HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The New Color Line At The University Of Texas.
Civil rights leaders once dreamed of a day when Americans would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, but today a different message is being spread at the University of Texas and other college campuses. “Diversity” means singling out certain races for special treatment.
UT’s extensive diversity bureaucracy effectively creates a separate education experience for “students of color,” with programs like the African American Male Research Initiative, the Black Student Leadership Institute, the Black Male Education Research Collection, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the African & African Diaspora Studies Department. . . .
Higher education, integrated even in the Jim Crow south with the support of federal troops in 1963, is returning to racial separation. Some colleges have separate dorms—designated “safe spaces”—for black students. At the University of Texas–which the Supreme Court forced to desegregate in 1950, prior to Brown—colorblindness is being replaced with racial division. The mind-bending irony is that this return to the odious color line is being led by African-American students and academics in the name of diversity!
In the interest of promoting solidarity, UT offers black students a separate lounge area on campus in which to congregate, study, and socialize. The lounge, which serves as a hub for UT’s black community, is, appropriately, named after black separatist Malcolm X. UT’s Multicultural Engagement Center, a student resource office within the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, hosts a number of black-only events, including a separate graduation ceremony (dubbed Black Graduation), described as “an annual program that gives graduates the chance to commemorate and cherish all the accomplishments, memories, and challenges throughout their college years. Furthermore, it is an occasion for parents and families of graduates to meet with Black faculty and staff to gain a greater insight on the journey of their students.”
The MEC was founded in 1988 in response to the anti-apartheid movement at UT. To protest South Africa’s discriminatory racial policies, black students at UT incongruously insisted on their own center to “centralize academic, social and financial information for African American and Hispanic students.” Promoting diversity, it turns out, requires treating students differently on the basis of race and ethnicity: “The MEC continues to serve as a resource for students of color at The University of Texas at Austin as well as empowers them to be the agents of social change.”
Sigh.