What Next: Separate Bathrooms, Water Fountains?

Racial segregation in higher education is not just a topic confined to history classrooms, all thanks to liberals segregation is coming back.

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After last year’s protests across the country over racial inequality, more universities have warmed to the idea that students should be segregated by race in clubs, diversity initiatives, housing, and conversations about race.

Last June, minority students, faculty, and staff at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Multicultural Student Center held separate meetings for minority students and white students to discuss the shootings of African-American men in Missouri and Louisiana.

On one hand, this is nothing new. Columbia University has held its annual “Students of Color Leadership Retreat” for more than 15 years, according to a school spokesperson.

Student groups have long formed around identities like race, sexual orientation, and religion. Self-segregation of marginalized students in mostly upper middle class, higher education environments has allowed them to have dialogues they feel they cannot have with non-marginalized students.

Universities who rightly advocate and promote diversity are increasingly supporting them with new initiatives and programs to build stronger communities.

More new are the efforts to brainwash  white students about so called “white privilege”, and the criticism from both minority students and white students of racially segregated programs.

Concordia University, St. Paul’s annual orientation for minorities backfired recently when a student of color took offense to a letter that said all minority students were “expected” to attend. Another minority student called the orientation “discriminatory.”

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The university also noted that “the concept of white privilege is not new nor is it exclusive to UVM.”
Critics say these racially segregated programs can perpetuate bias, particularly when the dialogue that takes place within them doesn’t extend to the larger community.

A 2004 study that examined “ethnic enclaves” within college universities, surveying incoming freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles the week before classes began and those same students each spring for the next four years, found that “membership in ethnically oriented student organizations actually increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue of one’s ethnicity.”

The researchers found that this “victimization” and attendant hostility toward other ethnic groups applied to both minority students and white students in predominantly white fraternities and sororities.

“The longer they were in these clubs, the more they felt they were being discriminated against by other students at the university and by the administration,” said co-author Jim Sidanius, now professor of psychology and African American studies at Harvard. “This increased sense of victimization contributed to an increase of tension between and among these groups.”

Universities are in a bind, Sidanius said. They want to promote diversity, which is a good thing, but they haven’t found an effective way of doing so without negative side effects.

“So far, I haven’t seen universities come up with any solutions,” he said.

 

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