San Diego State University’s Marriage and Family Association is set to host a free workshop entitled Taking Back Our Truths: Healing Circle. The event is listed as a “racial healing workshop,” except that not all races are welcome at the event. Like a 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s lunch counter, this event is segregated. This time the signs might read: No Whites Allowed.
Although the website for the event doesn’t explicitly ban white people, the March 22 event is billed as a “safe space for students and faculty of color to discuss issues that impact persons of color in higher academia.” When you dig just a bit deeper, you’ll find that the name of the event varies slightly from “Taking Back Our Truths: Healing Circle” to the more racially charged, “Taking Back Our Truths: Deconstructing Whiteness in Academia and Embracing Racial Justice and Healing” workshop.
“The intimate one-and-a-half-hour Racial Healing Workshop; catered to students and faculty of color, will be led by well-known professional Dr. Cheryl E. Matias,” according to the student organizers of the event.
Matias, whose website describes her as a professor, “motherscholar,” race consultant, and academic coach is also the author of the book Feeling White: Whiteness, Emotionality and Education, a treatise on how “feeling white” impacts current race relations.
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One reviewer, Dr. Christine Sleeter, professor emeritus of Cal State-Monterey Bay, said of Feeling White, “Drawing on her deep wisdom about how race works, Cheryl Matias interrogates the emotional arsenal white people use as shields from the pain of confronting racism, peeling back its layers to unearth a core of love that can open us up.”
In other words, if white people could just feel more guilty about racism, then maybe we can all get past it.
On her website, Matias lists herself as a “woman faculty of color.” That’s fine, of course, but one wonders about her choice of title. Could a straight person get away with writing a book entitled Feeling Gay? Could a white person write a book entitled Feeling Black without serious consequences?
San Diego State is not the only college in America practicing the segregation of whites. At American University in Washington, D.C., students and faculty are demanding a minority-only “safe space” on campus in response to an alleged hate crime.
At Ryerson University in 2015, two white students, acting as journalists, were banned from a meeting of the Racialized Student Collective for the crime of being white.
Minority students from dozens of colleges are asking for, and in many cases receiving, segregated spaces where whites are simply not allowed. There’s a word for this type of exclusionary tactic. It’s called racism.
The whole concept of these “safe spaces” is antithetical to what higher education is supposed to be. Students need to be subjected to all types of people and all types of viewpoints in order to become well-rounded individuals.
The intersectional garbage being preached by leftists in academia in this current age is extremely damaging. High-school and college kids nowadays are being taught that their identity group — be it race, sexual orientation, gender, or religious affiliation — means everything. That type of education does not prepare students for the real world they must face when they leave college and try to get jobs. When employers are hiring people, none of those intersectional labels should mean anything. Hiring decisions should be made on qualifications for a specific job — not intersectional nonsense.
Despite its high-minded title, events such as the one at San Diego State do not heal. They only serve to further divide a nation already so divided that we cannot have civil discussions anymore. But demonizing “whitey” has become a cottage industry for people such as Dr. Matias. There are coveted positions of “race experts” on MSNBC and CNN. There is money to be made and fame to be gained by calling out racism — even where none exists.
Race should never matter in our dealings with people. We should strive to treat everyone we meet as individuals instead of members of identity groups. We should strive to judge all people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
Photo: Delmaine Donson / E+
