workforce. She said: “When they decided to go after quote-unquote DEI, Black women, the most educated demographic in this country, somehow ended up the most unemployed out of everyone.”

I winced as soon as I heard her say that Black women are “the most educated demographic in this country.”  As a former reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I spent years tracking outcomes such as degree attainment by race and gender using the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and National Center for Education Statistics, so I knew immediately that the claim did not square with the data.

Not to mention, I had seen this claim plastered on popular memes and circulated across social media for years. But I didn’t expect this inaccurate statistic to be repeated by a high-profile politician who was making a compelling argument about race, education, labor, and discrimination in Trump’s America. And I knew Crockett’s shaky claim was gonna backfire and be used to discredit and smear her as dishonest while ignoring her broader argument about DEI and unequal employment outcomes.

Social media immediately lit up with some critics pointing to Census or Pew data showing that Asian women have the highest attainment rates for Bachelor’s degrees and postgraduate degree levels, followed by white women, Black women, and then Hispanic women.

Not surprisingly, right-wing accounts clipped the remark not to engage in an honest debate about labor-market inequality. They would never. Instead, they seized the opportunity as permission to mock Crockett’s intelligence and call her a “ghetto rat,” “Ghetto Shanaynay,” and other vile names. 

Johnathan Choe, a journalist at the Discovery Institute who has previously called Crockett a “race hustler,” wrote: “Once again, ghetto Crockett is wrong. Asian women have the highest educational attainment in America.” 

These racists took delight in Crockett’s statistical error because it validated what they already believed about Black women: That we are intellectually inferior regardless of educational attainment. That we did not achieve our degrees or professional positions through merit but we are products of affirmative action or DEI programs that “stole” opportunities from supposedly more qualified white candidates. Unfortunately, by overstating the data on how attacks on DEI have harmed highly-credentialed Black women, Crockett the anti-DIE grievance goblins ammunition for their racist propaganda machines. 

But Crockett’s argument, despite the false statistic, is still valid. Data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics show that Black women have actually made extraordinary educational gains. Back in the late 1970s, just 112 years removed from slavery when educating Black people had once been a crime, and just a dozen years after the fall of Jim Crow segregation, Black women earned a little more than 33,000 bachelor’s degrees. That number rose to more than 130,000 by 2022. The data also show that during that same period, the number of Black women earning master’s degrees climbed from a little more than 13,000 to almost 70,000, a fivefold increase.

It cannot be denied that Black women’s rise in degree attainment ranks among the most extraordinary educational advances in modern American history. And perhaps this rapid progress helps explain why the right has amped up its attacks on DEI, critical race theory, curricula, and access to student loans. These attacks threaten the very pathways Black women have used to enter institutions, earn credentials, and claim opportunities that were systematically denied to generations before them.

While we can and should celebrate that extraordinary progress, we also have to be honest about what pursuing higher education has disproportionately cost Black women. Many of us grew up in homes where we were told to be “twice as good,” to “stay in school,” “go to college,” “get a degree,” “go as high as you can go,” and a degree was something “nobody can ever take away from you.”  But our elders didn’t warn us about the business of higher ed and how the degree could become a new form of indebtedness that could turn us into modern-day sharecroppers who spend decades laboring under balances that keep growing even as we hold down jobs and care for families.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black women consistently have among the highest labor-force participation rates of any group of women in the country. In June 2026, the rate was 61.3% for Black women, compared with 56.5% for white women. Despite our credentials and work ethic, Black women also shoulder a disproportionately higher share of student-loan debt. This is due to our families holding less intergenerational wealth to help finance college. Then we enter a labor market shaped by discrimination, occupational segregation, and wage inequality, where those hard-won degrees frequently yield smaller economic returns than they do for white workers.

That is the cruel bargain that Rep. Crockett was trying to articulate, and the right-wing wants to deny. So, there’s no need for us to pretend that Black women are “the most educated demographic in America” because the truth is even more damning. 

Study Harder. Get more degrees. Borrow more. Work longer than your white colleagues. Prove yourself twice over. These are the messages generations of Black women have absorbed while earning less money and job security from jobs that extract from and profit off our labor, and still have the audacity to question our qualifications and belonging.

So this isn’t really a conversation about how “highly educated” we are. No, this is a story about how America lies to itself about race and achievement. As soon as Black women, who’ve long been regarded as the mammies and mules of this country, meet every demand and still cannot secure equal returns, the fraud of this so-called democratic meritocracy is exposed. America is a racist capitalist nation that survives by constantly moving the goalposts, manufacturing scarcity, and keeping marginalized groups permanently indebted and insecure, while giving white Americans the illusion that their comfort and privileges were hard-earned and not subsidized by Black people’s exploitation.

Facts matter, and yes, precision makes our arguments harder to distort and easier to defend. Folks can wag their fingers at Rep. Crockett for getting this one wrong. But let’s be honest: Black women are often treated as wrong even when we are surgically precise because too many of the people judging us are committed to operating in bad faith. Accuracy will not cure their racism, misogyny, or contempt for us, whether we hold degrees or not. 

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