Dear African American Center:
Season’s greetings! I wanted to write to you today to share a heartwarming story that will help kick off your annual celebration of Kwanza. It involves a young woman of color who recently finished one of my classes in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. She told me that she thoroughly enjoyed the course and was glad she did not drop it as she was advised to do. Sadly, the people who advised her to drop the class were supporters of the campus African American Center. You are doing a fine job of instilling the values of racial separatism in the hearts of this new generation of students. Never has a generation of minority students had so much social opportunity and so little desire to mingle with the rest of society.
You will recall last year when I wrote an article suggesting that numerous “centers” on our campus should be shut down in order to alleviate our growing financial problems. One of the many centers was the African American Center. Black segregationists – both students and former students - took to the local media to decry my opposition to racial segregation. Fortunately for me, after the controversy hit the local media, polling data showed that my ideas received widespread support among taxpayers. That is the way it always plays out. The divisive diversophiles run to the media calling people like me “extreme.” Then the polls show that it is the university’s segregationist diversity plan that is considered extreme.
Here in the South, we have come a long way. Segregation is dead nearly everywhere except on our college campuses, which are run by liberals from the North. Accusations of racism are usually only leveled at those who push for equality and mixing of the races. If my fifth cousin Theodore Gilmore Bilbo were alive today, he would be a college administrator. He would certainly still be a registered Democrat. He would also support the African American Center’s preference for racial separatism.
In the final analysis, the smear campaign that was launched against those who would dare to oppose African American Centers in general was harmful to your African American Center in particular. That harm manifested itself in at least three distinct ways:
1.) Supporters of the African American Center were the only ones who went to the media to complain about my general opposition to demographic segregation. This was despite the fact that other centers – Hispanic, Gay, and Women’s – were targeted for closure in my column. Put simply, this made it appear that blacks are even more firmly committed to racial segregation than other minorities. Regardless of its veracity, this is now the widespread perception. This reflects poorly on the African American Center.2.) Supporters of the African American Center made specific calls to administrators demanding that I be fired simply for expressing my First Amendment rights. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. would not approve of this. King relied heavily upon the First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Today, too many black students shamelessly seek to destroy First Amendment protections that made the civil rights movement possible. This is harmful to oppressed peoples everywhere. Hence, it undermines the African American Center’s stated concern for helping those without a voice.
3.) Unfortunately, the incident showed that having separate centers is not enough for some minority students. Some want to see racially segregated classrooms, too. Specifically, some diversophiles want to make sure that opponents of the African American Center are stuck teaching all-white classes. Telling black students not to take classes from professors who oppose African American Centers simply spreads segregation from the centers to the classroom. Why would black students want to punish a professor who says he wants more racial integration by ensuring he only teaches whites? This is a perversion of diversity. It’s perversity. It shows that the African American Center has been teaching racism, not eradicating it. And this is simply a disgrace to the entire university.
Segregation in the name of diversity must be opposed today. Segregation in the name of diversity must be opposed tomorrow. Segregation in the name of diversity must be opposed forever. It is time for the diversity movement to honor the memory of Martin Luther King, not the memory of Governor George Wallace or Theodore Gilmore Bilbo.
But far be it from me to suggest we should close the African American Center. I would hate to wind up in another tussle with the local media. And I’d hate to be blacklisted all over again.