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.
Left-wing curricula is commonplace in deep-blue public school districts like MPS, which has spent millions of dollars to incorporate “ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity” into its K-5 math curriculum. The Minneapolis public schools are about 30-percent black and 20-percent Hispanic—a much higher proportion than the city’s overall population.
The public schools require students to take at least one ethnic studies course to graduate high school. The requirement, which was in effect for the first time for the class of 2025, comes after the city’s downtown was damaged by rioting in 2020 in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, which took place not far from South High School.
Requiring all students to take ethnic studies courses is likely legal. Racially segregated classes, however, are likely illegal.
“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,” Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a public interest law firm, told the Free Beacon, referencing federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and gender.
South, Edison, Roosevelt, and North high schools did not respond to requests for comment. MPS did not respond to a request for comment.
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.”
Luna’s comments came in a Journal piece that highlighted “race-specific elective courses” in blue cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco. The outlet noted “federal antidiscrimination laws prevent public schools from mandatorily separating students by race,” but claimed “education lawyers say optional courses can comply with the law.” The Journal did not quote any such lawyers, and Morenoff said the course being an elective is irrelevant in the eyes of the law.
“I am sure that there are those who would tell you that they could draw a distinction based on whether or not this was compulsory given the language of Title VI,” he said. “I strongly doubt that those arguments are good.”
“Is there a federal funding recipient?” Morenoff continued. “Yes. Does the federal funding recipient have a program that we’re talking about? Yes. Is that program and its benefits being afforded to individuals or denied to individuals based on their race? The answer is very clearly yes. We’re kind of done. It doesn’t actually matter whether it’s mandatory.”
The Office of Black Student Achievement did not respond to a request for comment.
MPS associate superintendent Michael Walker established the office in 2014 as the Office of Black Male Student Achievement to “address the needs of the largest demographic group within MPS,” according to its website. It began offering resources to girls in 2019.
“Historical context proves that the educational system was designed for the educational success of White students, which had and continues to have a direct and negative impact on the opportunities and experiences of Black students,” the office’s website says. “We are not here to ‘fix’ Black students. In fact, we are here to change the beliefs and mindsets of educators as well as awaken the greatness within Black students.”
Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, explicitly bars any racial discrimination in schools, whether a course is an elective or not. MPS, meanwhile, requires students to receive five elective credits—effectively five year-long classes—to graduate high school. By barring white students from certain courses that fulfill a graduation requirement, these students have fewer options to complete the coursework needed for a diploma.
Attorney Jason Torchinsky, who is representing a Harvard Business School student in a civil rights case against Harvard University, argued the racially segregated courses are a legal “problem” for MPS.
“Clearly allowing a governmental program that is only open to individuals of a particular race is a problem under the U.S. Constitution and U.S. civil rights laws, and frankly, probably also under state civil rights laws,” he said. “The fact that they further restrict the courses based on gender as well is even more stunning.”
“Substitute any other minority in for ‘African American male’ or ‘African American female,’ and tell me if anybody would say it would be okay to restrict a course only to particular races or genders. And the answer is no.”
Public school students in Minneapolis went more than a year without full in-person instruction during the coronavirus pandemic. A decline in test scores followed. MPS received roughly $250 million in federal funds to help students recover, some of which went to the Office of Black Student Achievement. Its operating budget in 2024 was $2.2 million.
Now that pandemic-era funding is drying up, the office is slated for a yearly budget cut of $750,000, but will continue to operate, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. Test scores in the district have not recovered—just 36 percent of MPS students are proficient in math, according to a Minnesota Reformer database.
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