The Biden administration and progressives are encouraging schools to separate students along racial lines — an unforgivable step backwards.
The Biden administration and progressives are encouraging schools to separate students along racial lines — an unforgivable step backwards.
I t took 86 years from the ratification of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. With support from the Biden administration and the complicity of the Department of Justice, it has taken less than 70 years for radical leftists to reimpose separate educational facilities under the guise of promoting equity.
More than a year after its Freedom of Information Act request, Judicial Watch this month received records from District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) that show D.C. officials are providing segregated “affinity spaces” for its teachers and other staff on the basis of race and sexual identity. A September 2021 DCPS presentation explains, “Affinity spaces are gathering opportunities for people who share a common identity. This space will be organized based on the racial identities represented in Central Office as we aim to lean into the Courageous Conversation condition of isolating race.”
A form included in the presentation asks respondents to submit their pronouns and to select the racial affinity group(s) they intend to join. The choices are: Asian American/Pacific Islander, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous/Native American, Multi-Racial, and White. The form also asks if respondents are interested in new LGBTQIA+ affinity spaces. Those spaces are divided into BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Color) LGBTQIA+ and White LGBTQIA+.
A June 2021 email setting the agenda for a meeting at Marie Reed Elementary School explains that the “goal of these affinity groups is to create a safe space among colleagues to process the impacts of racism and white supremacy within our school community and identify collective actions to take as individuals and as groups.”
Another email lists DCPS’s objectives, including the “norm of isolating race — in dialogue and collaboration” and providing a “lens for equity.” On a more positive note, the objectives also include “Create Cross-Racial Learning Opportunities.”
Schools in cities as diverse as New York City and Madison, Wisconsin, are asking their students to resegregate. Learning For Justice (LFJ), endorsed by the DCPS, seeks to “uphold the mission of the Southern Poverty Law Center” by developing racially segregated affinity groups and working with K–12 schools nationwide “to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements and advance the human rights of all people.” In a section of its website entitled “Preparing for Pushback,” LFJ asserts that segregated groups aren’t really “separatist and racist” and that there is no need for whites to participate, other than if they wish to focus on support for students of color.
The resegregation of American education that began before George Floyd’s death has accelerated. In last year’s A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow described the resegregation of higher education, as black students choose to live, learn, and socialize in dormitories that bar white residents. Stanford launched its black-only Ujamaa House in 1970, followed by Cornell in 1972. Stanford also boasts Casa Zapata, for Hispanics. Chocolate City @ MIT (yes, that is its name) grew out of New House, founded in 1975. The University of Connecticut established ScHOLA2Rs House for blacks in 2016. Oregon State University opened a “living-leaning” community for Native American students in 2020. More recently, Western Washington University and the University of Colorado have established black-students-only housing.
Since last year, Columbia’s undergraduate colleges have supplemented the university’s graduation event with Multicultural Graduation Celebrations that separate its students into LGBTQIA+, Asian, first-generation/low-income, black, “Latinx,” and Native American ceremonies. Columbia’s woke apartheid upends its mission of providing a path forward for disadvantaged and minority students. Instead, Columbia reaffirms that they are different, less than, and other than wealthy, white, straight graduates. (DCPS, Columbia, and other progressives insist on using the term “Latinx,” which has been firmly rejected by more than 95 percent of Hispanics.)
All of this occurs against a backdrop of a president fixated on race and the most racist administration since Woodrow Wilson was president more than 100 years ago. From its whole-of-government executive order to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of federal policies, billions of dollars in grants, loan forgiveness, and other programs for which whites, and sometimes Asians, are ineligible, conditioning selection of a vice president, a Supreme Court justice, and numerous cabinet members on race, to the Department of Education’s (ED) directive that schools allocate Covid grants using principles enunciated by the Abolitionist Teaching Network, which advocates “antiracist therapy for White educators” and “disrupt[ing] whiteness,” the administration has sought to resegregate decision-making, contracting, and employment. Last year, the Biden administration’s ED also reversed the Trump administration ED’s ban on racially segregated affinity groups.
Separate-but-equal in public education is still unconstitutional. No member of the Supreme Court has advocated overturning Brown. As recently confirmed, the commitment of progressives to preserving (liberal) Supreme Court precedent is unshakeable. Further, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs. In his message calling for the enactment of Title VI, President John F. Kennedy said: “Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial discrimination.”
We are living in an Alice Through the Looking Glass upside-down world. Racism, including its most extreme form, segregation, is ethically and morally repugnant. It is contrary to the founding principles of America. The Northwest Ordinance, the first organic law passed under the Articles of Confederation, and then re-enacted by the First Congress, marked the first time the U.S. expanded beyond the 13 colonies. It was adopted at the same time the Constitution was being debated in the Constitutional Convention, and it prohibited both slavery and involuntary servitude in the territory. As Edward Erler, a leading scholar on America’s formation, has observed, the Northwest Ordinance was an effort to set a future course for the Constitution on the issue of slavery.
Our bicameral Congress, and the often-criticized three-fifths compromise, reduced the influence of states that permitted slavery. Hundreds of thousands died to end slavery, and since then, through private action, legislation, and court decisions, the rights of people of all races and ethnicities to live together with dignity and equality has been a central focus of America’s progress as a nation. By 2018, more than 10 percent of all married couples were interracial or interethnic.
People do not learn about each other, or how to live together, by living separately. The resegregation of the American education system is a horrible, unconstitutional, and unlawful step backwards to a future of division, discord, disunity, and hate.