Posted on 09/05/2016 8:25:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
After writing a piece in a local newspaper in California discussing three in-state universities who are facilitating and promoting segregation in student housing, it was fascinating to watch my e-mail and my Facebook page. Uniformly, virtually no one was aware that universities were promoting segregated housing. Uniformly, no one indicated they thought allowing minority students to determine not to be part of the general population of their universities with respect to housing was anything except a very bad idea. Uniformly, and sadly, I was lauded for writing about the issue.
What e-mails also revealed is that voluntary segregation of minorities in student housing is not remotely limited to the Universities of California at Irvine, Berkeley and Santa Barbara. This is apparently becoming the expected way to house students in campus housing throughout the country. Some schools are bold about their segregated housing such as Berkeley and Santa Barbara. Some are trying to accomplish their goals very quietly. At UCSB, where no ethnic groups is over 40 percent, the second largest ethnic group is Hispanic/Latino at 27 percent and yet there is a Chican@/Latino housing opportunity. Is it fair to say this is un-American?
These university websites are not shy about their segregated housing opportunities. Websites include pictures of residents of a single race living on a single floor of a dormitory. Berkeley's housing website includes a picture of Black students with the quote: "I enjoy being around peers who look like me." UCSB's housing website boldly offers separate housing opportunities for Asian & Pacific Islanders and Black-African American Scholars, as well as Chican@/Latin@Scholars and a few other racial categories. UCSB's housing website features a housing opportunity in their Santa Rosa residence hall with a head note of "Black/African American Scholars" with the quote: "We are family; I got all my brothers and sisters with me."
The issue is not limited to California. At the University of Connecticut, their website leads us to "ScHOLA²RS House is a Learning Community designed to support the scholastic efforts of male students who identify as African American/Black through academic and social/emotional support, access to research opportunities, and professional development." Look to the University of Connecticut and to your alma mater.
In the movie Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino gives a brilliant soliloquy in attempting to defend a young friend from being expelled from a boarding school. He compares bad decisions he has made in his life to the good decisions made by his young friend: "I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too damn hard."
Many universities' inability to make proper legal and/or moral decisions with respect to segregated housing is not about ignorance of the right path. The right path, the legal/moral path of not permitting a segregation of the races is apparently "too damn hard" for university administrators. When campus Black Student Union leaders and other leaders of specific racial groups demand segregated housing, our universities are ignoring the law and/or their moral responsibilities and building and/or facilitating such segregated housing.
There are legal questions in California: Given the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and California's Proposition 209, how is it possible that universities could be promoting, facilitating and rationalizing the creation and operation of segregated student housing?
California's Proposition 209 first defines the "state" to include the "public university system" and then provides that the "state" may not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race in the operation of public education. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that it is the policy of the United States that discrimination on the basis of race shall not occur in connection with programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance and authorizes the appropriate Federal departments and agencies to take action to carry out this policy. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it unlawful to discriminate against any person in the privilege of rental of a dwelling. It goes on to make unlawful so much as the printing of any notice or advertising that indicates any preference based on race in housing.
How did universities that were on the forefront of eliminating segregation become the facilitators of segregated housing? Such thinking puts society itself is in peril. Under what moral authority does a university say yes to segregated housing? At best, it is axiomatic that segregated housing achieves nothing good for society.
The impact of self-segregation is two-fold. For the self-selected segregating students, they will miss significant opportunities to build strong multi-racial bonds during their college experience. For the remaining students, these students will be more segregated by the withdrawal of self-segregating students from general housing. For every minority student self-segregating, that is one less minority student living in the main population of UCI students. Self-segregation abetted by university housing policies and actions, in effect, results in greater segregation of all housing. It is simple math.
Segregation was a terrible wrong when it was demanded by a white dominated majority. Segregation in housing was a disgrace. If we change the race or ethnicity of those demanding segregation and facilitate it on college campuses today, it is no less a terrible wrong and a terrible disgrace. Society should not and cannot accept our finest institutions taking any role except trying to implement programs that make segregation in their housing stocks impossible. It is axiomatic that universities that are properly promoting diversity and inclusion in the classroom should not be promoting segregation in campus housing. However well meaning, there should be no accepting institutionally promoted and facilitated segregation.
>It’s simple: if “minority” groups want forced integration, they get it. If they want segregation, they get it.
