"Safe Space" For Black Students Means Keeping Out White Students?
We used to call this "segregation," and a bunch of people died and went to jail to fight it.
There was a "Black Lives Matter" assembly at Oak Park and River Forest high school in Illinois, and the nitwits who run the place thought it would be a good idea to have only black people present. They naturally gravitated to the Orwellian-sounding term of "affinity grouping" to justify this, as if anyone would be okay with it if there were a "white people only" "affinity grouping."
(Did these administrators forget about the overturning of "separate but equal"?)
Rebecca R. Bibbs reports for the Pioneer Press/Chi Trib:
Principal Nathaniel Rouse, the assembly's organizer, said he thought black students would speak more freely among members of their own race, a model known as affinity grouping....The fallout from the Black Lives Matter assembly spurred a three-hour discussion at OPRF's School Board meeting March 16 that included public comment from dozens of parents, students and teachers -- almost all of whom spoke out in support of Rouse and the assembly.
Each trustee of the Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Board supported the intent of the assembly, but several worried about potential legal consequences faced by the school.
School Board President John Phelan, a lawyer by trade, said he was concerned about a process that led to an event that could be considered separate but equal, a segregationist doctrine that was later deemed unconstitutional with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.
...Superintendent Steven Isoye said he believed he was the only non-black person at the assembly.
"It was clear to me that Mr. Rouse was trying to build a space that was safe space for our black students," he said.
Guess what? Life is not a "safe space" where they segregate black people from the rest of us, and public school, as was determined in hard-fought battles of the civil rights movement, is no place for segregation.
hardly surprising at OPRF... the demos are not mixing well, and never have. River Forest is a 'burb with very, very expensive old money houses, where there is still very little crime, because that's where real mob-bosses live, and so. Nothing ever happens. Also, home to 2 colleges on it's northwest side, both religious. Oak Park on the other hand is much more integrated. Home to many Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and his studio... has a bit of tourism for that. It has large expensive old homes bleeding over from RF, on it's west side.
But head east, and you head into lower income on an almost street by street basis, ending in the Austin neighborhood, which is blighted near west Chicago.
Now but all that in the blender, and blend on "this mix has been going since the late 60's..."
You get a strange mix. Some neighborhoods are quite ossified, unchanging, while others go up and down on short timespans, depending on who moves in or out.
That they had this stupid SafeSpace Segregation is hardly surprising, the fact that they didn't even get how that looks or works-
Indicates that they are still able to take all the "right side of history" steps, and end up in the wrong place.
And it will prolly take a decade for anyone to figure out how to exit the problem while saving face.
Add Chicago Machine politicians? It'sa C.F.
I still have friends back there, but you couldn't convince me to go live there again, some of it is too stupid.
SwissArmyD at March 19, 2015 7:11 AM
"Safe space"? Do these people not remember who put the United States Constitution in place and passed the Voting Rights Act of 1964?
Right out of "1984", this Newspeak insists that black people are special-needs children while calling them something else. Disgusting.
Radwaste at March 19, 2015 1:03 PM
"Safe space" LOL, someone really needs to look at crime and murder stats comparing white on black crime and black on black crime.
Joe j at March 19, 2015 1:15 PM
Non-black kids who get "desegregated" into mostly-black schools get routinely beat up or robbed, and authority won't do anything about it.
With that as the alternative, segregation is preferable.
jdgalt at March 19, 2015 7:11 PM
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