TORONTO, Canada – Black students at Canada’s largest university are having a special graduation ceremony just for them, a student-organized celebration of their triumph over alleged systemic racism at the University of Toronto.

Jessica Kirk told The Canadian Press that black students face racism on campus all the time in the form of microaggressions, a lack of black faculty members and other “systemic barriers” that made it harder for the school’s roughly 80 black graduates to obtain a degree than other students.

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“We wanted to take a moment because of the different forms of adversity that they’ve had to face while at university and kind of congratulate them for making it to the finish line,” she said.

“I’ve experienced, and have seen, that black students are more likely to be talked over and interrupted in the classroom,” Kirk said. “Although those are smaller experiences, it takes a toll.”

The idea for the racially segregated ceremony – which allegedly dovetails with the university’s obsession with “inclusion” – came from similar ceremonies held at the University of California, Harvard University, and other American colleges.

Kirk and her friend Nasma Ahmed asked school officials in February if they could organize their own blacks only ceremony, and received a thumbs up. The students are formally organizing the black graduation, but U of T is financing and supporting their efforts.

U of T’s vice president of equity, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, said it was a first for the university but she hopes other oppressed groups like indigenous students will follow suit.

“The goal is to create a strong pipeline of people who want to make U of T a place to study and encouraging those students to come to U of T and look at U of T as an option, a space where they can come and learn and feel very comfortable and contribute to that community,” she said.

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Not everyone thinks the special segregated ceremony is the brightest idea.

Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah described the ceremony, scheduled for today, as a form of manufactured victimhood.

“On Monday, the Toronto Star reported that two African-Canadian students at the University of Toronto, Jessica Kirk and Nasma Ahmed, were organizing U of T’s first-ever ‘Black graduation ceremony’, an event restricted to students of the right skin pigmentation,” he wrote. “No graduates of Scottish, Chinese, Indian or dare I say English ancestry will be permitted. What next, ‘No-White Days’ at Canadian universities?”

Fatah continued:

The news was greeted among liberal circles and the Left as if Toronto had just discovered not one, but two Rosa Parks. As if the two women were reincarnations from apartheid-like Birmingham, Alabama students of 1963.

Wrong. This is not a step forward.

In Lenin’s words, it is ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.’ Its political ignorance steeped in make-believe victimhood in a society that has made such shenanigans possible.

Today, as Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto explains, “The black community in the United States is the 18th wealthiest community — the 18th wealthiest nation on the planet.”

Both the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement were open to Whites, Jews, and people of all colours. The U of T ‘Blacks-only’ graduation ceremony is an insult to Rosa Parks, Mandela, Dr King, Bobby Kennedy and Gandhi.