For Abraham, a recent migrant, the main issue is the school system telling Black students and parents what they cannot do and school texts that make STEM education unnecessarily arcane.  While he understands why Black immigrant youth might fall behind because of their migration trajectories, he feels that Black students who are born and grow up here should be able to “compete equally.”  Thus, Abraham has set up a program that supports Black students to become interested in and pass STEM/STEAM courses.  For him, STEM/STEAM is a democratizing force—an area in which there is no discrimination because “science is science … there is no racial issue. … STEM/STEAM opens your entire world.”   But helping students succeed depends heavily on parent involvement, which Abraham sees as lacking in his community due to overwork.  Nevertheless, he understands parents’ lack of involvement as also structured by their own not having been able to access STEM careers.  Abraham is grateful for the funding provided for his program by universities whose research highlights Black underrepresentation in STEM, but he laments that it is insufficient.  He is paid only for contact time which does not account for his prep time and all the cultural enrichment programming he offers.   He finds the broader funding context to be self-referential, and this keeps his organization on the runaround.  Abraham worries that all the academic research on the issue is unlikely to be effective.  What will be effective is the kind of on-the-ground work he does.