“Ritzy Hamilton College in upstate New York is bringing back the disgraceful legal doctrine of separate but equal for its minority students,” Eric Owens of the Daily Caller writes:
The leftist hothouse has announced an event entitled “Real Talk: A Dialogue about Internalized Racism” that is “open to people of color only.”
The brochure explaining the event states:
“Conversations about race in the U.S. mostly focus on race relations between white communities and people of color. However, people of color are also prone top [sic] internalize racist messages about their own community, and about other races/ethnicities/people of color. This conversation allows people of color to come together and examine how we may have accepted racist attitudes toward other racial groups and our own racial/ethnic communities, and move towards healing and mutual respect. In order to create a safe space, this program is open to people of color only. A similar conversation for white students, faculty and staff is planned for the spring semester.”
The brochure also notes that dinner will be provided. “Please contact Amit Taneja for more information ([email protected]).”
The discussion is scheduled to take place on Thursday, Sept. 26 at 4:15 p.m. at the school’s Bristol Center (named for the co-
founder of global biopharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb). There will also be a joint session involving both “people of color” and white people at some future time, notes Legal Insurrection, the website that broke the story.
That last link leads to a post from Cornell’s Prof. William A. Jacobson, who writes that Hamilton was his alma mater; but the college has dramatically transformed itself into “a hotbed of multi-cultural activism to the extent that Western Civilization has been driven off campus.”
Do not miss the photo of the brochure on “Real Talk: A Dialogue About Internalized Racism” that accompanies Prof. Jacobson’s post — it’s 21st century academia’s equivalent of the famous but dreadful third season Star Trek episode where Frank Gorshin appeared as an alien whose skin was half black and half white, divided down the center of his face.
As Jacobson writes, recently retired Hamilton Professor Ted Eismeier describes the course as “separate but equal” discussions. But then, we’ve been occasionally charting leftwing* academia’s increasing descent into Separate But Equal education since the first year of our blog, 11 years ago.
In 2009, I wrote that elite colleges, with faculties that skew far to the left have been promoting the functional equivalent of “Separate But Equal” graduations and dorms for years — we first wrote about the latter topic (linking to a piece by Joanne Jacobs, former San Jose Mecury columnist turned author and pioneering edu-blogger) during the first year of our blog, back in 2002. Boston talk radio host Michael Graham wrote Redneck Nation, which looked at similar trends in 2001. As he said:
In 1948, Strom Thurmond was a politician obsessed with race. The modern American liberal is obsessed with race. Strom Thurmond thought schools and courts should treat citizens differently based on their skin color. Liberal supporters of, among other things, race-based admissions policies and hate-crime laws agree. Strom promoted the “multicultural” view that institutions like Jim Crow and segregation might appear irrational or unjust to outside agitators, but they were a perfect fit with southern culture.
* * * * * * *
Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I know live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because “race matters.” I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say “black people learn differently from white people.”
And of course, as recently as 2008, a certain prominent spiritual leader was telling his audience in a nationally-televised speech precisely that last point:
He was trafficking in stereotypes, though to a p.c. theme to which few could object. But soon, Wright’s speech turned more serious. More subtly separatist. More Afro-centric.
He claimed these differences were genetic (imagine Charles Murray trying to pull this off!). European-Americans have a “left-brain cognitive, object-oriented learning style. Logical and analytical,” explained Wright, whereas blacks “learn not from an object, but from a subject. They are right-brain, subject-oriented in their learning style. That means creative and intuitive. The two worlds have different ways of learning.”
The logical conclusion of Wright’s words was that whites and blacks should be schooled separately, but he did not expand on the point. What was important is that whites and blacks inhabit different spheres — two worlds, in fact. And now we were at the nut of Wright’s message.
The following year the New York Times published its “Holiday Gift Guide For People Of Color.”
So the news out of New York State’s Hamilton College isn’t any any way happening “unexpectedly,” as another New York-based publication would say.
Devil’s Night, Zev Chafets’ 1990 book on Detroit, documents a century worth of primitivist thinking, as the city’s institutionally racist police force was eventually replaced, after the 1967 riots, by an institutionally reverse racist city government, following the election of Coleman Young, the city’s militant black separatist mayor who governed for nearly 20 years from 1974 until the end of 1993.
Similarly, I’m not at all sure if a similar trend in academia, to replace the racism of the past with even more racism, is reversible anytime soon. But as the photo atop the post at Legal Insurrection illustrates, there’s no hiding this level of intellectual and moral decline.
Elsewhere in the news of academia gone bad, there’s “No Handing Out Constitutions on Constitution Day” at California’s Modesto Junior College, Greg Lukianoff of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) writes at Ricochet.
And Reason notes that the Ohio State campus police is playing its part in continuing the theme of an increasingly militarized police force nationwide: “Ohio State University Gets Armored Military Vehicle, Repeatedly Dodges Questions About It.”
I’m sure it will come in handy when Ohio State hosts its own equivalent of Constitution Day.
* Sorry, no way I can call this “liberal” in any sense of the word, other than “liberal fascism,” of course.
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