There is a reason why the hard left continues pushing the idea that those opposing the Democrats’ proposed voting rights laws are guilty of perpetuating “Jim Crow 2.0.” It lies in a popular maxim used in politics: “Always accuse your enemy of that which you are doing.”
While so-called Democrats are pretending anyone who disagrees with them is Bull Connor, so-called progressives are injecting a decidedly Jim Crowish ideology into America’s educational institutions, hoping that nobody will notice. In universities, the hard left is pushing the idea of segregating students by race, which sounds exactly like the type of thing that would make folks like Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond grin.
RedState’s Alex Parker has written on more than a few instances in which colleges are separating students by skin color. Most recently, he wrote about Arizona State University’s (ASU) annual Color Cabaret, which is a performance featuring only non-white students. The university announced:
Join current ASU students for the annual Color Cabaret! This entirely student-led cabaret is an opportunity for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre to create performances that speak to their own experience. Formed through personal connections, friends and colleagues from all over ASU, the creative team is a community of creators of color in all fields of music theater and opera.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville’s College of Social Work also promoted “antiracism” workshops that excluded the melanin-challenged. The college announced:
We’re excited to welcome you to the College of Social Work and invite you participate in our work towards inclusive excellence. To do that work, we also must address those internal barriers that inhibit us from completely engaging and move forward to reimagining our personal role in the effort to build a more inclusive/equitable workplace. … White Accountability Group (WAG) is an important mechanism for people who identify as White and/or have white skin privilege to do their own work.
Students attending New York University actually created a petition to have separate boarding for black students. The petition read:
The creators of this petition were fortunate enough to be paired together freshman year. Through our personal experience, we recognize the value of living with another Black student and having a safe space where we felt free to express ourselves to the highest degree. Too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism. This assumed responsibility is exhausting and undoubtedly unfair to NYU’s black community. Black students should not be forced to do the labor of explaining cultural touchstones (like hair rituals) and advocating for their humanity within their own homes. There is not one space on campus entirely dedicated to Black student life. Black Lives Matter cannot be reduced to a slogan sent in university-wide emails. Now is the time for NYU to create tangible change to support its Black students. We are hoping that Black Living communities can spark a new effort towards comprehensive Black inclusion across NYU.
These examples are but a small sampling of what is happening in universities across the country. But it’s not just happening in higher education; the left has been hard at work pushing these types of programs in K-12 schools.
Parents Defending Education (PDE), an advocacy group that has been on the frontlines of the battle against wokeist concepts being infused into the classroom, recently won a lawsuit against Wellesley Public Schools, a district located in Massachusetts. The plaintiffs successfully argued that the district’s implementation of “affinity groups” and “bias response teams” violated the First Amendment. These programs also excluded white students based on their skin color. PDE has also identified at least 13 other examples of schools practicing racial segregation.
The thinking of progressives supporting segregation in America’s learning institutions is so twisted they are working to unravel what the Civil Rights movement accomplished in the 1960s. While some will freely admit that they prefer racial segregation, most are not honest or rational enough to question what they are doing. In their minds, Jim Crow segregation is bad, but woke segregation is desirable.
In reality, the far-left is trying to drum up as much racial strife as possible. They seek to divide people by race by fomenting and inflaming racial tensions as much as possible. Unfortunately, their methods seem to be working, as we have seen the racial divide grow even deeper over the past five years. It will take a holistic effort to push back against the machinations of those who seek to push America further towards Marxism by using race to divide and conquer. The question is, are we up to the challenge?
