There is an interesting controversy at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park (outside of Chicago) where the school allowed students to hold a black-student only meeting. OPRF held a “Black Lives Matter” assembly on Feb. 27 but barred parents of white students who tried to participate. Principal Nathaniel Rouse (right), the assembly’s organizer, insisted he thought black students would speak more freely among members of their own race as what is known as affinity grouping. It might also be called racial segregation at a public school. What if white students wanted to engage in “affinity grouping” by excluding minority students?
The OPRF school board met to discuss the controversy and heard from dozens of parents, students and teachers who virtually all supported Rouse.
While I understand Rouse’s view that black students needed to discuss recent events among themselves, I disagree with the decision on both legal and pedagogical grounds. I believe it is far more important to have the whole community involved in speaking to such issues. Indeed, many of these parents appeared to want to come to express their solidarity and sympathy.
The controversy is reminiscent of the backlash against the Smith College president for being too inclusive in saying “all lives matter.”
Superintendent Steven Isoye (left) also defended Rouse in saying that “It was clear to me that Mr. Rouse was trying to build a space that was safe space for our black students.”
OPRF English teacher Paul Noble was more forceful:
“Not everything is about us. Not everything needs to have our stamp of approval, much less our participation. Can we just check our white privilege for a minute? I don’t know why a white affinity group is necessary to make a black affinity group palatable.”
I fail to see why the question is one of “white privilege” rather than equal treatment. To call a demand for equal treatment as “privilege” is rather Orwellian. The privilege goes to the group allowed unique or exempt status in a given practice. If the school is saying that students are allowed to base affinity groups on race, I do not see why such groups would be only permitted for African American students. There is a reason why the law imposed color-blind tests that seek to establish neutrality and equality in the treatment of different racial, religious, and other groups.
While I reject the notion of “White privilege” as the reason for objections, there does remain the good-faith view of Rouse that this meeting was to allow a minority group to discuss contemporary issues among themselves. Although I disagree with the decision, I can see why Rouse believed that the highly emotional recent events warranted a special evening for just black students and parents to express shared feelings and viewpoints.
What do you think?
Source: Chicago Tribune
This is very unfortunate. All discrimination is bad. You don’t fight a wrong with another wrong.
Very good post Ken.
Empathy and understanding will never happen when people are segregated.
Ken – well spoken but it doesn’t solve the problem.
Well done, Ken Rogers.
Director, FBI –
“In fact, we all, white and black, carry various biases around with us. I am reminded of the song from the Broadway hit, Avenue Q: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” Part of it goes like this:
Look around and you will find
No one’s really color blind.
Maybe it’s a fact
We all should face
Everyone makes judgments
Based on race.
You should be grateful I did not try to sing that.”
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Duh! Hello Reverend Farrakhan.
“”Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan went on a fiery tirade about Ferguson on Saturday — threatening that if the demands of protesters aren’t met, “we’ll tear this goddamn country apart!”
Farrakhan stated in his speech — given at Morgan State University, a black college located in Baltimore, Md. — that violence was justified in response to the decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson and peaceful protests are only in the interest of “white folks.”
“We going to die anyway. Let’s die for something,” the radical figure told the crowd to roaring applause.
He even said the parents of teenagers should teach their kids how to throw Molotov cocktails. “Teach your baby how to throw the bottle if they can. Fight,” the minister advised, and then imitated throwing the explosive device.
Farrakhan argued that violence was justified by the “law of retaliation” he claims is in both the Bible and the Koran.””
_______________________________________________________________
“Rev. Louis Farrakhan argued in a blog post Tuesday that the deadly Ebola virus is a race-targeting bioweapon created by white people.
“Methods of Depopulation: Disease infection through bio-weapons such as Ebola & AIDS, which are race targeting weapons,” the Nation of Islam leader tweeted to his 308,000 followers.”
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What’s the percentage in your neighborhood? Truthfully.
Abe Lincoln –
“If all earthly power were given me,” said Lincoln in a speech delivered in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854, “I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution [of slavery]. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land.” …he asked whether freed blacks should be made “politically and socially our equals?” “My own feelings will not admit of this,” he said, “and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not … We can not, then, make them equals.”
