RACIAL SEGREGATION IS BACK

Instapundit » Blog Archive » RACIAL SEGREGATION IS BACK, Brendan O’Neill writes in the Australian: What we’re witnessing, no…:
RACIAL SEGREGATION IS BACK, Brendan O’Neill writes in the Australian:

What we’re witnessing, not only in Australia but in other Western nations too, is the reawakening of the segregationist mindset. Segregationism has been given a makeover, turned from something that once made us wince — try looking at photos of an American “Coloured Drinking Fountain” without feeling horrified — to something that is treated as acceptable, even good: a “special measure” that can benefit certain groups.

The fashion for PC segregation is especially strong on Western campuses. In the US, students who think of themselves as decent, right-minded, left-of-centre people are openly demanding segregated spaces.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, student protesters are agitating for “safe spaces” for “Africana-identifying students”. At New York University, a student campaign is underway to create “an entire floor of the mixed-use building… to be dedicated to students of colour.” Students at UCLA want a floor of the student union building to be made African-American-only, on the basis that there needs to be a “safe space for black students”.

* * * * * * *

So now we’re expected to treat people as “racial/cultural beings”. We’re expected to “acknowledge” a person’s race. This grates against the great, progressive gains of the late twentieth century, especially of the American civil-rights movement, which encouraged us *not* to treat people as racial beings, and to *refuse* to acknowledge race.

Indeed, Martin Luther King’s great vision was a world in which his children, and everyone else’s, would “not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. That dream is being demolished. Now people are elevating colour over character, seeing others as racial beings rather than simply beings.

O’Neill’s column is headlined “Segregation staggers back to life,” but it’s not that new a trend.  
On American college campuses, segregation was revived by the left concurrent with political correctness as far back as the 1990s; as I’ve stated before, Michael Graham spotted these trends nearly 15 years ago in Redneck Nation. 
But as with PC itself, thought dead by the late 1990s – certainly immediately after 9/11 – Democrats’ return to embracing segregation in academia and rejecting the notion of a colorblind society has accelerated dramatically over the last decade."