The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Resegregating American Education

Academia is getting more “woke,” which is supposed to be a way to counter racial bias and prejudice. In reality, it’s creating new racial bias and prejudice, as noted by Kenin Spivak, a lifetime member of the National Association of Scholars.

It took 86 years from the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. With support from the Biden administration and the complicity of the Department of Justice, it has taken less than 70 years for radical leftists to reimpose separate educational facilities under the guise of promoting equity.

More than a year after its Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch this month received records from District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) that show D.C. officials are providing segregated “affinity spaces” for its teachers and other staff on the basis of race and sexual identity. A September 2021 DCPS presentation explains, “Affinity spaces are gathering opportunities for people who share a common identity. This space will be organized based on the racial identities represented in Central Office as we aim to lean into the Courageous Conversation condition of isolating race.”

The racial categories are the typical ones, and more questions identify “LGBTQIA+” preferences.

A June 2021 email setting the agenda for a meeting at Marie Reed Elementary School explains that the “goal of these affinity groups is to create a safe space among colleagues to process the impacts of racism and white supremacy within our school community and identify collective actions to take as individuals and as groups.”

Evidently, that means separating people of color from people of pallor, though they still aim to “Create Cross-Racial Learning Opportunities.”

Schools in cities as diverse as New York City and Madison, Wisconsin, are asking their students to resegregate. Learning For Justice (LFJ), endorsed by the DCPS, seeks to “uphold the mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center” by developing racially segregated affinity groups and working with K–12 schools nationwide “to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people.” In a section of its website entitled “Preparing for Pushback,” LFJ asserts that segregated groups aren’t really “separatist and racist” and that there is no need for whites to participate, other than if they wish to focus on support for students of color.

Ever since George Floyd’s death, the Left has accelerated the effort of resegregation, and Spivak lists many institutions guilty of it. Though leftists don’t call it this, it rings of something familiar: separate but equal.

All of this occurs against a backdrop of a president fixated on race and the most racist administration since Woodrow Wilson was president more than 100 years ago. From its whole-of-government executive order to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of federal policies, billions of dollars in grants, loan forgiveness, and other programs for which whites, and sometimes Asians, are ineligible, conditioning selection of a vice president, a Supreme Court justice, and numerous cabinet members on race, to the Department of Education’s (ED) directive that schools allocate Covid grants using principles enunciated by the Abolitionist Teaching Network, which advocates “antiracist therapy for White educators” and “disrupt[ing] whiteness,” the administration has sought to resegregate decision-making, contracting, and employment. Last year, the Biden administration’s ED also reversed the Trump administration ED’s ban on racially segregated affinity groups.

Separate-but-equal in public education is still unconstitutional.

But never mind our national history of wars and constitutional amendments to address racial strife and oppression. None of that matters to the woke, who thrive on fomenting modern grievance.

Spivak concludes:

People do not learn about each other, or how to live together, by living separately. The resegregation of the American education system is a horrible, unconstitutional, and unlawful step backwards to a future of division, discord, disunity, and hate.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.