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Affirmative Action, anyone? Affirmative Action and multiple other laws and programs are deliberately racist.
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Obama appoints an African AG. African AG resigns and Obama nominates another African AG. It is statistically impossible that the best qualified candidate comes from a pool of 12% of the population. The compelling criterion is race.
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Obama has refined his racist anti-colonialist campaign which he learned from his African-citizen father (contrasted with his Indonesian father).
Obama was “down for the struggle” in Selma as a racial hybrid who “spent the last two years of high school in a (counter-cultural) drug haze” as a Hawaiian and Indonesian (registered for H.S. as an “Indonesian citizen”).
Obama hasn’t called Netanyahu to congratulate him on his victory.
Obama has called Iran to allow Iran to pursue nuclear WMD.
Obama has conducted positive relations with Venezuela and Iran.
Obama has facilitated Venezuelan regional influence up to the American border.
Obama has approved Iran’s pursuit of Venezuelan uranium.
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Every race is racist.
The assignation of racism solely to Americans and Caucasians is erroneous, deceitful, deceptive and fraudulent.
The false claims of racism by Americans only must be rejected as the strategy of deceit it is.
Ken Rogers got it right.
While I understand and sympathize with the concept of an Affinity Grouping for minorities, it’s a bad idea. Mostly because there will people who will see this as a double standard. To take a principled stand on equality, minorities will have to take the heat when they promote exclusionary groupings. I think they should rethink such groupings in light of their own history of being victims of racism, which was exclusionary in the extreme.
@Issac
“I have absolutely no idea what it means to be Black. I have no idea what it means to be oppressed. Nothing like that has ever stood in my way. How do you make the jump from White to Black in the understanding department?”
You “make the jump” by using your moral imagination or ability to empathize with others. You do it the same way you listen, with empathy, to an old friend who has a problem you’ve never personally experienced. In the process of listening and perhaps asking questions for clarification of the problem, you come to share your friend’s mental/emotional state vis a vis the problem, and help him think of solutions.
I’m sure you don’t really think that all the “White” people who marched with Martin Luther King did so because they were unable to “make the jump” into the oppressed consciousness of their fellow “Black” marchers.
The notion is commonly expressed, at least in our culture, that “we can’t get into another person’s head,” but the fact is that we do so all the time, albeit with varying degrees of success. If we didn’t, we’d each be living in an exclusive little world of our own, in varying degrees of solipsism, with no input from others, and wouldn’t be able to relate with *anyone* in a different body, let alone someone of a different gender, ethnicity, age, educational background, etc., etc.
By attending to what others express with words, and by their facial expressions and other body language, we can come to understand “where they’re coming from” and have the capacity for saying, as I’ve heard many “Blacks” do, for instance, “I feel you.”
Different people have different capacities for empathy, of course, and people with authoritarian personalities have a markedly reduced conscious capacity for it. That’s why they have so many “enemies” and are much more interested in harming them in some way than in understanding them and trying to make themselves, in turn, understood. We *all* can enhance our ability to empathize with others, however, even authoritarians, albeit the latter with more difficulty.
Whether you choose to call it “reverse racism,” ethnocentrism, or a manifestation of “unthinking tribalism,” the decision to have an exclusively “Black” meeting served more to inhibit mutual understanding between “Whites” and “Blacks,” than it ever could to foster it.
The “Whites” who wanted to attend the meeting and gain a deeper understanding of the concerns of the “Blacks” exhibited much more empathy than the unthinking administrators who excluded them.
There aren’t any human capacities more important than that for empathy, and it behooves us to consciously attend to its importance.
John Donne, one of Shelly’s “unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” i.e., poets, memorably expressed this in the following way:
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated… As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Bailers’ separate-but-equal argument flies in the face of history. Tragically.
Left is the new right.
“Darren Smith
The school district should now budget for losing a summary judgment in federal court.”
Who’s going to sue, and what damages are they going to claim need to paid for the victims to be made whole?
And I’ll point out that the Government SHOULD be able to discriminate in their message and use of funds. For example, black men have significantly higher heart disease rates than white men do. Should the CDC be allowed to target black men with programs for their health specifically because of this known fact? Or is that discriminatory?
