The Patriot Post® · Re-Segregating America, One University After Another

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” —Martin Luther King, Aug. 28, 1963

While Americans remain distracted by the election, college campuses across the nation are busy turning Martin Luther King’s vision on its head. Students are demanding to be segregated, and spineless administrators are accommodating them.

At California State University Los Angeles, the Black Student Union sent a letter to president William A. Covino asserting that black students “have been, and still are, consistently made the targets of racist attacks by fellow students, faculty, and administration.” Fourteen “DEMANDs” were listed, including “the creation and financial support of a CSLA housing space delegated for Black students.”

Spokesman Robert Lopez offered up Orwellian rationale for Cal State’s surrender, insisting the arrangement “focuses on academic excellence and learning experiences that are inclusive and non-discriminatory.”

At the University of Connecticut, there is a “living-learning” community reserved for black male students. That’s okay with administrators because it doesn’t take over the whole dormitory — it’s one of 20 learning groups “topically” categorized — and because, as UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz put it, at “many predominantly white institutions nationwide, elements of African-American culture are harder to find, which can make some students experience a sense of detachment from their universities.”

UC Davis boasts a similar living-learning center, and UC Berkeley established a “Person of Color Theme House” described as “the best way to meet the needs of students of color and low income students’ needs.”

Students at NYU have demanded two separate spaces, one dedicated to “Students of Color” and the other for Queer Students as part of an initiative called the “NYU 2031 Plan.”

One website lists 79 colleges that have established a “Link to Demands” where students have ostensibly “risen up to demand an end to systemic and structural racism on campus.” It includes three national demands compiled by the Black Liberation Collective: black student and faculty representation on campus must be equal to or higher than black representation in the general population; free tuition must be provided for black and indigenous students; and divestment from prisons and investment in communities must be undertaken.

Northwestern University plans to quadruple the number of black student safe spaces on campus, based on a 149-page task force report titled “Black Student Experience.” It asserts black students feel “dissatisfied, exhausted and alienated on campus,” and recommends a “cultural audit” of the entire campus to ensure it is “representative of the diversity that exists within the University.”

In a Washington Post op-ed, Northwestern president Morton Schapiro revealed the intellectual bankruptcy that attends these segregationist impulses. Commenting on an incident where a group of black students in the cafeteria decided they didn’t want two white students joining them, he insisted the black students “had every right to enjoy their lunches in peace.” He elaborated, “There are plenty of times and places to engage in uncomfortable learning, but that wasn’t one of them. The white students, while well-meaning, didn’t have the right to unilaterally decide when uncomfortable learning would take place.”

One need only imagine a group of white students denying black students seats at a cafeteria lunch table to grasp the hypocrisy.

Unfortunately, at DePaul, the nation’s largest Catholic university, no imagination at all is necessary to see how deep the hypocritical rot goes. A group of pro-life students was told it could not display posters reading “Unborn Lives Matter” because doing so could upset the campus’s Black Lives Matter movement. “By our nature, we are committed to developing arguments and exploring important issues that can be steeped in controversy and, oftentimes, emotion,” explained University president Father Dennis Holtschneider in a letter to the College Republicans who had sponsored the effort. “Yet there will be times when some forms of speech challenge our grounding in Catholic and Vincentian values. When that happens, you will see us refuse to allow members of our community be subjected to bigotry that occurs under the cover of free speech.”

Apparently the BLM movement, whose entire existence is based on fomenting anti-police bigotry, remains a paragon of Catholic and Vincentian values, even as one of the central tenets of the Catholic faith is too provocative for First Amendment protection. Not to mention that abortion claims a hugely disproportionate number of black lives.

Harassment of white students is part of the mix as well. As part of a protest at Berkeley reiterating demands for spaces of color and transgender safe spaces, white students were prevented from crossing a campus bridge, while students of color were granted safe passage.

Until public scrutiny forced them to abandon their plans to provide two course sections exclusively for black students, Moraine Valley Community College’s assistant director of communications Jessica Crotty revealed the motivation behind such efforts, noting that students “feel comfortable and are more likely to open up because they’re with other students who are like them.”

Chicago Tribune reporter Ted Slowik adds a dollop of the victimist worldview to the mix, insisting that “our system of public education isn’t perfectly balanced,” meaning some students “simply aren’t as well prepared for college as others.” Thus “peer support” (read: segregation) is an acceptable tool for achieving academic success.

Maybe some students of color aren’t well prepared for college because in virtually every major city in America, public education has been controlled by Democrats for decades. Democrats completely aligned with unaccountable education unions promising “reform” for 50 years and failing to deliver. Unions so strong, the NAACP voted for a moratorium on charter schools, despite the reality they currently provide 700,000 black families with an escape route from the most disastrous public schools overwhelmingly located in minority neighborhoods.

Or maybe students are indoctrinated into the grievance culture long before they reach college. Like those “taught” by the thousands of Seattle teachers who wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts to an event organized to dramatize the inequality of public schools — run by those same teachers. Or like students at Middletown South and Toms River North who decided to honor police officers, EMTs, firemen and military at a football game — only to be sent a memo by the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union condemning the ceremony as a “frightening message” designed to “intimidate and ostracize people who express their views about systemic racism and social just [sic].”

“Americans need to understand that this otherwise fringe ideology and extremism is now thoroughly embedded throughout the education system, from pre-K through university,” asserts Alex Newman, co-author of “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” Newman further points out this system has “harmed black Americans even more than others, although all Americans have suffered from it” even as he warns the cure is not more of the same “racialist, collectivist, leftist poison.”

It is racialist, collectivist, leftist poison that has engendered one of the great ironies of modern times: people of color demanding segregation, making an utter mockery of King’s work and his vision. It doesn’t get much more twisted than that.