When Schools Dump Diversity
Teaching Tolerance has reported many times and in many ways that the United States is plunging headlong toward racial and cultural re-segregation. That process took an enormous leap in the wrong direction last week when the Wake County school board in North Carolina voted to dismantle its policy of diversifying the schools.
Remembering Bloody Sunday
On March 7, 1965, millions of Americans sat watching their television sets in horror. Grainy black-and-white news images from Selma, Ala., showed about 600 mostly African-American protesters trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were marching to the state capital, Montgomery, to win voting rights in the Jim Crow South.
The Trouble with Women’s History Month
The trouble with Women’s History Month—with all these special months—is that they encourage people to think that problems have been solved. The female heroes of yesterday are acknowledged, the debt paid and the slate cleaned.
Noose on Campus
It used to be thought that college was where you went to open your mind, explore ideas and, in the words of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, “be freed from the prison-house of … class, race, time, place [and] background.”
Trashing The Student Non-Discrimination Act
About a month ago, U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act of 2010 (SNDA). This bill, which now has 60 or so bipartisan co-sponsors, would prohibit discrimination against students on the basis of sexual orientation. It mimics the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial discrimination, and Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender.