>As far as white people are concerned, it doesn’t matter what they want. If they even bring the subject up rather than capitulate to the demands of other groups, THEY are the ones accused of racism.
Yep.
Diversity is division.
(bumper sticker)
People have the natural right to freedom of association. Whether or not being racist makes someone an a-hole is a different question than whether free individuals have an inherent right to be a-holes if that is their choice.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 needs to be revisited, because it grossly overstepped the boundaries of government power by prohibiting individual action.
Laws against racism and discrimination should be exclusively about limiting government power to discriminate and/and or force segregation with regard to the government policies, law enforcement, government institutions and facilities. The injustices of the Jim Crow era were legally enforced by the government, and the Jim Crow era laws needed to be eliminated.
But free individuals have a right to choose with whom they will or will not associate. If society wants to impose sanctions on racist a-holes, that's fine, as long as it's done socially (i.e. boycotts and shunning) and not legally.
Much of the government over reach we have seen in the past 50 years is due to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 being commandeered by the left to limit the rights of the people relating to pretty much all private activity, instead of being limited to curtailing the powers of the government.
If black people want to live exclusively with black people at private colleges, that is their right if the college chooses to adopt that policy. But that same right also must be recognized for all other races and ethnic groups as well.
Like Kaepernick?
“Segregation was a terrible wrong when it was demanded by a white dominated majority”
Funny how this stuff is only bad when white Americans do it. Of course it was intended as a political hammer right from the start back in the ‘60s. You can bet that this behavior won’t be “a terrible wrong” when whites are a minority and can be discriminated against with impunity. Come to think of it that’s already the case in places like California.
“Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada”
Yet in the corporations there are already SJW diversity zampolits in place.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 needs to be revisited, because it grossly overstepped the boundaries of government power by prohibiting individual action. “
which is why Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan opposed the bill. Of course that was at a time when conservatives worried about giving government officials power that amounts to thought policing over individual Americans. Now we have conservative buffoons championing those laws and bragging about how Republicans were responsible for them
In my errant youth I read through the critically condemned "Turner Diaries" and thought them alarmist and overly emotionally inciting.
I remind everyone that all it takes is to single-out, isolate, condemn and punish those who are perceived as guilty to become the next step to kneeling one beside a ditch and blowing their brains out after they've had their fun with you.
When I was in college the school wouldn’t assign roommates of differing races unless both people specifically asked for each other. I know this because I had a student job in the residential halls.
My wife an I are graduates of the Class of 1974 at the University of Oklahoma. During the early 1970’s blacks self-segregated to their own dorms. The largest was ironically named “Sanger House”!
Yes. Freedom of association is under-rated.
Just removing your ability to make personal choices is bad enough. These bills have created race focused government agencies. They prosecute schools, businesses, home sellers, whomever they want to, all based on if gov’t race counters don’t approve of how people live their lives, whom they hire, whom they promote.
It doesn’t matter how these choices are made, only the aggregate numbers by race count. Everyone caves and walks the PC line to avoid getting prosecuted by these thought police.
And of course it’s not just race anymore, this is where the gov’t prosecuting bakers for not making gay wedding cakes comes from. Welcome to the land of the free, which suffered a serious wound back in 1964
I knew someone there who didn't seem to have a chip on his shoulder or any reason to just hang with his "brothers and sister" and asked him why he was in the dorm.
The answer: there were many more single person rooms in that dorm than any other on campus.
Single person dorm rooms were a rare and precious commodity. If you wanted to be alone to study or alone with your significant other that's what you wanted more than anything else.
So it's not always about race evidently.
That’s a great post.
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.When government attempts to be society, freedom can easily collapse. When society and government are coextensive, freedom does not exist. Then, “everything which is not mandatory is forbidden.”Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil . . . - Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
This is not news to me. Baxk in the early 90s I had a summer with 3 blacl roommates, 2 from historically black colleges in the south, and they were raving about how they wanted separate but equal.
Yeah, I knew several black students in my classes who were open about the fact that they thought it didn't matter if they weren't at the top of the class, all they had to do was pass and they'd be offered a great job because they were black and had Affirmative Action. Well, none of them got great jobs. The ones that did get job offers lost the jobs within a year and ended up somewhere else. The black students I knew who did well and graduated at the top, they are set up for life in great careers. I know white students who graduated at the top, same course of study, and they are still struggling.
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