What Justice? What america that is founded on a system of equality?........When did that happen?

 

A 'Confederacy of Whiteness': Virginia Military Academy's Uncivil War Against Its Black Students

http://http://http://Michael Harriot

Wed, September 23, 2020, 10:00 AM PDT·20 mins read

When Vice President Mike Pence visited the Virginia Military Academy, the Black students disappeared.

That is not a metaphor.

Everyone loves a good metaphor. But Mike Pence is not the personification of VMI’s racism, and there are much better ways to compare 181-year old VMI—the oldest state-supported military college in the U.S.—with the 244-year-old country in which it sits. Geologists have never seen a molehill evolve into a mountain range. Few veterinarians can recall a camel spine being fractured by a straw. And VMI is not a metaphor for America.

Black people built America. The Virginia Military Institute, on the other hand, began as an all-white male college. Black people were in Virginia since 1619 but Black students couldn’t enroll at VMI for the school’s first 129 years. While America pretends to be a democracy, VMI does not. America feigns progress while VMI unapologetically clings to its past. At least America tries to camouflage institutional inequality. VMI, however, will not even concede that systemic racism exists.

For years, Black students at VMI have used every conceivable method to tell the leadership how the school fosters an environment that is openly hostile to non-white students. They told professors. They wrote letters. They spoke to the media. The authorities at VMI met each successive attempt with indifference and contempt.

According to a dozen current and former VMI cadets who spoke to The Root, the administrators won’t even pretend to substantively address issues of racism, sexism and harassment at the school. Instead, VMI’s position seems to be that cadets at VMI cannot be “victims of racism” because there is no race at the beloved institution. So, when VMI welcomed Mike Pence—along with Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy and U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), both VMI grads—to its campus on Sept. 10, a group of students decided to protest by becoming a literal example of their treatment.

They became invisible.

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