Infamous segregationist Democrat governor George Wallace proclaimed more than a half century ago, “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” His prediction may be coming to pass, too — and it’s today’s Democrats making it happen.
Just as racial equality has given way to “equity,” a euphemism for racial discrimination, integration is now increasingly giving way to segregation. The latest case in point is a “Racial Justice Task Force” commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania that has prescribed a “permanent shared space for black student-athletes.”
As Campus Reform reports, the university’s
athletics department approved a series of diversity-related recommendations from its “Racial Justice Task Force,” including a “permanent shared space for Black student-athletes” which is also open to “allies and non-athletes.”
Director of Penn Athletics and Recreation M. Grace Calhoun and the Division of Recreation and Intercollegiate Athletics unanimously affirmed the task force’s recommendations.
Penn Athletics states that “these recommendations have been created as a beginning, not a conclusion” in the process of making the athletics department into a “more diverse, inclusive, anti-racist organization.”
… Among the task force’s short-term goals is the hiring of an “Athletic Diversity & Inclusion” designee, who will be “solely dedicated to job responsibilities focusing on diversity and inclusion.” In the long-term, the university is recommended to “secure funding for and hire a Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer.”
… According to the recommendation, student-athletes will view a one-hour video entitled “Broadening Your Perspectives.” Then, students will be divided into 30-person groups to discuss the video and view additional content.
In the long-term, staff members will undergo training during in-services, as well as implicit bias training for hiring managers “on an ongoing basis.”
As far as explicit biases go, one in favor of segregation is becoming more common. For example, according to “new whistleblower documents, at least three public agencies in the Seattle region have implemented race-segregated diversity trainings that teach employees, in the words of one training manual, to ‘accept responsibility for their own racism’ and ‘question the white power structure,’” wrote City Journal last year in “The New Segregation.”
Then there’s George Mason University, which held a separate orientation for black students in 2018. “The event was called the ‘Black Freshman Orientation,’” reported the College Fix. “Hosted by the Black Student Alliance, the additional orientation occurred on August 25 at the university. It has become an annual event there.”
Such events are actually fairly common on today’s college campuses, too. As the College Fix reported in 2016, “While segregation of the past has a negative connotation, today its general definition — to set apart from the rest, isolate or divide — describes what’s going on at universities in which special events are designed for students of color, and often specifically for black students.”
Moreover, some universities are even offering special dorms wings for black students. Of course, in colleges there are no white orientations or white wings (only left wings), not any more than there’s White Entertainment Television, a Miss White America pageant, or a Congressional White Caucus. There’s plenty of dogmatic lecturing about “white privilege,” though.
Considering that leftists fought segregation in the 1960s, it’s reflexive to accuse them of hypocrisy when witnessing how “they” now support it. But it’s not that simple.
While some wizened but not wise liberals who once preached civil rights in the ’60s may still be around and woke, today’s leftists are different people. And what explains how they can all be called “leftists” despite taking opposing positions is that leftism (or liberalism) isn’t an ideology — it’s a process.
Just as conservatism is the process of ever trying to preserve the status quo — to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” as William F. Buckley put it — liberalism is the process of ever trying to change the status quo.
It’s that typical relativism-born problem of moderns that G.K. Chesterton lamented, writing, “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision[;] instead we are always changing the vision.”
Yet the change liberalism inspires and that conservatives, inured to it over time, accept, can in particular be defined as movement toward disorder.
Just as a house or car or anything else deteriorates if left to sit, without the application of energy called maintenance, so does a civilization. Effort must be made to identify Truth, convert it into action and imbue institutions with it, and to cultivate the virtues in ourselves and instill them in children.
If we simply slouch morally, we will slouch toward Gomorrah, as late Justice Robert Bork might have said. For to not be governed by something higher will increasingly mean being governed by something lower — instinct — which guarantees descent into our animal nature. And call it entropy, leftism, or something else, it all amounts to the same thing: the end of the world as we know it.
