Fighting racism with racism: Segregated study hall opens at Canuck U

I must be getting old. [What do you mean, "getting"? Ed.] I can remember when protests like this (left), calling for an end to segregated schools, were commonplace in the Excited States of America, particularly in Dixie. 

You didn't see them so much in Yankeeland because in places like Connecticut Persons of Colour knew their place and didn't want to go to school wif the white chilluns. And in Canada, back then, there were no coloured people (except the Indians, of course), so segregation/integration wasn't an issue.

Along came Brown v Board of Education and, later, the Civil Rights Act, and separate-but-equal came to an end. Governor Faubus got out of the doorway, and white and black students across the land have studied together in peace and harmony ever since. You know how true that is!

But lately there has been a push by "progressives", SJWS and assorted wokesters to de-integrate schools, and reintroduce segregated classrooms and even residences. Can you believe it? How come? Was integration some sort of ghastly mistake? Why turn back the clock to the bad old days of racist America?

Last month, Brock University, a small public university in Saint Catharines ON, set up a racially segregated study hall!

The school's Learning Services Department said the initiative is "part of many ongoing efforts by Brock to address inequity in post-secondary learning, and [was] developed in collaboration with the University's Hadiyaˀdagénhahs First Nations, Métis and Inuit Student Centre, and BIPOC Caucus."

OK, but why?! A spokesthingy for the university told the meeja, "We know BIPOC students are historically under-represented in academic spaces in general and had less opportunities in terms of getting to university. Feeling welcomed and supported academically in the study hall and throughout the University is just one of the ways we are trying to address that.”

Could we  have some specifics please? Well, the "BIPOC Study Hall", which takes place every Tuesday and Wednesday evening at the school's "Student Success Centre", offers participants (not you, whitey!) free tutoring from fourth-year students, and "an exclusive study space". 

"The twice-weekly gatherings will also welcome various on-campus units to provide more tailored resources during specific weeks, as well as partners to donate snacks and refreshments." What kind of snacks and refreshments? Surely not fried chicken and Colt-45!

Jonathan Kay, the well-known author, editor and contributor to the National Post, Tweeted,  "Brock University in Ontario has set up a racially segregated study hall. (Please) check out the first sentence [highlighted in green above] from the in-house university mag article announcing how proud they are of t heir new race-restricted amenity."

Mr Kay, who has written before about Brock's swan-dive into progressive politics and dysfunctional nature, then added this comment, which was followed by another from Sue-Ann Levy.

The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, which has a local chapter at the woke university and just held a Brock event featuring its national president at the end of October, asked its followers “Is the future a segregated one?"

Speaking in reference to someone who commented that Brock "clearly recognizes Black Indigenous People of Colour need all the help they can get to keep up," SAFS replied, "A rather uncharitable explanation would be either 1) the presence of white people is some sort of threat, or 2) the other groups can’t succeed without extra supports, or 3) both. None of these sound good."

Indeed. Well, Ed. tells me that's enough social justice commentary for one day. I'm going to go visit my alma mater (not Brock) to see if the doors are still labelled "blankes" -- that would be me -- and  "nie-blankes". I'll be talkin' at ya.

Woke Toronto moves forward on segregated schools

Toronto, aka the Wormy Apple, aka The City Canadians Love to Hate, aspires to be not just a "world-class" but, under Mayor John Jelly, the Wokest City in the World. Facing stiff competition from London (the other one) and San Francisco, it has had to settle for Wokest City in Canuckistan. But it's trying to improve. 

Today (Agent 3 reports)The Toronto District School Board is unveiling a "Centre of Excellence for Black Student Achievement". In politically incorrect English (archaic language no longer spoken in Canada), that's a segregated school For Blacks Only.

Unable to justify the cost of building a full-sized standard school building for the few dozen students expected to attend, the TDSB, after a year of delays and "virtual learning" has settled for a wing [left or right? Ed.] in Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute in the dreary but integrated Scarborough district, some distance from North York and Etobicoke, where many schools are already segregated, being located in predominantly black neighbourhoods.

