My Article Condemning Racial Segregation Was Removed from a Medium Publication. Huh?

I’ve never enjoyed the ol’ heave-ho more.

Joe Garza
6 min readDec 10, 2020

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Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay

Last October, I published an article slamming the King County Library System in Washington state for holding racially segregated “DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Sessions” — one for “People of Color” and one for “People Who are White”, which you can marvel at here:

Below is the image that made the rounds on social media and prompted me to write the article in the first place:

The image wasn’t fake, as the King County Library System released a statement justifying their decision by claiming that the racially segregated “listening sessions” were voluntary.

Ahem.

For those of you who are new to my writing or just like reading my Declaration of Culture War, I’ve made it my own personal mission to fight wokeness, especially in the arts and in our cultural institutions. I don’t do this to score political points for my side; I’m an old school liberal, a far cry from the reactionary right-winger I’m often accused of when I criticize things like, well, racial segregation, especially when it’s pretending to be about fairness and compassion.

I’m against racism from the political right, but I’m also against racism from the political left. And, since I consider myself a part of the political left, I consider it my duty to criticize my own side, regardless of the slings and arrows I take from people whose overall goals, if not their means to achieve them, for the U.S. I largely agree with.

So it came as a surprise when someone from An Injustice! reached out to me about including my article in their Medium publication about “voices”, “values”, and “identities”.

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Joe Garza

I cover art, culture, film, comedy, creativity, books, and more at https://medium.com/the-reckless-muse