White students have reportedly been banned from attending Black History Month events by a student union at the University of Westminster, leading to accusations of racial segregation on campus.
The student union reportedly proclaimed in an email to students that some events during Black History Month — which is observed in October in the United Kingdom and Ireland — will be “reserved for black students to encourage a safe space for discussions and honest conversations,” according to a report from The Telegraph.
In response, Brexit leader Nigel Farage said: “Now we have apartheid. Well done everyone, racial segregation is back.”
Mixed-race political commentator and Anglican deacon Calvin Robinson said that he was “sorry to see [the Westminster Student Union] implementing racial segregation at [the University of Westminster].
“This is the problem with Critical Race Theory. Well intentioned activists are trying to create ‘safe spaces’ and inadvertently stoking racial tensions where they may not have existed to begin with,” Robinson added.
The union didn’t specify which events would be prohibited for white students. On Instagram this week, advertising a career development seminar, the union said: “This is a Black History Month event but ALL students are welcome! Be sure not to miss out.”
Westminster University has also recently created a ‘Black History Year Create’ programme to specifically help prepare black students to enter into the workforce.
Explaining the idea, a university spokesman said: “Equality of opportunity does not always mean giving everyone access to the same thing; it means creating a level playing field by offering some programmes to those who are underrepresented or those who have had less access to opportunity.”
While the British education system has imported many tenets of the far-left 0n issues surrounding race and gender from the United States, instances of racial segregation have not been a prominent feature of the ‘decolonise the curriculum’ push.
However, in 2019, the University of Edinburgh did prohibit white people from speaking at a “Resisting Whiteness” event.
The issue of left-wing racial segregation first came to major prominence in 2017 at the progressive Evergreen State University in Washington state, when students demanded that professors, administrators, and other students abide by a ‘Day of Absence’ in which white people were asked to leave the campus.
The refusal by Professor Bret Weinstein to bow to such demands resulted in the left-wing academic facing threats against himself and his family, ultimately forcing him to resign from his position at the university.
The use of highly racially charged politics have been steadily bleeding into the British system as well, with the nation’s largest teachers union, for example, calling for educators to receive activist training on the issue of “whiteness” in order to increase the focus of “white privilege and colonialism” in schools last year.
Dr Neil Thin of the University of Edinburgh said that it was “tragic” that a British university was “copying the racial segregationism that we have previously seen in South African and USA education systems”.
“It is bitterly ironic to see the rhetoric of ‘safe spaces’ abused to justify racial segregation. Nothing is more likely to make social spaces unsafe than this kind of wilful sowing of interethnic suspicion and division,” he added.
Toby Young, of the Free Speech Union, concurred: “At some point, you’d think it would be clear to these zealots that you’re not going to reduce racial discrimination by discriminating against people on the basis of their race, but they’re so blinded by ideological groupthink they cannot see this glaring contradiction.”
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka