Strange things happen in Wokistan : racial segregation is back ! In a growing number of schools all across America, educators who believe themselves to be fighting for racial justice are separating children from each other on the basis of their skin color. Some public schools have started segregating particular subjects. Evanston Township High School, in the suburbs of Chicago, now offers calculus classes reserved for students who “identify as Black.” Many more are embracing race-segregated “affinity groups.” A school district in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for example, recently hosted a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American Students.” As an emailed invitation emphasized, “This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, not for students who identify only as White.”

At some of America’s most elite schools, from Boston to Los Angeles, teachers now routinely divide students into different groups based on their race or ethnicity. In many cases, such groups are effectively mandatory. In some, students are so young that their teachers need to tell them which group to join. At Gordon, a storied private school in Rhode Island, teachers start to divide children into affinity groups—which meet every week and are divided by race—in kindergarten.
“A play-based curriculum that explicitly affirms racial identity,” wrote Julie Parsons, a longtime teacher at Gordon, which was recently honored for its efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion by the National Association of Independent Schools, is especially important “for the youngest learners.”

Dalton, a prestigious school on New York’s Upper East Side that educates the children of the city’s elite, has gone out of its way to explain the pedagogical goals that animate such practices. According to statements and outside resources hosted on Dalton’s website, antiracist institutions must help their students achieve the right racial identity. A conversation between experts convened by a prominent organization that has worked closely with the school and is fittingly called Embrace-Race points out that when students are young, “even a person of color or Black person might say: I don’t see myself as a racial being. I’m just human.” The task of a good education is to change that attitude: “We are racial beings.”
And the first step toward that goal is to reject the “color-blind idea” that our commonalities are more important than our differences.

(from Yascha Mounk: The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time)