I haven’t blogged a new installment of the “Real Racism” series for a while. But this example is so blatant that it has to be discussed.
From Jessica Schwalb’s article for freebeacon.com:
Several Minneapolis public high schools prohibit white and Asian students from enrolling in a set of courses on black culture, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The courses contribute toward Minneapolis Public Schools’ (MPS) electives requirement, and white and Asian students must therefore choose from a narrower list of options in order to graduate.
One of the proscribed courses, “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge,” is open only to black men. Another, “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge (Queens),” is open only to black women, a practice civil rights attorneys say almost certainly puts the schools in violation of civil rights law.
Another Minneapolis public school, Roosevelt High School, offers one of the two courses, according to a course catalog, which states the course is “for Black girls (Queens)” who “will explore different topics relevant to their lives as Black students.” The girls, designated as “Queens,” will “build a sisterhood” and, among other goals, “learn about creating healthy, positive relationships” over the year-long course.
Requiring all students to take ethnic studies courses is likely legal. Racially segregated classes, however, are likely illegal.
“It is extremely hard to imagine how this could possibly be legal under either Title VI or Title IX to literally have programming explicitly open only to one race,” Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a public interest law firm, told the Free Beacon, referencing federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and gender.
South, Edison, Roosevelt, and North high schools did not respond to requests for comment. MPS did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to what you just read, Ms. Schwalb’s article shows the school’s own descriptions of each course – which, as indicated above, specifically include/exclude students on the basis of race and gender.
Help me out here: other than the fact that Black and non-Black students are allowed to be in the same school at all, how does this differ from what would have been done in 1960’s Mississippi? Alabama?
What if a few White students decided they wanted to be allowed in these classes? What would happen? Would Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz do a “George Wallace” and stand in front of the classroom door preventing them from entering?
And now that I mention his name, where IS Tim Walz on this? Why isn’t he front and center denouncing the overt racism inherent in who is/isn’t allowed to take these courses? Or is he OK with it, based on the “logic” that, unlike No Blacks Allowed, No Whites Allowed is good racism, not bad racism? Ditto for Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
Real racism. It comes in all forms and from all sources. No group is immune to it or from it – as, most recently, proven in the Minneapolis school system.
What in the world has happened to the city of Minneapolis? The state of Minnesota?
