Whites And Women (Black Or White) Need Not Apply

Some City University of New York programs for black men are being challenged by a New York civil rights group. The New York Civil Rights Coalition has filed a complaint in federal court alleging that the challenged programs

violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by colleges receiving federal assistance, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination by such institutions.

….

The Medgar Evers programs cited in the complaint are offered through the institution’s Male Development and Empowerment Center as part of the college’s effort to help black males. They include a monthly meeting “intended to encourage male-to-male communication,” a series of financial seminars designed to increase the economic power of black and Hispanic men, workshops that seek to help such students learn more about various industries, and a program that helps fathers deal with issues related to their parental rights.

Although I agree that the New York Civil Rights Coalition is a reputable group, I found the following characterization of it bothersome:

The New York Civil Rights Coalition is hardly alone in challenging college programs advertised as solely for members of racial- or ethnic-minority groups. Other individuals and groups, including the Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, have persuaded more than 100 colleges to open such programs to students of any race, and have filed federal complaints triggering Office for Civil Rights investigations of several colleges that had resisted their demands. But the New York group has a profile different from those of other organizations that have opposed such programs — one that precludes pigeonholing it as conservative, libertarian, or invested in protecting white interests.

The former chairman of the group’s Board of Directors was the late Kenneth B. Clark, the black psychologist whose testimony regarding the effects of school segregation on children was pivotal in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954. The board’s current members include two well-known black authors of books about the civil-rights movement: Juan Williams, the prominent television and newspaper pundit, and Orlando Patterson, a Jamaican-born professor of sociology at Harvard University.

The group describes itself on its Web site as committed, above all, to racial integration, as both a philosophy and a strategy for ensuring equal opportunity. Established in 1986 in response to racial violence in Queens, it has mounted several protests against incidents of racial violence while, at the same time, taking a harshly critical stand toward college programs for minority students. In a 2002 report, it condemned ethnic dormitories, as well as courses and programs for minority students, as “segregationist” and “apartheid policies.”

Michael Meyers, the group’s executive director, described himself on Tuesday as a liberal who favors affirmative action but believes “separatism is not affirmative action.” He characterized affirmative action as “the affirmative use of race and gender in order to integrate people into the mainstream of American society, not to put them on the shoulder of the road.”

In other words, they’re not loonies who, you know, believe that imposing burdens on individuals based on their race is (can you believe it!) wrong.

Perhaps in a future issue the Chronicle of Higher Education could list those organizations who have challenged racial discrimination because they are “invested in protecting white interests.”

Say What?