Posted on 08/14/2016 8:51:50 AM PDT by EinNYC
A collective of colleges in Los Angeles suburb has been in an uproar for the past week over Facebook posts from students with one request for housing: No white roommates.
A Facebook post from Karé Ureña, a junior at Pitzer College at the Claremont Colleges, asked for fellow students to join an off-campus house for the upcoming school year.
“POC only,” she wrote, using the abbreviation for “people of color.”
Ureña, who is black, added, “I don’t want to live with any white folks.”
The post, first reported by the Claremont Independent student magazine, sparked outrage from the campus and denouncements from school administration.
Other Pitzer students pushed back on the request, setting off a fierce debate on a private Facebook page.
“POC only?’ Maybe I’m missing something or misunderstanding your post, but how is that not a racist thing to say?” Pitzer student Dalia Zada wrote, according to the Independent.
Another student wrote “housing segregation is illegal.”
Pitzer student Terriyonna Smith later wrote back: “White people always mad when they don’t feel included but at the end of the day y’all are damaging asf (as f---) and if a POC feels they need to protect themselves from that toxic environment THEY CAN! Quick to try to jump on a POC but you won’t call your friends out when they’re being racist asf...I’m not responding to NO comments and NOPE I don’t wanna have a dialogue.”
Pitzer President Melvin Oliver —who last year became the college’s first African-American president — said the roomie request was “inconsistent with our Mission and values.”
“This is but another example to us that social media is not an effective platform to engage in complex dialog on seemingly intractable critical issues that have varied histories and contested understandings,” he wrote in a message sent to the campus community.
“They create more heat than light and invite extreme viewpoints that intentionally obfuscate the nuanced context that surrounds these issues.”
Ureña and her roommate, Pomona College student Sajo Jefferson, defended their request in a statement to The Washington Post, which said minority students feel ostracized on campus.
“When and if you understand this context, it becomes clear that students of color seeking a living space that is all-POC is not only reasonable, but can be necessary,” the statement said.
“We live in a world where the living circumstances of POC are grounded in racist social structures that we can not opt out of. These conditions threaten the minds, bodies and souls of people of color both within and without the realms of higher education. We are fighting to exist.”
Ureña said her friends have since found their roommate, and she has deleted the post.
Pitzer is part of Claremont Colleges, a group of small liberal arts schools in Claremont, Califorinia, that also comprises Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College and Pomona College, as well as Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences.
According to school data, 48% of Pitzer’s 1,067 undergraduates are white; only 5% are African American.
Classes at Pitzer are scheduled to start Aug. 30.
Are you kidding? She will thrive in such a setting, with plenty of willing help from HR.
Her name sounds color aligned, just not with the RGB region she wants to be in.
People of color: eloquent descriptor.
Colored people: racist terminology
Asking black people to follow the same laws that govern the rest of us is now considered racist and evil?
In our country’s recent history we’ve celebrated diversity in our population as if it were a good thing. However, one look at world history will show you that no country with a diverse population of different races, languages, and religion has long survived.
Countries don’t naturally form with a diverse population, and when in the past they’ve occurred it’s usually been as a result of armed conquest. These unnaturally formed countries have either melded together into a single population made up of one mixed race with one language and one religion or they’ve come apart, and they’ve usually come apart with extreme violence. The longer these diverse populations were forced to coexist with one another without mixing and becoming one, the more the hatred grew among them and the more violently they broke apart, but break apart they did, or genocide has settled the issue once and for all.
Why is this and why can’t we all just get along? The truth of the matter is that we (the human race) just aren’t as civilized as we would like to think we are. Our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, isn’t that long “out of the trees” and the veneer of civilization is very thin, to non-existent, upon us all. We’re all carrying the genes that got us here and some of those genes carry a very basic survival instinct that has allowed us to survive thus far.
This most basic of all survival instincts is self preservation and it’s the one that warns us to be very wary of those who are different than us, our family, and our tribe. Those who possessed this survival instinct survived and reproduced, and those who had no fear/distrust of strangers didn’t survive. Over the years, this survival instinct has been referred to as tribalism, nationalism, nativism, ethnocentrism, racism, and various other isms, but it’s an inborn instinct carried in our genes whether we like it or not.
A “celebration” of diversity and multiculturalism in the American population was introduced in the 1960s and 70s as a deliberate, divisive revolutionary tool wielded by Marxists like Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and other radicals. It became dogma taught by Marxists in our universities, then spread by our leftist controlled news media and leftist controlled Hollywood. The intent was, and is, to split American culture along race and class lines and set off a “proletarian” revolution to destroy capitalism. The Left has now managed to elect a half-Black radical as President and their revolution is proceeding along very predictable lines, with him using every opportunity to stir up more division and discontent. A reading of the Constitution of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA at this link should make clear their goals and methods: http://revcom.us/Constitution/constitution.html
I want to see the regions layed out/defined in some 3D color space.
They just want what the elites have - their own unique Justice System.
Why can't people live with people the choose to live with?
If Blacks want to live with Blacks...what does it matter?
We've been brainwashed (as a nation) into believing that if any group that isn't racially mixed is "racist." We've integrated all suburbia to a point that no neighborhood is safe to walk in at night.
I would like to live in a house with whomever I chose...but in today's America I might be arrested and imprisoned for being a "racist."
What has happened to America?
“They are missing a whole lot of nuance in this skin color bidness.”
I don’t know if it is still the case, but in Atlanta, in order to be accepted into black high society one could not be darker than a brown paper bag.
I’ve noticed at fast food restaurants that whites will clean up their table before leaving and blacks do not. Leaving messes for others seems to be part of their nature.
Gee I remember a time when she wouldn’t have had to worry about living with whites. LOL!
well said
First of all, housing discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and probably sexual orientation by this time, is illegal in California. So the ad broke the law for starters.
Second, the ad was placed in a public forum, so like anything so widely announced is subject to commentary and debate.
Third, we are in an era of Black Lives Matter where individuals and groups maintain that whites institutionally discriminate against “people of color.” If this same aggrieved group wishes to engage in its own racism, then it's rational and understandable that public commentary will follow.
So yes, it's everybody’s business.
I am 70 yrs. old. I consider the term “NEGRO” just as valid
as the term “CAUCASIAN”. The fact that a few Klansmen
bastardized the term “NEGRO” is no reason to accommodate
the Klan with changing a perfectly valid and honorable
name. (Even some “blacks” also bastardize the name “NEGRO”,
and that is very unbecoming!)
POC. Pieces of Crap?
They get the right to discriminate while normal people are forced to accept people they don’t want to live with.
or People On Crack
“...PONC (people of no color)...
Or POP (people of pallor.)
Not true.
It took a couple supreme court cases to firm it up, but the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibits all racial discrimination in the sale or rental of publicly or privately held property, without exception, whether facilitated by a real estate agent or not.
The 1968 civil rights act added the Fair Housing Act which provided further discriminatory practices, including within advertising.
If I had seen this ad as a white person, I would’ve requested the room and filed a HUD complaint after not getting it.
$16,000 on first offense through an administrative HUD complaint.
It is not my business to tell her she cannot do what she is doing. But is all of our business to point out the hypocrisy of her position.
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