No, it’s not a course seeking social justice for diminutive aliens from outer space. The “green” in the title of a seminar to be given to students at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay this fall, is the ecology-friendly kind that appears in terms such as green energy.
According to its online description, the course seeks to merge civil rights and environmental concerns and arises out of something called the Environmental Justice Movement. From the description:
Led primarily by people of color, women, and blue collar sectors of society, the Environmental Justice Movement now marks a worldwide grassroots effort for social justice. This course represents an effort to learn about the Environmental Justice Movement by studying its history, causes, and the struggles of people shaping the movement. Examples of topics to be covered include the following: Flint lead contamination, migrant farm worker pesticide exposure, Cancer Alley (Louisiana), mining on tribal lands, Hurricane Katrina, Alaskan natives, urban environmental harms, and others
The summary has all the right buzz words — people of color, women, social justice, and so on — but how are students of color enrolled at the university and the BLM population in general going to react to the course title? The BLMers haven’t taken kindly to efforts to riff on the BLM name so far. As reported here yesterday, a student government leader at the University of Houston was suspended for 50 days and ordered to attend a diversity seminar for daring to opine on Facebook that “All Lives Matter.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Then again, this course is a social justice warrior’s dream, so maybe the protesters will cut the the school some slack. On the other hand, according to a 2013 demographic breakdown along lines, the portion of the student body that was black, American Indian, Alaskan Native, and/or Hispanic represented only 6% of the total enrollment combined. Unless that’s changed radically in the years since, there may be hell to pay.
(h/t The College Fix)
