The Return Of Separate But Equal Education?

Betsy Newmark links to a Wendy McElroy piece on cultural racism in Seattle public schools, and writes:

The Seattle Public Schools just bought themselves a heap of controversy by attempting to define racism. Their definition is laughably racist itself.

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.”

Only whites are racist. They don’t even recognize the possibility that preferring one race above another could involve seeking to elevate Blacks or Latinos over whites. Couldn’t they have just used the dictionary? If so, they would have found a defintion that wouldn’t have been so, er, race-based, such as this one.

The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.

They then get themselves into more trouble by trying to give examples of various types of racism.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has a racially divisive school of its own. Michelle Malkin looks at a government-run public school whose founder and principal, Marcos Aguilar, was recently quoted in a self-described “online journal that addresses educational conditions in Los Angeles schools” as saying:

We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil Rights Movement is all within the box of White culture and White supremacy. We should not still be fighting for what they have. We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction.

This isn’t all that new a development though–last year, we looked at separate but equal college graduation ceremonies, and way back in 2002, segregated college dorms. Pinch Sulzberger of the New York Times recently personally apologized at a college commencement ceremony for the state of America; somehow I doubt though, that these decisions by academia were what he had in mind.

Update: La Shawn Barber has some related thoughts on this topic.