Are the water fountains also segregated during the ceremony? Update to this previous story.
The commencement season is at hand, soon school will be suspended for the summer, and the silly season is at hand. Students are competing with the college dean and the university president to be the Sophomore of the Year.
The campus at the University of New Hampshire is in an uproar, not over swallowing goldfish or raiding for young ladies’ panties, but over ponchos and sombreros, and who is entitled to wear one, whether it’s raining or not.
Danique Montique, a sophomore (naturally), approached a male student in a poncho on Cinco de Mayo, “the Fifth of May,” observed in Mexico with parades and ceremonies to celebrate Mexico’s victory of the French (who else?) at the Battle of Pueblo. She scolded him for appropriating someone else’s culture. (Shouldn’t the French be offended, too?)
The young man protested that it was all in fun. On some campuses, where drinking beer is the No. 1 sport, insensitive students call it “Cinco de Drunko.”Miss Montique was doubly offended, and posted a photograph of white students in ponchos and sombreros with the caption: “As a black woman, I was forced to become the very thing society deems me to be, angry.”[…]
All that was shocking — shocking ! — but the biggest shock of all was on the campus at Harvard, fair Harvard, where every prospect pleases and fair winds blow. Harvard, once the redoubt of abolitionists, has authorized in the name of progress racially segregated graduation ceremonies.
“Aside from studying and taking grueling tests, if you’re a minority, the outer pressures of society make the already challenging coursework even more difficult,” reported BET.com. “Knowing this, Black members of the class of 2017 decided to form an individual ceremony. It’s the first of its kind at the school in recent memory and took nearly a year to plan. The separate graduation is an effort to highlight the aforementioned struggles and resilience it takes to get through those.”