A Michigan State University spring conference on “teaching, learning, and student success” will include woke breakout sessions as well as discussions segregated by race.
The conference, scheduled for early May, includes progressively named presentations like “Crip Methodologies in Feminist Theory as Anti-Racist Pedagogy” and “Trauma Informed Teaching Strategies.”
The website for the event currently shows no mention of the segregated sessions, but an archived version of the website shows the segregation was a key selling point of the conference.
The website contains a section of what’s new to the conference this year. Previously, the first bullet point on the list was for “Affinity Groups for conversation within identity groups.” Just below the list was a description of the affinity groups, which read:
We invite attendees to participate in an affinity group during the Student Success Spring Conference. Affinity (or caucus) groups provide spaces for people to work within their own identity groups. To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. For white people, an affinity group provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation.
There will be an affinity group for white folx [sic] and an affinity group for people of color. The focus of the affinity groups will align with the theme of our featured keynote speakers listed below. Each group will be led by trained facilitators to engage in dialogue utilizing a set of prompts.
As written, the affinity groups do not appear to be mandatory, but their inclusion is the latest example of segregation in higher education, where white people are explicitly told they must accept their inherent racism while people of color are allowed to discuss their own alleged victimization.
Event organizers did not respond to a Daily Wire request for information prior to press time.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, segregated first-year students by race and provided them different orientation sessions accordingly. Just as with Michigan State University, Lewis & Clark used affinity groups to segregate students by identity.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reported, the college partnered with Race Talks, a “social justice activism” group, to run a mandatory orientation workshop on race titled “Engage for Racial Justice.” The workshop used “affinity groups as a way to create safe spaces for people to speak openly and honestly about race and racism.” Students were required to identify themselves by race and were given three options: black, Indigenous/people of color, and white. They were then separated into different Zoom sessions for what FIRE described as “separate educational experiences,” which unlawfully limited “their ability within the program to engage with students of different races.”