Students at Cornell defended the university’s decision to segregate a rock climbing course in the name of anti-racism.
According to the Cornell Daily Sun, a local school paper, controversy ensued when news of the class, “BIPOC Rock Climbing,” where BIPOC stands for “black, indigenous, and people of color,” triggered outrage and a “wave of media coverage” which led the university to remove the initial ban on white student enrollment.
“This class is designed to enable Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asia, or other people of color underrepresented in the sport of rock climbing to learn the sport and to feel included and supported,” the course description reads.
Matthew Gavieta, one of the course’s instructors told the paper while the university opened enrollment to non-BIPOC students, white students would be unlikely to sign up given its mission statement, and complained rock climbing was too white.
“There is an issue of inaccessibility for minorities in this white-centric sport and BIPOC rock-climbing is a small step towards desegregating that community,” Gaveita said, touting the school’s offer of nearly a dozen other courses for the sport. In other words, 70 years after the separate but equal doctrine was successfully overturned, woke activists seek a new form of separate but equal.
Proponents of course segregation at the elite school, however, defended the university’s pursuit to organize courses on the basis of race.
“Lwam Asfaw said that people should be focusing less on why segregation exists and more on why there’s need to segregate,” the Cornell Daily Sun reported.
https://twitter.com/kakutani_y/status/1389599082625343497?s=20
Michelle Croen, also a course instructor with Gavieta, told the university newspaper microaggressions kept too many women and minorities deterred from climbing which warranted the race-based class.
“From larger issues such as cost of entry and accessibility, to smaller microaggressions like the names of some outdoor climbing routes, it’s difficult to be a minority and feel welcomed in the outdoors,” Croen said. “Just under the surface, the climbing world especially is affected by racism, sexism and sizeism.”
The student defense of class segregation at one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities is just the latest illustration of how America’s toxic obsession with race reverses decades of progress on racial equality.
Furthermore, their defense highlights how a nation primed to think about race will see racism in everything, even where it might not exist, breeding a new generation of elite students in corporate boardrooms and legacy newsrooms infected by woke fragility. To this population, white supremacy is rooted in every adversarial aspect of their lives — to which every inconvenience is intensely adversarial — presenting a terrifying landscape where even the names of climbing trails inflict a violent “microaggression.”
The American obsession with race paints hiking trails and trees as racist and leaves no item or activity immune from presenting some sort of racial prejudice. Woke fragility, increasingly adopted as a secular religion even, and especially at the Ivy League level will only continue to exacerbate a new kind of racism, where those in the minority require separate special assistance to overcome a supposed racial, gender, or sizeable handicap.