A NOTE TO READERS: This piece was originally published on NewsOne, August 5, 2026.
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.
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THIS CONTENT IS WRITTEN IN THE AUTHOR’S PERSONAL CAPACITY. ANY OPINIONS EXPRESSED ARE THE AUTHOR’S OWN AND SHOULD NOT BE ATTRIBUTED TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY OR MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY.
