This Chicago Tribune article reports African-American students holding separate homecoming ceremonies on a variety of mainstream campuses. What is revealed here is academia's dirty little secret: Minorities on campuses self-segregate and the cowardly school administrators allow it to happen and even facilitate it.
What makes this so immensely ironic is that university presidents insist on admission quotas or the equivalent in order to have a racially representative student body. Once they have this diverse student body, do they insist that everyone live, work, study, play, and celebrate in an integrated fashion? Study and work: yes. Play and celebrate: no. [The "live" is equivocal, some campuses have a la Raza dorm, an Asian dorm and/or a black dorm, other campuses don't.] And some campuses have racially separate fraternities and sororities organized by and for minorities.
I've kicked around academia for too many years; I've taught on 9 campuses in 3 states and a territory. My classes were always integrated. However, when I'd walk over to the student union and look at the students sitting around the tables eating, talking and studying, the tables were almost invariably segregated by race. Here an African-American table, then a couple of white tables, there a Hispanic table, or an Asian table, and a couple more white tables. Left to their own devices, college students self-segregate by race or ethnic group. The same pattern is generally true in the library, or in social groups of students walking across campus.
Many campuses have separate graduation ceremonies for students of this or that minority group. I hadn't heard about separate homecoming ceremonies but it makes sense and fits the pattern. Whatever happened to Brown v. Board of Education? I thought we'd established that "separate but equal" was nasty. Apparently it is only nasty if whites do it.