According to CBC News, the centre, which the TDSB says is the first of its kind in Canada, "is part of its plan to dismantle anti-Black racism after years of complaints from staff, students and families. It reached a tipping point last year when the board said in its annual report that it had a 'serious racism problem' and anti-Black racism exceeded all other hate incidents by far....

"The ultimate goal is to educate staff and students on anti-Black racism, help affirm the identity of Black students and give them the tools to advocate for themselves when instances of racism do happen, so 'they know how to engage and be responsive'."

Agent 3 questions the boards claim that the new school is the first of its kind.  A short-lived "Afro-Caribbean alternative high school" operated in the mid-1980s. In 1995, a royal commission Report on Learning recommended "black-focused" schools. Some critics it, errr, "segregation", but others said such a school was needed to tackle the 40% dropout rate amongst Toronto’s black yoofs.

The idea of separate schools for blacks and others was even more divisive by the mid-2000s, but the TDSB, dominated by leftist politicos, voted in 2008 to move ahead with a small "Africentric" school. It opened for students in JK to Grade 5 in September of 2009, with 128 kids from across the so-called Greater Toronto Area enrolled. 

Like the new Centre for Excellence &c, the Africentric school had to share a building, and some spaces, with an integrated public school. The Toronto Red Star reports that the library was divided by an imaginary line, with a poster of Toronto Maple Leafs centre Auston Matthews on one side, and a picture of Nelson Mandela on the other. The latter has books clearly focused on the black experience, while the former is filled with typical children's books. 

Teachers at the Africentric school, most of whom are black, incorporate black history, experiences and contributions into the curriculum. While curriculum from the alternative school was available online following the closure of schools due to the Wuhan flu, Africentric teaching was discontinued.

Agent 3 could not say whether the Africentric school will reopen in September, or whether the new Centre for Excellence &c is intended as a "new and improved" replacement. The Africentric school had challenges right from the get-go. There was no school bus service. Test scores were shaky and enrolment declined to a few dozen in the last year it was open.

The TDSB, "Canada's largest and most diverse school board", has 582 schools, serving 246,000 students, 11% of whom are Black. Statistics show black students have historically performed below average. They're more likely to be labelled as having "special education" needs, suspended and expelled, and streamed into programmes that don’t lead to university or college. Whether they'll do better, now that they don't have to compete with white and (especially) Asian kids, remains to be seen.

Book review: "Some of My Best Friends Are Black"

Some of My Best Friends Are Black, by Tanner Colby (Viking, 2012) is a book I didn't expect to like. Just skimming a few pages at random to get a feel for it, I recognized the author's white, liberal, anti-Republican stance. (He calls Richard Nixon an asshole, which may be true but he should've said the same of Bill Clinton!)

Obviously, I thought, "The Strange Story of Integration in America" -- that's the book's subtitle -- is going to be a defence of the noble ideal, the downtrodden "African-Americans" and a condemnation of the "white racism" that caused integration to fail. Not so.

True enough, the bias is there, but Mr. Colby sees and writes truthfully about the problems and fallacies of the greatest experiment in social engineering in the history of America. He finds that, 50 years after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, true integration has made few inroads into the lives of most Americans. Some of My Best Friends Are Black tells four stories to make this point.

Part 1 is "Letter from a Birmingham Suburb", which recounts the fight of wealthy, white-flight Vestavia Hills AL to keep its schools white. When federal courts ordered desegregation by busing, Vestavia's high school got some black kids from neighbouring Oxmoor, and some other black kids from the inner city. A handful of the better-off black kids were accepted by their white peers. The rest segregated themselves, for instance by establishing their own section of the school cafeteria. Meanwhile, the Birmingham schools became blacker and blacker, and today are effectively as "separate but equal" as they were before Brown v. Board of Education.

In "Planning for Permanence" (Part 2) we learn the geography and history of Kansas City MO, where Troost Avenue marks the "Berlin Wall" between the blighted black part of town, to the east, and the prosperous white areas to the west. The further west you go, the nicer KC becomes, until finally you get to the very posh "Country Club District" which spills over into Kansas. This, Mr. Colby tells us, was all planned and deliberate, achieved by a technique called "block-busting", which he describes in detail for any realtors who don't know how to do it.

