It seems lately as if everything that's old is new again. One-hundred-and-two years after the Spanish Influenza, we're back to having a national pandemic. And sixty-six years after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, we're back to having government-sanctioned segregation, this time in Portland.

Brown is America’s seminal civil rights case, in which the Supreme Court explicitly held against segregation. In doing so, it overruled the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision from 1896, in which the Supreme Court held that making separate, but theoretically “equal,” facilities for different races satisfied the 13th and 14th Amendments. In Brown, the Supreme Court rejected the Plessy doctrine, holding that it has no place in American education: 

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Although the decision was limited to public education, the underlying idea is so profound that it now applies as a matter of law, not just to all government-run facilities, but to all American institutions, public or private.

Hard-left academia, though, has been busy reinstating segregation based upon race and sexuality. For example, colleges now offer separate dorms for different races and sexual orientations. Recently a video emerged showing a black woman at the University of Virginia kicking white people out of a multicultural student center:

Leftists at the University of Virginia are dictating who is and who isn’t allowed in the new Multicultural Student Center.

“Frankly there is just too many white people in here, and this is a space for people of color.”

This kind of racist intolerance is NOT multicultural. pic.twitter.com/XkefKqfqLA

— YAF (@yaf) February 12, 2020

If you’re wondering what happens to the college students who embrace this impulse to segregate, some of them may be working for the municipal government in Portland, Oregon.

As is true in other Democrat-run cities, Portland has a sizable homeless population. While other cities are moving the homeless into hotel rooms or other indoor facilities to protect that population and, by extension, the rest of their city from COVID-19, Portland has a different approach. It’s setting up three outdoor tent cities to house the homeless:

Portland will open three organized camps for homeless people during coronavirus — an unprecedented step for a city that has long resisted sanctioned camping.

The three sites — two on Southeast Water Avenue and one near the westside base of Broadway Bridge — will also group residents in a way that has rarely been done in Portland shelters.

What’s genuinely unprecedented about this move, though, is that Portland is officially segregating the tent cities by race and sexual orientation:

One site will give priority to LGBTQ people and one for people of color. Anyone who wants the services specific to those sites will also be allowed to camp there. The third site will be for everyone, with an emphasis on older people.

The Oregon Live report from which the above quotation comes does not offer any explanation for this policy. Nor does OPB, a Portland NPR outlet, which reports on the same story.

Still, one doesn’t need a journalist to explain this segregation impulse. You can tell that it comes from college graduates just by paying attention to the words that Jo Ann Hardesty, a Portland Commissioner, uses when describing the city’s homeless situation:

“The reality is that a stay-at-home order leaves those without homes to return to behind, and we can’t let that happen,” said Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. “While the housed community can take refuge in their homes and have the bulk of their needs met during this time, our houseless neighbors have lost the many resources and support networks they depended on.”

Only in academia do you see sensitivities so delicate that the phrase “homeless” is no longer permissible. Instead, one has “housed community” and “houseless neighbors.” This is the same mentality that has taken the accurate phrase “illegal alien” and morphed it into “undocumented immigrant.”

This hyper-sensitivity is at odds with the Democrat policies that drive homelessness in the first place. The reality behind the euphemisms is that leftists are comfortable allowing people who are mentally ill and addicted to live on the streets while granting them easy access to food and drugs.

In light of Portland’s new policy, this video, from August 2019, is quite apropos: