OPINION:
Fashion goes in cycles. Women’s hems go up, they go down. Sometimes they go away, and the pantsuit is in, as Hillary Clinton grimly illustrates. Attitudes undergo alterations, too, and the R-words that everyone claims to hate are everywhere: racism, and the double-R word, reverse racism. Martin Luther King would surely not be pleased.
California State University-Los Angeles is bringing back the S-word, too, offering segregated housing for black students. The Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community has been established within a 192-apartment student housing complex, to “focus on academic excellence and learning experiences that are inclusive and non-discriminatory.” The College Fix, a student news website, reports that the arrangement is an answer to the university’s Black Student Union, which complained about “racially insensitive remarks” and “microaggressions” at the 28,000-student campus in East Los Angeles.
Cal State-Los Angeles follows a trend of racially segregated housing for black students. Other schools include the University of California branches at Davis and Berkeley, and the University of Connecticut. While others are not specifically excluded at Cal State-Los Angeles, the name “black living-learning community” sends the message about who is welcome and who is not. Reverse racism, clearly.
The brain trust of race consciousness has redefined racism. It’s no longer simply that some members of one race oppress members of another. It’s bigger than that, it’s historical and institutional oppression. “In the very specific context of American history, white people have not been enslaved, colonized, or forced to segregate on the scale that black people have,” writes Zeba Blay, a columnist for The Huffington Post. “This is not to say [whites] do not experience things like poverty and police brutality at all. But again not on the same scale — not even close.”
By such reasoning, racism is recast as extreme oppression, and only white folks can be guilty of it.
But this convoluted attempt at reasoning hardly changes reality. When students are privileged or disadvantaged based on skin color as a matter of policy, it’s racist, and it’s wrong. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited “discrimination on the ground of race, color, or national origin.” Can signs now be posted over the water fountain proclaiming “Blacks only”?
Georgetown University in Washington announced this month that it would offer preferential admissions to the descendants of 272 slaves the Jesuit fathers sold in 1838 to pay down the college debts. This is more than a gesture, and not an empty one, but redemption for violating the human rights of actual persons, and the school has the records to prove it.
Georgetown’s humbling act of reparation, one of remorse and Christian charity, nevertheless raises a question: When will a debt to the past be fully redeemed? It’s the question that the nation thought had been answered by the War Between the States 150 years ago, fought over slavery among other issues. The furor over racism, reverse racism and reparations rekindles the divisions that Martin Luther King sought to heal. By failing to follow Dr. King’s path toward a colorblind society, it’s clear that Americans have yet to take his message to heart.
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