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.
Another Minneapolis public school, Roosevelt High School, offers one of the two courses, according to a course catalog, which states the course is “for Black girls (Queens)” who “will explore different topics relevant to their lives as Black students.” The girls, designated as “Queens,” will “build a sisterhood” and, among other goals, “learn about creating healthy, positive relationships” over the year-long course.
Edison High School and North High School offer both courses, according to course catalogs.
The public schools require students to take at least one ethnic studies course to graduate high school. {snip}
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The “BLACK Culture” courses are offered in collaboration with MPS’s Office of Black Student Achievement, according to the course catalogs. “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.”
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