Comment by SpicyLemonZest
5 years ago
Reinstituting segregation isn't some kind of secret hidden plan; many people within the Black Lives Matter movement are openly in favor of it and have achieved meaningful successes towards the goal. A dozen or so universities offer segregated dorms (albeit on an opt-in basis) today. And the California legislature just recently passed a bill to re-legalize racial discrimination.
> many people within the Black Lives Matter movement are openly in favor of it
You mean like in general, or in very specific spaces? Because while there are black separatist groups that exist, they're fringe-of-fringe.
> And the California legislature just recently passed a bill to re-legalize racial discrimination.
I think we'll agree to disagree that legalizing affirmative action policies is a setback in racial equality.
Groups that identify as "black separatist" are fringe-of-fringe, certainly. But there's little controversy about the segregated dorms I mentioned where only black people are allowed to live.
> But there's little controversy about the segregated dorms I mentioned where only black people are allowed to live.
Sure, but these have been around for quite a while (the first example I see is from 1969).
I think this speaks to an interesting impedance mismatch in terms of race-blindness vs. race awareness. There's two kinds of arguments in this vein. One, the dogwhistly kind of race-blindness that's characterized by "I don't see race" and "America hasn't been a racist nation since 1965" kinds of things. You're not making this kind of argument, and I want to be clear that you aren't, but I want to touch on it for anyone else reading, because I think there's some interesting history there about the broader "race-blindness" statement.
Interestingly, right in the shadow of the civil rights movement, race-aware policies were the norm. School bussing and forced re-integration to make sure things weren't separate were commonplace and even mandated. But we've been slowly moving in the opposite direction, with the specific issue of school desegragation seeing a reversal in 2007, where race-aware re-integration policies that tried to account for de-facto segregation were declared unconstitutional. In other words, policies crafted during the civil rights era were declared to violate the "equal protection" clause, and as a result, school districts have grown significantly more segregated since 2007. The upshot: race-aware policies aren't "new" and in fact sentiment and legality for them has drifted against, not for, them over time.
So if we start from the axioms that black American culture is unique, and that it is valuable, then we might want to protect and foster it in a college environment. If you have a minority spread across a majority group, they'll be forced to integrate in various ways. Certainly things like black student unions and culture clubs exist (and they exist for other cultures as well, as do insular dorms in some cases), but who you live around has a huge impact on the culture. We know this is true in cases beyond ethnic culture: universities have insular dorms for all kinds of things, pre-med programs, honors programs, sports programs etc. Not to mention unofficial insular communities such as marching band, where I know many students choose to live near each other at many schools. Not to mention, like, fraternities and sororities.
So if we recognize the value of a culture, and we recognize the value of an insular community in protecting that culture, the next step is to foster an insular community to protect and encourage this culture. That way it doesn't get lost, and people can learn from and about it.
So the question becomes: is separate but equal being inherently unequal, as Brown v. BoE said, the end of the story, or does equality through assimilation cause it's own kind of inequality? And if so, how do you balance those inequalities?