Joshua C. Robertson is senior pastor of the Rock Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and founder and CEO of Black Pastors United for Education.
There’s wisdom in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” But I fear that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) has taken this sentiment as a license to right a relatively minor racial wrong, while ignoring a major crisis facing Black and Brown kids.
Don’t misunderstand me: I appreciate the small step Shapiro recently took. On Nov. 25, the likely 2028 presidential contender signed a law banning “hair-based discrimination.” It’s now illegal to treat Pennsylvanians differently because their hairstyles reflect their racial background. Black and Brown people in particular will presumably benefit.
I say this from experience. Before I became a pastor, I sold life insurance, and in 2009, I convinced a customer to buy a policy over the phone. The next day, I went to her house to get her signature. But she took one look at me, slammed the door and called my employer to accuse me of looking unprofessional.
I was wearing a navy suit with a dress shirt and tie, and, as a pastor’s son myself, I’d been taught from a young age how to dress nice and act nicer. That woman was reacting to one thing: my dreadlocks. It shook me so much, I went home that night and asked my wife to cut my hair. I haven’t had dreadlocks since.
Given my experience, I support the law that our state legislature passed and Shapiro signed. And yet, I find myself wondering why he made this a priority. As bad as hair-based discrimination is, it’s far from the worst racial injustice in Pennsylvania.
In a press release, the governor noted that the state received 916 complaints in 2022 about hair-based discrimination. But what about the tens of thousands of Black and Brown kids who go to schools that don’t teach them how to read, write or do basic math? The biggest race-based crisis in Pennsylvania — by far — is the fact that students of color are so far behind their White counterparts academically. Yet Shapiro and state lawmakers have let politics get in the way of righting this much bigger wrong, which is undermining the future of an entire generation.
I see the crisis of education every day. My church is full of Black families whose kids are being let down by underperforming public schools. So are the churches of the hundreds of other Black and Brown pastors I know across the state. The statistics are clear: Only 16 percent of Black fourth grade students in Pennsylvania were rated proficient in reading in 2024. That’s less than half the proficiency rate for students of all races. Worse, in 8th grade math, only 7 percent of Black studentsare proficient, compared to 31 percent of all students. Since 2003, Pennsylvania has made no meaningful improvement in closing the racial achievement gap.
We’re talking about young boys and girls with lives of promise that are being diminished by the day. When you’ve never learned to read well, good luck getting a job that can sustain a family. When you can barely add or subtract, good luck balancing a family budget or avoiding massive credit card debt— if you can even get a bank account. Black parents — and education experts — often talk about the public-school-to-prison pipeline. Isn’t education supposed to give you access to the ladder of opportunity, not a life of poverty or crime?
Every Black and Brown family I know wants our governor to fix education. That means we want him to give public schools the funding they need. But it also means giving parents the freedom they deserve. Families are desperate for education freedom, especially the Lifeline Scholarship program that Shapiro himself supported on the campaign trail in 2022. Polling shows that 94 percent of Black voters in Pennsylvania support this policy — also called PASS, or Pennsylvania Award for Student Success — which would provide $100 million to enroll low-income kids from low-performing schools in better private schools.
But since his election, Shapiro has chosen convenient politics over meaningful change, to the point of vetoing funding for Lifeline in 2023. I fear that’s the move of someone who cares less about the people of Pennsylvania than moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Education is the civil rights issue of our time. Our leaders have a moral obligation to help Black and Brown kids find lives of success and meaning, including helping them escape unsafe and underperforming schools. Instead, Shapiro has focused on the real yet much smaller problem of hair-based discrimination.
It’s hard not to feel as if the presidential hopeful is blackwashing — giving the appearance that he’s delivering for communities of color when he’s only doing the barest of minimums. As much as I care about the discrimination I faced, the Black and Brown families I serve and I care a lot more about education. I pray that our governor shows the true courage required to give our families the lifeline, the freedom and the future we desperately need.
The post Shapiro righted a minor racial wrong but is ignoring a crisis appeared first on Washington Post.
