Segregation Forever!

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent column in USA Today on the re-segregation of American universities that is being forced by the Democratic Party and the Left:

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!” Those words were thundered by Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his 1963 inauguration speech. But, in fact, the very next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which brought an end to segregation.

Or did it?

Wallace later repented of this phrase, but in 2020, the 1963 George Wallace seems to be getting some traction. Because all over America — and even in Alabama — universities and schools are promoting and endorsing schemes that divide and label students by race.

Power Line readers are familiar with this story, but Glenn supplies chapter and verse. All across the country, colleges and universities–all of them run by members of George Wallace’s Democratic Party–are segregating the races, favoring some and discriminating against others.

It was the argument of the old-time segregationists that the various races were too different to get along side by side. The best that could be hoped for was that each could stay in its lane and flourish on its own with minimal contact with the others. That’s sounding more and more like the sort of thing we’re hearing on college campuses, where each group is told that others can’t understand its thinking because of its unique experiences, requiring its own safe space.

This is an interesting point, too:

Old-time segregationists prefigured the modern university in another way. Though they talked about separating the races, what they really meant was separating whites from all the others. The Virginia statute barring interracial marriage, struck down by the Supreme Court in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, banned marriages between blacks and whites but allowed nonwhites to marry nonwhites of other races. Though the state said it was against race mixing, it was actually only against mixing whites with other races. …

Likewise, many of these university programs seem to lump all nonwhites — except Asians, who, as sometimes happened under Jim Crow, often get thrown in as honorary whites — into one category and whites in another.

In today’s academia, God help you if you are Asian. Your school’s administration certainly won’t.

I am old enough to remember when people thought George Wallace’s “Segregation forever!” was a retrograde slogan that would soon be relegated to the dustbin of history. Little did we know that more than 50 years later, the Democratic Party and the liberal educational establishment would embrace racial segregation as an ideal.

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