CNN laments that colleges are canceling affinity graduations due to anti-DEI policies. “Here is how students are preserving the traditions,” it reports. But why should they?
Imagine if taxpayer money were used to fund white affinity graduations and ceremonies at colleges and universities. It would be a scandal—a national controversy. Academics, activist groups, media outlets, and public officials would line up to condemn it as an act of racial exclusion, a ritual of white supremacy dressed in institutional respectability. And they would have a point.
So why is it acceptable for those same institutions to fund black affinity graduations?
The answer, we’re told, lies in history. White affinity events risk reinforcing racial hierarchies in a society where whiteness has long been dominant. Black affinity graduations, on the other hand, are said to offer marginalized students an affirming space—a safe space—to celebrate achievement in the face of systemic exclusion. This is a radical theory of equity: race-based remedies for race-based harm.
I know this argument. I once believed it. I don’t anymore.
This is not a moral principle. It’s an ideological commitment—one that many, probably most, Americans reject (even if they’re scared of saying so because of the backlash), one that fundamentally contradicts the American Creed, which affirms the equal moral worth of every individual and the rejection of racial double standards. It replaces the universal with the tribal, and justice with selective grievance. They call it progressives. But it’s plainly regressive.
But the deeper problem isn’t just philosophical or theoretical—it’s practical and self-reinforcing. These ceremonies don’t merely reflect a view of the past; they manufacture a story about the present. Their very conduct presupposes the permanence of racial hierarchy. That is the fatal circularity of contemporary antiracism: the black affinity ceremony is justified by the claim that racial inequality persists—and yet it enacts that inequality (separate is not equal), and does so as if racism were fixed, inevitable, and undeniable.
It’s a strange alchemy. The ritual becomes its own proof. It presumes what it claims to resist. It asserts the reality of racial division by performing it. It reifies the very hierarchy it ostensibly seeks to dismantle—by treating racial identity as entitlement and experience. One doesn’t resist racial division by engaging in it. The paradox is obnoxious. What so-called antiracist really seek is cancellation of the American Creed.
Critically, those organizing black affinity celebrations assert the exclusive right to do so. If black students organize by race, it’s celebrated as resistance. If white students did the same, it would be condemned as racism. The asymmetry is not incidental. It is the entire logic.
This is bad logic. This isn’t moral clarity—it’s moral relativism. It’s the same double standard we see in language taboos: one group may use a slur as a symbol of reclamation; another may lose their career for quoting it, even in academic context. That’s not equality. That’s power exercised along racial lines. History doesn’t justify that—it’s discrimination repackaged as social justice. It flips racial power, which remains an assertion of racial power.
This framework demands permanent grievance. It cannot allow for resolution, because resolution would negate its justification. Racism, however recoded as antiracism, needs division to validate its existence. That’s not progress. It’s ideological entrenchment through ritualized racialization.
I have said this much before, but it bears repeating: If this is inclusion, it is an inclusion that requires exclusion. If it is equity, it is equity that demands unequal treatment. If it is justice, it is the justice of group identity—not individual merit, not moral consistency, but tribal entitlement. And that’s no justice at all.
We’re not building a post-racial society with affinity ceremonies; we’re entrenching race as the central organizing principle of public life. That is not a vision of shared citizenship; it’s a roadmap for perpetual division. And that’s what progressives want.
I reject the theory—and the politics—that make this acceptable. In a constitutional republic, individuals must not be treated differently based on skin color—whether that means denying them something or granting them a privilege. This is why reparations is such an immoral and un-American proposal. If black students wish to host separate ceremonies, they may do so—just not with public funding. Taxpayer-supported events must be open to all regardless of skin color.
The dismantling of DEI is not just a policy preference—it’s a moral imperative. This is about restoring the colorblind principle at the heart of the American project: that all people are to be judged by their accomplishments and character, not by the color of their skin.
Trump is doing more than dismantling DEI. He’s stabbing at the beating heart of institutional discrimination. He rightly wondered why Harvard was giving more than 30 percent of its seats to foreigners while excluding white and Asian Americans. But the President didn’t wait for an answer. He stopped Harvard from discriminating against selected demographics by importing students by revoking Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), effectively barring the institution from enrolling international students.
