Major Educational Institutions Offer Graduation Ceremonies Segregated By Race, Sex, Income. Are They Still Calling For Unity?

The latest in woke progressive regression (both oxymoronic and moronic), Columbia University intends to hold six separate and distinct graduation ceremonies, segregating students based on sex, race, income, and other identities.

The school’s website says they are offering “Multicultural Graduation Celebrations, which provide a more intimate setting for students who self-identify in a variety of ways.” These ceremonies are intended to “complement” the existing graduation ceremonies, rather than replace. But it still creates an either/or situation centered on segregating identifiers.

The “multicultural” ceremonies offered at the New York City campuses include:

• A “Native Graduation” for students who identify as Native-American
• A “Lavender Graduation” for students who identify as LGBTQ
• An “Asian Graduation” for students who identify as Asian
• An “FLI Graduation” for students who identify as “first-generation and/or low-income community”
• A “Latinx Graduation” for students who identify as “Latinx”
• A “Black Graduation” for students who identify as Black

And it’s not just Columbia University planning segregated graduation ceremonies. According to the National Association of Scholars (NAS), there are at least 75 schools nationwide that are offering or have offered segregated graduation ceremonies, notably such elite schools as Harvard, the University of California-San Diego, the University of California-Irvine, Arizona State University, Stanford, the University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, University of Washington, and Yale. It’s been happening for several years. Harvard has even held an “UndocuGraduation” for illegal immigrants.

The NAS report says,

“Proponents of the [segregated] ceremonies contend that the unique experiences of blacks and other minorities warrant a separate celebration. They insists that segregated commencement ceremonies foster a sense of fellowship unlikely to be realized with their white peers. By this logic, white students just don’t understand the gravity of the achievement of black students.”

But Dion Pierre, an NAS scholar said,

“Ultimately, university officials go wrong when they treat students as black, Latino, or Asian, i.e., as different. By doing so, they reinforce the idea of interminable inequality and conflict between the races.”

Essentially, such segregation would only serve to fan the flames of racial tensions.

The president of the Harvard Black Graduate Student Alliance is quoted in the report as saying of the black student-only ceremony,

“…the ceremony is ‘not about segregation.'”

Except that they are literally segregating students based on race.

Are they for real? History has already shown us that segregating, dividing, and restricting fellow citizens based on their race, sex, or other identifying factors does not foster unity and cohesion. It does not improve our society. It fractures our society and pits people against each other. It fosters opposition, an “us versus them” mentality.

Now more than ever we need to be fostering kinship and unity. Isn’t that what the Left keeps telling us? Encouraging students and families to focus on their differences and draw lines of ethnic, gender, and socio-economic distinction is counterproductive to a goal of unity and peaceful cooperation.

Interestingly, in the first few days of his administration, Biden’s Department of Education reversed a decision finding that racially segregated groups are a form of segregation. So now, racially segregated groups in educational settings isn’t segregation.

Does that even make sense? Segregating people based on the color of their skin isn’t segregation? That’s ridiculous.

Imagine if educational institutions actually encouraged students to come together and focus on common goals, purposes, and values rather than dividing by race, gender, and income.