Tag: segregation

New York University moves to implement racial segregation in student dorms

Since late June, the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services at New York University (NYU) has been working closely with a small, student-led task force to make racially segregated housing a reality in undergraduate student dorms.

On July 20, Washington Square News, the weekly undergraduate student newspaper of NYU, published an article titled “Student-Led Task Force Calls for Black Housing on Campus,” in which they reported on the university’s willingness to help implement residential communities open solely to “Black-identifying students with Black Resident Assistants.” Since then, the university has officially given the project a green light, aiming to have NYU’s first segregated residential floor established by Fall 2021.

A little over two months ago, a recently-organized advocacy group called Black Violets created an online petition demanding that the university “implement Black student housing on campus in the vein of themed engagement floors across first-year and upperclassmen residence halls.” In their petition, the group argues that “Too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism.” African American students, they state, desperately require a “safe space” where they can escape from students, staff, and faculty of other races.

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Biden Said In 1977 That Desegregation Would Create ‘A Racial Jungle’

As presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s record on racial issues comes under increased scrutiny, comments from his past are haunting him including one where he said that non-“orderly” racial integration would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”

Biden denies that he opposed voluntary busing in the 1970s, but he was one of the Senate’s most vocal opponents of federally-mandated busing, according to a New York Times article. The Times reported Biden’s comments on busing and desegregation in a July 2019 article.

Daria Roithmayr, a University of Southern California Law School professor and scholar, found Biden’s jungle quote, which appears to be from a 1977 congressional hearing related to anti-busing legislation, Business Insider reported. Biden emphasized wanting to “insure we do have orderly integration of society,” adding he was “not just talking about education but all of society.”

Biden worried that court-ordered busing would cause resentment among Black and white students and lead to a “race war”.

“He emerged as the Democratic Party’s leading anti-busing crusader — a position that put him in league with Southern segregationists,” Astead W. Herndon and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote for the Times.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places.

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