Wellesley Public Schools hosted ‘Healing Space,’ excluding students ‘who identify only as White’

  • Wellesley Public Schools - Massachusetts

Incidents

Issues

In late March 2021, after the murder of Asian Americans in Atlanta, the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Wellesley Public Schools, outside Boston, decided to host a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American Students and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community who wish to process recent events.”

The message continued: “*Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.”

Notice that the message explicitly stated that “students who identify only as White” were not allowed to participate.

At the very bottom of the message, an assertion is made that the Atlanta shooting was a “hate crime against members of the Asian community.” The FBI director has said that there is no evidence that the shooting was racially motivated.

Afterwards, Superintendent David Lussier and other school district officials sent the community a message on the topic of segregating students by race, “WPS Message on Affinity Spaces,” stating that “we have come to unequivocally affirm the importance of ‘affinity space,’ where members of historically-marginalized groups can come together in a spirit of mutual support and understanding of shared experiences.”

Their assertion that “affinity spaces are not discriminatory” does not mean it’s true. In its mission statement on the district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion page, the school district says it will “challenge one another to continuously examine systems of privilege and bias.”