One small area on the east side of Troost held out. It's called "49/63", after the intersection of two streets at its centre. There, a couple of Jesuit priests and some white folks who were not horrified by the prospect of white neighbours organized a citizens' group to help newcomers get decent financing, and keep up the neighbourhood (and property values). They tried to build a community, and were moderately successful, albeit without much participation from the black newcomers, for reasons which Mr. Colby doesn't quite get a handle on. Today, "49/63" is the only quasi-integrated neighbourhood east of Troost.

Possibly the weakest of the book's four parts is No. 3, "Why Do Black People Drink Hawaiian Punch?" It's about Madison Avenue and the world of advertising, which Mr. Colby writes about from personal experience as a creative in more than one New York agency. He analyzes the hard choice faced by blacks entering the industry -- whether to try to join the "old (white) boys network" which pervades general advertising even today, or try to make it on their own, using black media to sell black stuff to black folks.

Because of the colour-blindness of the Internet, Colby argues, black-only advertising is no longer viable. Does that mean black practitioners are now working in general advertising in large numbers? Errr, no. Despite a spike in black employment in the industry in the 1970s, top black creatives in New York today number in the single digits, just as it was in the early `60s.

Finally, Mr. Colby looks at the world of religion in "Canaan", Part 4. He tells the story of the twin Roman Catholic parishes -- Sacred Heart and Christ the King -- of Grand Coteau LA, deep in the heart of Acadiana -- southern Lousiana's Cajun Country. In theory a Roman Catholic parish should correspond to a defined geographic area, and each parish should have one (1) church. But in LA -- unlike any other place on earth -- it had become the norm to have overlapping white and black parishes.

In the 1960s the Church decided that it should try to make "real" the principle of the equality of the races, by integrating its white and black parishes. The author describes in detail the struggle of two bishops and 11 parish priests -- 13 if you count the ones that came back twice -- to unite "The Church of the Sacred Heart of Christ the King". The white parishioners were willing, although not very happy about it. The real opposition came from a black faction, who wanted to stay in their own building, worshipping in their own way with people they were comfortable with. Human nature!

After 40 years of struggle, the two churches finally coalesced as St. Charles Borromeo. In the rest of Louisiana, dual parishes -- black and white -- are still the norm. And across the entire country, separate (but equal?) churches are stronger than ever. As Dr. King said, "11 a.m. on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America." Here's a quote from Some of My Best Friends Are Black:

"As the black middle class spread out in search of suburbia, black churches followed the migration. Once established, they became centers of gravity, accelerating the move and concentrating it...
"It would seem that just about everyone has settled quite contentedly on opposite sides of the spiritual tracks. By the most widely cited statistic, 93 percent of all churches in America are racially homogeneous. And if you every stop to suggest that maybe those churches should do something about it, people just look at you like you're crazy."

I know we're running a bit long here but I can't resist adding one more snippet, buried in the middle of Part 3, which sums up the dilemma of integration very nicely. The emphasis is mine.

"Starting in the late 1960s, America hurled its public schools headlong into a hugely disruptive, shot-in-the-dark experiment. We spent billions of dollars, all of it just to corral the Children of White Flight and the Children of the Dream and put them under the same roof. Given that historic opportunity, we call came together and...we sat on opposite sides of the cafeteria. Then we went and hung out at different clubs and fraternities at opposite ends of college campuses, or at completely separate colleges altogether.

"Ever since Brown v. Board, there's been a steady chorus of academics and politicians pronouncing all the wonderful things that integration is supposed to do for America. Integrated schools will produce better educational outcomes. Diversity programs will give us integrated workplaces that offer competitive advantages in a multicultural world. Etc. It's all a lot of crap.

"Integration doesn't do anything. It's something that is done, by people, and only by mutual choice.... Among those who were give the opportunity to integrate, most of us chose not to."