-With the advent of black-only dormitories
When students return to university next week, many will need to prepare for living and eating only with people of the same color! Whatever happened to the dream of a desegregated country?
Racial segregation is a really bad idea. So it is not surprising that advocates of identity politics are demanding that black-only dormitories should be established on American campuses.
The Washington Square News, the undergraduate students’ paper of New York University (NYU), recently reported that the university was willing to “help implement residential communities open solely to ‘Black identifying students with Black Residents Assistants.’” NYU aims to establish such a segregated residential floor by autumn 2021.
The institutionalization of segregation at NYU follows similar developments on other campuses. In many universities, racial segregation of dormitories is euphemistically called ‘affinity housing’. Supporters of affinity housing claim that these dorms create a “comfortable” and “safe” environment for minority students. They frequently assert that the presence of white students makes minority students uncomfortable. In its petition for segregated housing, an organization called Black Violets stated that “too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism.”
The triumph of the principle of segregation at NYU is only the most recent example of the adoption of this divisive outlook. A report published by the National Association of Scholars in April 2019, concluded that what it called ‘neo-segregation’ is a growing phenomenon on American campuses. They found that more than 80 higher education institutions have been complicit in hosting segregated dormitories.
The demand for a segregated campus life has been growing since 2015. And university administrators are increasingly more than happy to accommodate it. Of course, they rarely call segregation by its name. When they don’t use the term ‘affinity housing’ they adopt the phrase ‘themed housing’ or talk of ‘safe spaces’.
The imperative of segregation extends beyond dormitories. Sadly, university authorities tend to condone even the voluntary segregation of their eating facilities.
If an organization like PEN America, which was set up to defend “free expression” supports “voluntary” segregation, it is not surprising that there are few obstacles that stand in the way of the institutionalization of racial and cultural segregation in the United States.
As Martin Luther King pointed out in a speech in New York in 1956, during his long campaign to desegregate the education system and US society generally, “Segregation has always been evil, and only the misguided reactionary clothed in the thin garments of irrational emotionalism will seek to defend it. Segregation is both rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable.”