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In accordance with the anti-DEI panic that has gripped the Republican Party in its cold hands like a doctor who is telling you to turn your head and cough, the Alabama state legislature recently passed state Senate Bill 129, which outlaws DEI offices and initiatives in public institutions. Finally! No longer will white heterosexuals in Alabama be forced to labor under the oppressive yoke of the knowledge that non-white non-heterosexuals are full human beings to be treated with dignity and respect.
SB 129 specifically prohibits “public institutions of higher education from sponsoring any diversity, equity, and inclusion program that would advocate for a divisive concept.” The famously progressive University of Alabama, being one of those public institutions of higher education with a mission to welcome any and all into its hallowed halls for the sort of open intellectual inquiry across the ideological spectrum that is the domain of universities everywhere, bravely announced that this restrictive new law was incompatible with said mission. Therefore, the U of A administration said, the school would continue offering support to members of marginalized communities on its campus as if nothing had changed.
Ha ha, just kidding, the school wasted no time in shuttering the offices of its Black Student Union and the UA Safe Zone, an LGBTQ+ support center. Suck it, diversity!
A university spokeswoman told the ironically-named student newspaper The Crimson White that “in accordance with state and federal laws, no University program, space or benefit will contain impermissible restrictions, preferences or limitations related to race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity.” Also, the school will no longer use funds to “continue programs offered at Safe Zone.”
Of course neither of these organizations was off-limits to white people, or straight people. What were they going to do, call out the National Guard if a white kid walked into the BSU offices? Or as a former vice president of the BSU told the paper:
[Gabby] Kirk said that the BSU never stated that it was for Black students only but that there were not many non-Black students that went to the office, because they didn’t feel the need to.
Right! We also doubt there was an epidemic of white kids complaining to the university administration that they were being discriminated against by being made to feel uncomfortable if they went into the BSU office. Because who in the hell cares?
The university spokeswoman also said that the school “will continue to provide resources and support to every member of our campus community,” just apparently not if that support involves letting kids from this or that marginalized group have some officially sanctioned space where they can all gather to support each other. Which, as the BSU said in a statement posted to Instagram, was pretty much the entire point of the group’s existence to begin with:
Our office was more than just four walls; it was a haven for all of us, a place where we could be ourselves, support one another, and celebrate our culture and heritage.
Of course there is no way to know if the university administration made these moves because much of its hierarchy agrees with the law’s codification of bigotry under the guise of being anti-bigotry, or if the administrators are simply gutless cowards who don’t want to tangle with the state government. So we’ll just assume the answer is “both.”
Reporting in Inside Higher Ed shows that Alabama is far from the first university to respond to state anti-DEI laws by being cowards and weirdos. Just recently, the University of Missouri at Columbia told its campus chapter of the Legion of Black Collegians that it had to change the name of its annual event, the Welcome Black BBQ, to something more inclusive. After several months of fighting it, the Legion gave in and renamed the event the much more generic Welcome Black and Gold BBQ. (Black and gold are the school colors.)
A professor emerita at Missouri who worked in the school’s DEI office told Axios recently that while DEI critics like to portray such initiatives as bigotry, the truth is that “students’ feelings of social belonging are strongly connected to their ability to learn,” and that feelings of exclusion are “a significant barrier to student learning.” Well, that’s her problem right there, assuming these universities see the students as anything other than suckers with tuition checks.
All of this just serves to reinforce the fact that the anti-DEI panic is at its core a hollow and cynical exercise conservatives have engaged in as part of their long-standing desire to roll back the civil rights gains of the last 70 years or so. The University of Alabama has 38,000 students, of whom around 11 percent are black. Granting a Black student organization some office space in a university building is almost literally the least the administration can do. And with the connivance of the ass-backwards rubes in the state legislature, they now have an excuse to not do even that.
Roll Tide! We hope your football team sucks this year.
[The Crimson White / Instagram / Axios / Inside Higher Ed]
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