Administrators at the University of Missouri barred a Black welcome-week block party as unlawful discrimination. Complaints from non-Black students about denied access in prior years are unlikely given campus demographics. U.S. Department of Education data show 79 percent of undergraduates at the flagship campus were white and only 5 percent were Black in 2023-24, with fewer than 1,200 Black students. Only 33 of 1,027 tenure-track faculty were Black last year. These numbers make it implausible that Black collegians routinely wield power to exclude white peers. Systematic, race-disaggregated analyses of complaints would likely confirm this. Activities like the block party support Black students who are often one of very few in many spaces.
Administrators at the University of Missouri told a student organization that it could not proceed with a "Black 2 Class Block Party" because the event qualified as "unlawful discrimination." Is it possible that students who are not Black complained of being denied access to the annual event in prior years? Probably not. This cancellation is one of numerous examples of how institutions are attempting to comply with the Trump administration's anti-DEI agenda, as Inside Higher Ed reporter Jessica Blake noted in an article last Friday.
U.S. Department of Education data shows that during the 2023-24 school year, 79 percent of undergraduates on the University of Missouri's flagship campus were white. Black students were just 5 percent of the undergraduate student body. Put differently, nearly 19,000 students were white and fewer than 1,200 were Black. Numerically, there are not and have never been enough Black students there to create a climate of exclusion for their white counterparts.
Given these demographics, it seems implausible that collegians in the minority have enough power to routinely and unlawfully discriminate against their peers who comprise the majority. This could be confirmed via systematic analyses of discrimination complaints submitted to the university in recent years. When disaggregated by race, the data is unlikely to show that it is overwhelmingly white students who most often experience racism. Surely few, if any, complaints are about encounters with discrimination at Black student organization events.
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