To the Editor:
Your article on the University of Connecticut’s residence house for African American male students (“The Real Story Behind the U. of Connecticut’s ‘Scholars House’,” The Chronicle, August 26) is tilted. It quotes not a single liberal in opposition to UConn’s con — its policy of purposefully singling black males only for remedial and support services provided in a separate and racially identifiable section of a dorm. UConn mocks the law. “Scholars House” is a deliberate steering and assignment of students by race to a racially identifiable, campus residence. That’s segregation. It’s no wonder UConn won’t say how many nonblacks have enrolled; it won’t admit to the segregation it’s caused and staffed with only blacks.
Their ode to segregationist thinking makes hay of a demand for racially identifiable housing from blacks. Who cares? It’s not the college’s role or defense to accommodate or reinforce the deification of race. Worse, it deflects criticism of its racial silo as coming from “conservative” commentators. Wrong. There are black liberals, like myself, who reject such dorms as discriminatory and segregative actions that constitute sheer racial idiocy. A “black residence"—arranged by white and black college officials who themselves identify and sympathize with black nationalism, is not excused because 50 blacks answer their call for segregation. Lost in this sea of paternalism and racialism is the university’s duty to encourage students to think for themselves as individuals rather than as racial groups.
Racist living patterns arranged, funded, and supported by college officials is legally, educationally, and morally wrong. The offense is the call for “those people” to live with “their own kind.” Even if it’s for a year or two, there is no such thing as temporary racism. My mentor, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist, observed as much before and after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed deliberate segregation in public schools and colleges. He declared that a college is engaged in discriminatory and stereotypes whenever it encourages blacks to separate from their peers of other skin color. He decried the use of bogus psychology as rationalizing segregation as raising students’ “self-esteem.” He decried blacks’ racial breast beating and separatism as the carbon copy of whites’ racism.
Restricting any campus program or space on the flimsy basis of skin color preferences, moreover, betrays a university’s mission to help remove narrow constrictions of the mind. A dorm for black students only is an intellectual absurdity because it exposes the university’s betrayal of its duty to the individual to stand up to and resist racial prejudice and fanaticism.
Michael Meyers
President
New York Civil Rights Coalition
New York