If we’re going to “punish” the principle, make him hold a session with just white students. Bring the festivus pole and allow them to air grievances. There, everyone is whole.
From African-Americans to homosexuals, any “minority” group can only succeed politically with help from groups outside that minority.
They can win in the courts alone but not at the voting booth without help from others. They should want as many allies as possible to help them.
Nick Spinelli – “John McWhorter did a wonderful evisceration in the Daily Beast recently of the new meme being shoved down our throats, white privilege. A black man who sees the destructiveness of this new FEEEL good concept.”
White privilege is a must for the dems. It helps to destroy the pride felt for people who work hard. Yes I’m white, but the only privilege I had was that my parents expected us to act a certain way that allowed me and my siblings to succeed. I wear my white privilege proudly and will not be ashamed that my ancestors did the right things to make me who I am. Everyone and I mean everyone has times in their life where they had an advantage. It’s what we do with that advantage is what defines us.
Darren, BINGO! This is the Education Industry in full stupid FEEEL good mode.
“What do you think?”
~+~
A government agency held an open public meeting and excluded a class of individuals on the sole basis of their race. This government agency excluded these individuals who wished to exercise their right to peacefully assemble, prohibited their right to exercise free speech and possibly petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The school district should now budget for losing a summary judgment in federal court.
John McWhorter did a wonderful evisceration in the Daily Beast recently of the new meme being shoved down our throats, white privilege. A black man who sees the destructiveness of this new FEEEL good concept.
“’ll wager that everyone above me in the comments is a white male.”
It seems that comments much like this one have recently become more common and more accepted.
In my view there are some real issues here and they deserve to be discussed.
I would argue that neither race nor gender can tell us if a position has merit. In case any of you have forgotten, denigrating the words of someone because of their color is the way Klansman and bigots used to argue. Apparently their poisonous, stereotypical thought process lives on.
If you are going to convince me we should throw what some many sacrificed so much to achieve in the 1960’s and 1970’s, you will have to do more than point the finger at a particular group.
Isaac, This is a country of laws, not men. That’s why the law is so important. We share some derision for the practitioners of law, but our backgrounds are different. I doubt there has ever been a country where its constitution has been so strong and respected. That’s a good thing.
Two points. First, supporters are quick to point out the principal’s “good intentions. Well, “road to hell” and all that.
Second, I think it’s relevant that the Black principal is the authority figure in this. Would a white (or Asian or Latino) principal who barred those aside from his/her own race be evaluated similarly? Would a male principal who wanted to talk just to male students about declining achievement among high school boys be viewed as having “good intentions” when he bars women and girls from the meeting?
There are lots of ways to divide people once you start.
wonderer –
I think the principal could get away with this. I also think the principal could get away with talking to just the girls about feminine hygiene.
issac
Like you, I have Scottish ancestors along with some Irish ones. Because my ancestors were possibly oppressed, does that mean I have residual effects of that oppression? If so, I’ve never noticed them or felt the need to have a meeting to denigrate the British Empire. Perhaps I should start an affinity group? Perhaps I’ve been a victim all my life and never knew it?
Fact is, there is no one alive in America today who was a slave or a slave owner. There is not one student in any High School in America today who experienced racial segregation. As you accurately point out, there are some older adults still alive who experienced these things, but anyone under the age of about 45 has not.
Yes, racism and prejudice still exist and unfortunately are probably a part of the human condition, but it goes both ways across all ethnicity lines. I also think it happens to be a minority of the population who carry hate in their hearts.
You are correct in saying you and I have no experience being oppressed. My question would be, “Who in America under the age of 45 does?”
usn420 – this is not true “Fact is, there is no one alive in America today who was a slave or a slave owner. ” There are people living in slavery in the United States and there are slave owners. Damn few, thank God!
Double standards like this – becoming more “in your face” every day – are the reasons the races will never get along. It’s OK to have segregated organizations, fraternities, schools, and other groups as long as it’s a government-approved minority doing the segregating, but the first time a non-government-approved racial group tries to do this, the racist word gets applied and everybody runs for cover. Folks act like everybody is getting along, and keep a good public face on things, but I fear the racism is just being forced underground, where it will only foment and get worse.