Fast Times at Ridgemont High is the title of the 1982 comedy starring Sean Penn and others. If Ridgemont High were a Minneapolis public high school, Penn would be barred on account of the color of his skin from taking courses on “black culture” served up at several Minneapolis public high schools. The courses are restricted to black students. Jessica Schwalb reports for the Washington Free Beacon:
Several Minneapolis public high schools prohibit white and Asian students from enrolling in a set of courses on black culture, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The courses contribute toward Minneapolis Public Schools’ (MPS) electives requirement, and white and Asian students must therefore choose from a narrower list of options in order to graduate.
One of the proscribed courses, “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge,” is open only to black men. Another, “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge (Queens),” is open only to black women, a practice civil rights attorneys say almost certainly puts the schools in violation of civil rights law.
South High School, Minneapolis’s oldest and largest public high school where a large majority of students are black or Hispanic, lists the two courses in its 2025-2026 curriculum guide. The former examines “the complexity of the black male experience by exploring the lived reality of black men in the United States,” the latter “the experiences of Black girls in public schools.” The school’s guide explicitly states the courses are open to “All black male students” and “All black female students,” respectively.
Well, of course, those “civil rights” attorneys who doubt the legality of the racial restriction are correct, and South High is only one of several Minneapolis public high schools that should have to answer for what it is doing. Edison, Roosevelt, and North high schools have also gotten in on the act.
The story quotes Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project: “It is extremely hard to imagine how this could possibly be legal under either Title VI [race] or Title IX [sex] to literally have programming explicitly open only to one race.” Stated more bluntly, it is grossly illegal.
Not surprisingly, “South, Edison, Roosevelt, and North high schools did not respond to requests for comment. MPS did not respond to a request for comment.” Also: “The Office of Black Student Achievement did not respond to a request for comment.”
Coincidentally, the Free Press is running Eli Lake’s long profile of Harmeet Dhillon (behind the Free Press paywall) and her “civil rights revolution” at the Trump Department of Justice. She means to enforce the constitutional and statutory mandates of colorblind treatment. “As she sees it,” Lake writes, “the legal regime created to end racial discrimination has itself become discriminatory: a corrupt spoils system for favored minorities.”
Schwalb’s Free Beacon story should send up a flare to our friend Harmeet and/or our friend Dan Rosen, the new United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota.
