THE NEW RACISM: Segregation staggers back to life, by Brendan O’Neill.
What we’re witnessing, not only in Australia but in other Western nations too, is the reawakening of the segregationist mindset. Segregationism has been given a makeover, turned from something that once made us wince — try looking at photos of an American “Coloured Drinking Fountain” without feeling horrified — to something that is treated as acceptable, even good: a “special measure” that can benefit certain groups.
The fashion for PC segregation is especially strong on Western campuses. In the US, students who think of themselves as decent, right-minded, left-of-centre people are openly demanding segregated spaces.
At Oberlin College in Ohio, student protesters are agitating for “safe spaces” for “Africana-identifying students”. At New York University, a student campaign is underway to create “an entire floor of the mixed-use building… to be dedicated to students of colour.” Students at UCLA want a floor of the student union building to be made African-American-only, on the basis that there needs to be a “safe space for black students”.
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So now we’re expected to treat people as “racial/cultural beings”. We’re expected to “acknowledge” a person’s race. This grates against the great, progressive gains of the late twentieth century, especially of the American civil-rights movement, which encouraged us *not* to treat people as racial beings, and to *refuse* to acknowledge race.
Indeed, Martin Luther King’s great vision was a world in which his children, and everyone else’s, would “not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. That dream is being demolished. Now people are elevating colour over character, seeing others as racial beings rather than simply beings.
Treating people differently on the basis of their race is a prejudice — a pre-judgment, instead of judging a person by their actions.
Most call it racism, but because the PC elite and modern bureaucracies practice it they furiously deny that it is “racism”. The latest PC trend is to even insist that color-blindness is “racism”. Sure, whatever you say.
