Progress: Black students at Harvard to hold their own graduation ceremony

Progress: Black students at Harvard to hold their own graduation ceremony
Reading lesson at a Negro elementary school, 1942. (Image: Library of Congress)

This must be what progressives mean by progress. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held in Brown v. Board of Education that separate schools are “inherently unequal.” Fast-forward 64 years later, and graduate students at Harvard University are back to segregating themselves from their white fellow grads.

The phony “fact-checking” site Snopes bends over backward to paint lipstick on this pig, arguing that this is not self-segregation, a claim also made in an interview with The Root by Michael Huggins, a soon-to-become “masters” graduate. (Oh, that word!)

But what is it then? According to Huggins:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

It’s about fellowship and building a community. This is a chance to reaffirm for each other that we enter the work world with a network of supporters standing with us. We are all partners.

How that aspiration is different from the Harvard community at large Huggins doesn’t say. Ditto for his claim that the black-only ceremony is “an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s black excellence and black brilliance.” Why not share those achievements with the larger society in which these graduates will live and work? Or will their life after school also be restricted in much the way their life on campus was? Some elite universities, including Princeton, have begun acceding to black students’ demands for “affinity housing,” a euphemism for segregated dormitories.

Although Snopes’s main beef is with an article at The Daily Wire with the title “Harvard To Hold Blacks-Only Graduation Ceremony,” its writers feel compelled to concede that a piece at BET, which addresses the “pressures of society” on minorities that “make the already challenging coursework even more difficult,” is “slightly ambiguous.” By ambiguous, one assumes they mean “dumb.”

In an excellent op-ed about the decision, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes:

There are plenty of reasons to balk at the event — the segregationist tendency, for starters. But there is also reason to wonder why it is that students who have spent four years or more at one of the most comprehensive, most exclusive universities in the country are still struggling to find “fellowship” and “community.”

Maybe that’s a question that blacks and their enablers on the Left should be asking themselves.

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles is a freelance writer and regular contributor to "Liberty Unyielding."

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