By Madeleine Kearns
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Before the Supreme Court ruled, in the 1954 Brown v.
Board of Education decision, that racial segregation in public schools was
unconstitutional, the lower District Court in Kansas conceded that such
policies were “detrimental” to minority children since they contributed to a
“sense of inferiority.” In subsequent years, legislative milestones such as the
1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act provided practical and
symbolic relief from such degradation.
Or that has long been the consensus view, anyway. For
decades, some have fought to reframe segregation as a progressive cause, and in
recent years, their “anti-racism” has found fertile ground on campus. Last
year, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published an investigation,
“Separate but Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in American Higher Education.” The
report’s authors studied 173 public and private schools, pulling from all 50
states. They found that 43 percent of the schools had residential segregation,
46 percent had segregated orientation programs, and 72 percent had segregated
graduation ceremonies.
Just last week, reports emerged that a small, student-led
taskforce had succeeded in having New York University approve its first
racially segregated resident floor, planned for the fall of 2021. NYU’s policy
was first reported by Washington Square News, a weekly student
newspaper, which explained how an undergraduate activist group, the “Black
Violets,” had created an online petition outlining its “demands.” The campaign
was started by two black undergraduates who claimed to have “noticed that their
experience was different from that of their Black peers,” because they had had
black roommates and their black peers had not. They came to believe that “in
the classroom and in resident life, black students bear the brunt of educating
their uninformed peers about racism.”
They concluded that “the university does not adequately provide for its
Black students,” a complaint they expanded on in their petition:
Black students should not be forced
to do the labor of explaining cultural touchstones (like hair rituals) and
advocating for their humanity within their own homes. There is not one space on
campus entirely dedicated to Black student life. Black Lives Matter cannot be
reduced to a slogan sent in university-wide emails. Now is the time for NYU to
create tangible change to support its Black students. We are hoping that Black
Living communities can spark a new effort towards comprehensive Black inclusion
across NYU.
This isn’t the first time the issue has been raised. In
2002, New York University debated whether or not to have opt-in racially
segregated housing, ultimately deciding against it. As one of the students who
opposed the proposal pointed out at the time “in the real world, [such
self-segregation] doesn’t exist.”
In truth, student activism is often little more than a
pretext. The administrators who enact such policies tend to be quite far to the
left, and further still in that direction is an even bigger problem: critical
race theory’s successful conquest of every major liberal institution from the New
York Times to the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, in this instance, John
Beckman, a spokesperson for the NYU denied that the university had given
approval, telling Reason:
“NYU does not have and will not create student housing that excludes any
housing based on race.”
Still, the NAS data is alarming. In the name of “progress,” a pernicious and reactionary racial ideology is being established; in the name of “safety,” campuses are becoming dangerous breeding grounds for resentment and division; and in the name of “diversity,” segregation is making a comeback.
No comments:
Post a Comment