California University Officials Forget Race History And That They're Government, Governed By Law And Their Constitution

Erecting ghettos on the college campus is going backwards, not forward with education. That's because racial silos--even when, in retreat from integration, demanded by blacks themselves--often results in peer pressure on individuals, black and white, which may lead to intragroup hostility
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By Michael Meyers

Upon hearing of the California State University-Los Angeles campus' opening a residence for black students only--billed as a "safe space" for blacks-- I emailed the president of CSU-L.A., William Covino, and his supervisor, Timothy White, Chancellor of the California State University, with some 17 questions about what the heck the public university was purporting to do by way of enforcing racial segregation 62 years after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously outlawed segregation in public schools and colleges (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).

Chancellor White's reply was immediate; he promised me that the president at the college, Dr. Covino, would provide an "expansive" response; and he wanted to know if I had read the LA Times story on how their residence for blacks was not unique. I took that to mean that the University was readying a bizarre proliferation--why are you picking on us?--defense. I had indeed read all of the news reports about its "Halisi Black Living-Learning Community" residence. And given the fad now in full bloom at many elite private and public coleges--including at Berkeley, UC Davis, and the University of Connecticut, that have their own "special housing" for black and other racial minorities (including for Native Americans and Hispanics at some). Yeah, yeah, I already knew that colleges were following the pack and heeding the demands of some minority students for housing that serve the purpose of shielding them from "living" with the very people they say despise them because of their skin color.

But does any college, private or public, remedy ethnic polarization or hurt feelings between students of different cultures and skin colors by instituting racial silos on campus in the guise of helping minority students fend off contact with people who don't look like them or come from communities that don't resemble their home neighborhoods? Shouldn't the college's admissions office had warned the incoming frosh of all colors that college life is not the same as living in suburban or urban ghettos, that they will be expected to interact and live with roommates who they've never met?

Instead of pushing a truly liberal higher education, too many colleges and universities, I have learned, and researched, have beat a hasty retreat from the in loco parentis role of pushing students to think critically and outside the box as to what it means to be a thoroughly informed and educated individual. The educated person, it was once accepted, would need to be exposed to and deal with people from different cultures, if not lands. The purpose of higher education, all my mentors told me, is for the college to help extirpate racial prejudice, to remove narrow constrictions of the mind, and to tear down the racial walls that divide us in our respective worlds of racial paranoia and skin color preferences.

Nowadays, college officials talk up and make much of students' skin color differences. Their attititude now is that blacks are indeed different from whites and from Asians-- and that blacks, especially black men--are 'at risk" on majority white campuses and in society at large because of negative attitudes and prejudice towards them as black men. So, even without any social science evidence to support their notions that blacks stand a better chance at advancing through college if they're given a remedial safe house in which to learn from and communicate with each other about the state of being black in America a black house is touted as a panacea and quick route to racial peace. That's the rationale of CSU-L.A.'s "Halisi Black Living-Learning" residence. Gleaning from what the black students (who demanded separate housing for blacks) said about Halisi, its raison detre is for blacks on an ethnically and racially diverse campus to extol the black experience, to "congregate, connect and learn from each other"--in other words, with their own kind, in isolation.

University officials foolishly and clumsily at first embraced the separatist agenda and defended its accommodation with the racially-identifiable residence by citing support for the separate housing from black parents and incoming black students who supposedly told the college that the black residence is why they chose CSU-L.A. over other colleges. The residence, boasts the house's supporters and college officialdom, is full and has a "waiting list." Segregation, we're told, is popular. And when blacks themselves demand or ask for it, it is not "segregation." Only if whites, I suppose, were to demand a dorm for whites, would the college officials balk. A for the black housing, for which they are proud, the college won't say how many of its residents, if any, are non-blacks, or how it is even possible for a residence for blacks can be established on a campus with a polyglot multiracial student body, without the full and close involvement of college housing officials with steering and locating blacks in sections or floors with other blacks The legal eagles there, now that the residence is open and racially identifiable--organized as a refuge for black students--insist that the residence is "open to all." Really? Who in charge there encouraged whites to apply to housing intended and designed for black students to live together as blacks, and to share with each other "the black experience"?

We are to believe, as the college officials smirk at us with double talk, that its housing chieftains had no part in reserving spaces or placing students of a certain skin color persuasion to the Halisi Black Living-Learning Community? I don't buy that. Racial steering by government officials--and Cal State University is controlled by government officials--is "state action". So, Cal State University is not in the clear, notwithstanding that no white students have complained. Governmental involvement and decision making in separating and ensuring and the segregation of students by race/skin color is expressly prohibited by California law, a ban dating back to the adoption of Proposition 209, an amendment to its state Constitution through which voters decreed the end to the consideration of race as either a preference or as the basis for steering or excluding any person from a benefit or program or facility owned and operated by state government. If liberals believe their own rhetoric, segregation in either intent or effect is powerful evidence of racial discrimination.

I might add that segregation in any guise is also absurd, and anti-intellectual.

Yet, no top California university official spoke up against racial silos on campus. And the Chancellor of the system has so far failed to speak out in defense of the rule of law or against race-based campus housing. He merely had to say that beyond the reasonable request of students for their choice of roommate(s) there will be no state accommodation or participation in race-matching of students in campus/university-controlled and owned housing. It is not reasonable for a college to designate floors or wings of a residential building for blacks or for whites. . That's the law and it's also heretofore been California's public and educational policy.

Chancelor White, president Covino, and Governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown, a Cal State University trustee, know that a residence established, funded and staffed for blacks is inherently discriminatory against people who dare not apply much less interfere with the expressed demands of minority students for "their own" space away from "those"(white) people. As for the "educational" support for a black residence, the college officials must know that no neutral observer of this racial idiocy is fooled by the duplicitous claim that a segregated dorm is "focused on academic excellence". That is a recycling of the old and discredited "separate but equal" doctrine in public education which the courts have repeatedly and persistently debunked and blocked. Separate is inherently unequal, the nation's highest court decided in Brown v. Board of Education.

Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist whose research guided the outlawing of segregation in public schools, including colleges, declared that "separate but equal" can never be. Minority students, especially blacks who were for decades placed behind the eight ball of segregationist policies and thinking, always get shortchanged in the segregated facilities set up for them by the very officials they say oppress blacks because of their skin color. Dr. Clark, my mentor, many years ago, had reminded us that segregation, moreover, harms not only blacks but majority students, too, by stigmatizing and stereotyping individuals by their skin color and racial group status. in such circumstances there is no possibility for equal interaction. Clark who served on New York State's Board of Regents for 20 years had his colleagues adopt a policy that is instructive to Cal State University officials who should be embarrassed and ashamed to recycle segregationist practices. Black dorms, the Regents in a 1972 policy statement #15, opined , lead only to "blocked communications, with a resultant social climate that is close and tense, if not hostile." And Clark added, rejecting "transitional" arguments for black dorm and their look-a-likes, "there is no such thing as 'temporary racism."

Erecting ghettos on the college campus is going backwards, not forward with education. That's because racial silos--even when, in retreat from integration, demanded by blacks themselves--often results in peer pressure on individuals, black and white, which may lead to intragroup hostility. To me, it's shocking and deplorable that California's Gov. Brown and its higher education officials have not read or become acquainted with the New York Regents' 1972 policy objection to race dorms. If they and the trustees of California State University, who meet September 20-21, want to read our Regents' policy, I will send it to them faster than they can formulate a convincing response to my 17 questions about how they expect to get away with an apoplectic functional repeal of California's Proposition 209.

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