Jim Crow 2.0
Today, I offer an opportunity to read a giant bowl of woke word salad, brought to you by Western Washington University. Click HERE, and when you've lifted your jaw off the floor, come back for the rest of the story.
"Black Affinity Housing" is, to use inconvenient but accurate language, a segregated dormitory. As in No Whites Allowed.
One might think that such would run afoul of one or more of the myriad anti-discrimination laws out there, but as someone at Quora explains, it can be finessed.
Under a libertarian worldview, presuming no public money is involved, a school (or business) can do whatever it wants to in this regard. However, WWU is a public university, meaning it receives substantial state (and federal) funding. This should make segregation a no-no, but I'm sure those who try to stand up to this bit of racism will themselves be dubbed racist oppressors, or colonizers, or whatever the en vogue epithet happens to be at that moment.
Ponder, next, Bank of America's decision to offer zero money down mortgages to blacks and hispanics. Perhaps the forward thinkers therein have a memory too short to recall what happened the last time banks went this zero-down route: the 2008 housing bubble and crash. Can anyone at BoA say "Moral Hazard?"
Continuing this theme of Corporate America carrying water for leftists, behold the new mandate by the NASDAQ stock exchange: Companies must satisfy certain diversity criteria on their boards, or risk being delisted.
All this and more, we are repeatedly told, is about correcting not only the injustices of the past, but balancing out the "systemic racism" that they claim is so deeply infused into our culture that the only remedy is preferential treatment. Such a philosophy is not only wholly at odds with the fundamentals of individual liberty - which include an imperative to equal treatment - but destined to failure and certain to create further division, animosity, and resentment. Where preferential treatment is institutionalized, either by government or by schools, businesses, and our cultural arbiters, the incentive to seek supremacy in the grievance hierarchy becomes irresistible.
Does racism continue to exist in America? Only fools and liars would say "no." But, 'reverse racism' as a remedy does none but the agitators any good. It just perpetuates the premise that people should be judged by the color of their skin. Dr. Martin Luther King's endlessly-quoted aphorism,
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
obviously comes to mind, but there are prominent voices in the race debate today (and going back a decade) who question or refute the notion of pursuing a color-blind society. The great irony is that the policies of the self-styled champions of blacks and other minorities - the Left - are the proximate cause of the continued socioeconomic disparities between those communities and the rest of America.
All those screams of "systemic racism" assert its existence in vague and clandestine ways. They trot out outcome-based conclusions, i.e. that any group or set whose racial or identity mix does not match the overall societal ratios (e.g. a town that is less than 13.6% black) is ‘proof’ of an underlying mechanism of exclusion, one as subtle as low density zoning laws or individual homeowners that won’t sell to blacks.
The screamers ignore history: "Systemic racism" was that which is coercively and overtly installed via law. The Jim Crow era wasn't about sneaky, stealthy racism, it was actual laws, put in place by governments, that not only segregated society but actually debarred individuals from integrating their lives. If you were a liberal-minded person in the South and tried to open a restaurant that was "color-blind," you'd be subject to arrest.
As is true of so many other progressive things, overt coercion via discriminatory law is being supplanted by 'softer' coercion in our institutions. Coercion is never a good thing. The libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, not an over-balancing of the scales to correct past wrongs, is the only moral way to advance a free and just society.
Or, as stated by our Chief Justice,
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Chapter 1 - A Catastrophic Failure
Chapter 2 - A Brief History
Chapter 3 - A Society Rooted in Individual Liberty
Chapter 4 - Use vs Abuse
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Peter.
The phrase from Black Affinity Housing - "Black identified staff and faculty" made me think of Rachel Dolezal
As to the rest sounds like self-segregation
Peter, great piece. I admire your work. Thank you.