The administration cited national security concerns and alleged insufficient transparency regarding the identities of foreign students to justify revocation. This is not cover for the real agenda. National security concerns are also part of the equation. Two birds with one stone.
Harvard responded by filing a lawsuit (of course), arguing that the revocation was retaliatory and unconstitutional, especially given the university’s opposition to certain governmental policies. What policies? Harvard accuses the Trump Administration of attempting to influence Harvard’s curriculum, governance, and the ideological perspectives of faculty and students. Harvard viewed this as an infringement on its academic independence and First Amendment rights. See how the Orwellian inversion works? Harvard uses the rhetoric of free speech to flout free speech.
Harvard is desperate to deflect attention from the very real concerns raised by the Trump Administration about institutional discrimination, campus antisemitism, and alleged coordination with the Chinese Communist Party. For it’s part, the Department of Homeland Security has accused Harvard of fostering a hostile environment and collaborating with foreign adversaries and demanded detailed records related to international students and foreign funding—reasonable inquiries in an age of cyber-espionage and ideological subversion.
More than decertification of SEVP, Harvard’s refusal to fully comply has been met with threats to revoke federal funding. I fully agree. What gives Harvard and its defenders the right to obstruct the federal government’s responsibility to protect the American people from threats to national security? If there are spies and extremists operating under the cover of academia, then Harvard isn’t just turning a blind eye—it is actively shielding those who are stealing secrets and undermining the nation from within.
Predictably, the federal district judge in the case, Allison Burroughs, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the revocation, allowing foreign students to continue their studies at Harvard while the legal proceedings unfold.
Remember when the Supreme Court told Harvard they couldn’t do the racist thing anymore? In June 2023, the US Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. The Court’s decision concluded that Harvard’s use of race in admissions lacked sufficiently focused and measurable objectives, unavoidably employed race in a negative manner, and involved racial stereotyping.
Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that while universities could consider how race affected an applicant’s life experiences, they could not use race as a factor in admissions decisions per se. But even this concession undercuts the foundational American principles of equality before the law and individual merit. The idea that a person’s race—even indirectly—should influence admissions decisions stands in tension with a nation built on the ideals of equal opportunity and individualism. If race is truly irrelevant to a person’s intrinsic capability and worth, then it should play no role, overt or subtle, in how educational—or any other—opportunities are distributed. A truly fair admissions system would judge applicants solely on personal achievement, character, and potential—not their racial or ethnic background.
Still, the ruling effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, prompting institutions nationwide to reevaluate their admissions processes to comply with the new legal standards. That’s a huge win for the cause of justice. Yet, in the meantime, Harvard has been effectively discriminating against white and Asian Americans by luring foreigners to their institution and enrolling them. As with the black affinity ceremonial, that’s fine—as long as taxpayers aren’t paying for it.
I know progressives who are apoplectic over this. Why would any taxpayer support giving money to a racist institution that denied opportunities for Americans? Answer: because many progressives are anti-American, and they associate white and white-adjacent citizens with Americanism. It’s the same impulse that’s fueling the return of virulent antisemitism. Anything that is oppositional to Americanism, and broadly the West—transgressing boundaries protecting children and women, Islamofascism, whatever—is coded as social justice and any resistance to it is bigotry.
It would be one thing if anti-American anti-Enlightenment ideology was relegated to the fringes of society—Antifa, climate fanatics, BLM, trans activists, and the like—but we have major colleges and universities in the United States constructing the idea systems that mean to delegitimize the West and socializing an army of professionals whose purpose it is to take these ideas and colonize and command our sense-making and policy-making institutions.
Donald Trump is right to try to stop the runaway train of institutionalized racialization. In the 1950s and 60s, this country rightly dismantled the laws and customs that segregated people by race. But instead of moving beyond identity politics, progressives reengineered it through affirmative action, DEI, and critical race theory. So-called antiracist ideologies have entrenched race-consciousness into our culture, laws, and policies—and they have to be confronted.
The Cathedral portrays Trump’s actions as racist. But if anti-racism is to have any real meaning at all, it must mean that decision-making and segregation on the basis of race is intolerable.
freedom and reason 