– The Australian, 20 February 2016 –

Racial segregation is back. That scourge of the 20th century, with its racialised drinking fountains and buses with whites-only seats, is staggering back to life, zombie-like. Only now its loudest cheerleaders are not old-fashioned racists with a Bible in one hand and lit torch in the other. No, it’s the right-on, small-l liberals, those who, in a serious abuse of the English language, call themselves “progressive”. Welcome to the era of PC segregation.

The controversy over QUT’s Aboriginal-only computer lab has shone a light on the continuation of racial segregation in a new form. QUT employee Cindy Prior is suing some students over an incident in 2013 that she says caused her to suffer “offence, embarrassment, humiliation and psychiatric injury”. What did the students do? They tried to enter QUT’s Oodgeroo Unit, to use its computers, but were stopped by Ms Prior on the basis that the lab is “an indigenous space for Aboriginal and Torres Strait students”.

The blocked students took to social media to complain. One accused QUT of practising segregation. Another said “I wonder where the white supremacist computer lab is”. Now that same student, in his submission to Ms Prior’s court case over her alleged humiliation, says: “As an Australian… I was appalled to learn that racial segregation was being practised on [my] campus.”

QUT isn’t alone in offering a space specifically for students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait backgrounds. The University of Sydney’s Koori Centre is also devoted to assisting indigenous students. But when such labs or rooms explicitly bar non-indigenous students, don’t they cross the line from being student-specific help centres to being racially segregated zones? The Racial Discrimination Act forbids discrimination on the basis of race, yet the Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane has refused to condemn QUT, claiming the Act also allows for “special measures”.

What we’re witnessing, not only in Australia but in other Western nations too, is the reawakening of the segregationist mindset. Segregationism has been given a makeover, turned from something that once made us wince — try looking at photos of an American “Coloured Drinking Fountain” without feeling horrified — to something that is treated as acceptable, even good: a “special measure” that can benefit certain groups.

The fashion for PC segregation is especially strong on Western campuses. In the US, students who think of themselves as decent, right-minded, left-of-centre people are openly demanding segregated spaces.

At Oberlin College in Ohio, student protesters are agitating for “safe spaces” for “Africana-identifying students”. At New York University, a student campaign is underway to create “an entire floor of the mixed-use building… to be dedicated to students of colour.” Students at UCLA want a floor of the student union building to be made African-American-only, on the basis that there needs to be a “safe space for black students”.

In Britain, radical students have tried to create blacks-only spaces. At Goldsmiths University in London, a film-and-discussion group was described as being for “BME students only” (BME stands for “black and minority ethnic”). The student newspaper The Tab said this is “the first [racially segregated event] at a UK university”. A writer for the Spectator argued that the new campus “orthodoxy of the safe space” — where students obsess over creating zones in which nothing controversial is ever said or done — has “now led to racial segregation at a British university”.

Some Western universities now actively encourage racial thinking. In fact, on some American campuses, students and academics who *refuse* to think racially face condemnation.

UCLA says it is a “racial microaggression” to say things like, “When I look at you, I don’t see colour”; “There is only one race: the human race”; and “I don’t believe in race”. Apparently such phrases undermine individuals’ experiences as “racial/cultural beings”.

Other American universities likewise warn against “colour-blindness”. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point advises staff that any comment that suggests you do not “want to acknowledge race” can be a problem. The University of Missouri’s guide to “inclusive terminology” says the ideal of colour-blindness may have “originated from civil-rights [activism]”, but it’s no longer cool because it can be “disempowering for people whose racial identity is an important part of who they are”.

So now we’re expected to treat people as “racial/cultural beings”. We’re expected to “acknowledge” a person’s race. This grates against the great, progressive gains of the late twentieth century, especially of the American civil-rights movement, which encouraged us *not* to treat people as racial beings, and to *refuse* to acknowledge race.

Indeed, Martin Luther King’s great vision was a world in which his children, and everyone else’s, would “not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. That dream is being demolished. Now people are elevating colour over character, seeing others as racial beings rather than simply beings.

Beyond campuses, other parts of public life are being re-racialised too. Witness talk of the “black vote” and the “white working-class vote”, with politicians increasingly approaching the electorate as racial blocs. Or behold the popularity of phrases like “As a black man” or “As an Asian woman” or “As an LGBT person”: we now announce ourselves by our natural characteristics rather than through saying what we do or what we believe.

Western society is being re-racialised. Fifty years after the height of the US civil-rights movement and other struggles, the racial imagination is making a comeback.

This is what the politics of identity has wrought. As the old left-right divide has become emptied of real meaning, and as we enter what some refer to as a post-ideological era, more and more of us are defining ourselves by our race, gender or sexuality rather than by our moral convictions. And this has nurtured a really divisive dynamic.

Where once progressive politics was about “the common man”, about the shared interests of people of various colours and of both sexes, now it’s about the apparently different experiences and outlooks of whites, blacks, gays, women, trans people, and so on. Universal ideals are being subsumed by the relentless rise of a deeply sectional politics of identity.

The end result? Segregation. Although now it’s dolled up as a “safe space”. How long before we create a blacks-only zone on buses in the name of having a “safe space for black people”? We must fight anew against racial thinking, and restate the case for character being the only criterion on which we should judge our fellow humans.