Minneapolis High Schools Bar White and Asian Students From 'BLACK Culture' Classes

Plus, 'painful' layoffs underway at NBC and John Podesta gets laughed out of court

Oct 16, 2025

Several Minneapolis public high schools offer courses on “BLACK Culture” and prohibit white and Asian students from enrolling.

Course catalogs at institutions like South High School, Minneapolis’s oldest and largest public high school, indicate the courses “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge” and “BLACK Culture – Building Lives Acquiring Cultural Knowledge (Queens)” are open only to “black male students” and “black female students,” respectively. That’s almost certainly illegal, civil rights attorneys told our Jessica Schwalb.

“It is extremely hard to imagine how this could possibly be legal under either Title VI or Title IX to literally have programming explicitly open only to one race,” American Civil Rights Project executive director Dan Morenoff said, referring to federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and gender.

“The ‘BLACK Culture’ courses are offered in collaboration with the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Office of Black Student Achievement,” Schwalb reports. “’A lot of times within our education system, Black students are expected to conform to a white standard,’ the director of the office, Dena Luna, told the Wall Street Journal in 2023. ‘In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness.’”

NBC News carried out “significant” layoffs on Wednesday characterized by the former CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy as “deep and painful.” We’re not so sure.

“It’s another promising development—on the heels of Donald Trump’s historic Middle East peace deal—that weary Americans can embrace to justify their hope for a better future,” our Andrew Stiles writes. “Most encouragingly, the network eliminated its ‘teams dedicated to covering issues affecting Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups,’ prompting howls of outrage from diversity fanatics.”

“The long-awaited industry downsizing comes at a time when public trust in the mainstream media is at an all-time low. Liberal journalists—pardon the redundancy—have only themselves to blame. Some network executives may have finally realized something has to change. Filling the airwaves with partisan hacks who openly disdain half the country might not be a viable business strategy.”

An Obama-appointed judge dismissed with prejudice a high-profile climate suit arguing that Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policies will kill children, our Thomas Catenacci reports. It’s a blow to former Biden climate czar John Podesta, who served as an expert witness in the lawsuit.

Podesta’s testimony didn’t manage to persuade Judge Dana Christensen, who found that the courts lack the authority to block Trump’s executive orders declaring a national energy emergency and boosting oil and gas production. Montana attorney general Austin Knudsen (R.), who led a coalition of 19 states to intervene in the case on behalf of the Trump administration, spiked the football, calling the case a “show trial contrived by climate activists who wasted the taxpayers’ money.”

Elsewhere:

Zohran Mamdani is a big advocate for peace in Gaza. But when Martha MacCallum of Fox News pressed him on whether Hamas—the terror outfit currently slaughtering its Gazan critics in the street—should disarm, he demurred. “I don’t really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel,” the New York City socialist—who has never missed an opportunity to spout off about genocide and famine—told her.
The Supreme Court appears poised to ban the consideration of race when drawing congressional districts, having heard arguments in the dispute over a race-conscious Louisiana map on Wednesday. That is a promising development: For more on that case, read Students for Fair Admissions founder Edward Blum’s primer here.
There’s a messy Democratic primary brewing in Massachusetts, where 46-year-old congressman Seth Moulton is challenging 79-year-old incumbent senator Ed Markey, who was first elected to Congress in 1976, when Wings’s “Silly Love Songs” finished as the top track of the year.

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