by Robby Soave
“ACLU, you protect Hitler too,” chanted the protesters, many of whom were white. This was the least colorful of their slogans; they continued with “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution,” “Blood on your hands,” and “Shame, shame, shame” (which I took as an ode to Queen Cersei Lannister’s dehumanizing abuse at the hands of the Faith Militant during the fifth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones—although it turns out that this particular chant predates the show).
Most notably, the activists also shouted “Liberalism is white supremacy.” Such a statement will strike many readers as incoherent—it was incoherent to me as well, at least at first. As an ideology, white supremacy is a staple of the far, far right, and associated in America with the KKK and neo-Nazi movements. These groups are not exactly conservative—which is why their newest incarnation needed to invent a term, “alt-right,” as in an alternative to the right as it is currently understood—but they are in direct opposition to liberalism. Liberalism in all its forms (classical, New Deal–era, modern, neo-) is the ideology of individual rights and anti-racism. Whatever their differences with mild, plain old liberalism, surely the leftist activists did not actually view it as equivalent to white supremacy.
In fact, they did.
“This is about liberals’ use of the concept of free speech in the furthering of White Supremacy,” one of the protesters told the Black Voice, a campus publication run by students of color, and one of the few media outlets with which the activists were willing to speak (probably because its writers and editorial team were themselves activists). “Our goal is to silence white supremacy, to not allow it a platform like the ACLU has done for a long time.”12
Historically, the ACLU has defended the First Amendment rights of everyone, including neo-Nazis, the alt-right, and the Westboro Baptist Church—but also communists, gay activists, and racial and environmental equality organizations. The ACLU believes that when one group’s free speech rights are threatened, the entire principle is endangered. That’s why, in 2017, the ACLU sued the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for viewpoint discrimination, alleging that in preventing certain groups from advertising on the Washington, D.C., Metro system, the transit authority had violated the First Amendment. In order to make the point that free speech is a universal right, the ACLU selected a wide range of candidates for the suit, choosing to represent Carafem (a nonprofit that supports abortion), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and Milo Yiannopoulos himself. It’s not about Carafem’s views, or PETA’s, or Milo’s: it’s about the free speech protections that all Americans enjoy under the First Amendment.
But for the activists at William and Mary, the issue is black-and-white: you are with them or you are against them. And in taking the side of white nationalists in free speech cases, the ACLU had declared itself an enemy of the left, in the young protesters’ view. Intersectionality, of course, does not concern itself with an individual right such as free speech: it is concerned with rights for the marginalized and their allies. The intersectional left will not defend free speech as a good thing in and of itself—it’s good for intersectional progressives to have it, and bad otherwise.
Unlike at the Charles Murray event in Ann Arbor, William and Mary’s administration provided no pushback whatsoever. On the contrary, one of the students who had helped organize the ACLU event handed the protesters a microphone, encouraging their leader to speak.
“We know from personal experience that rights granted to wealthy, white, cis, male, straight bodies do not trickle down to marginalized groups,” said the leader of the protest, a black female student preaching intersectionality. “We face greater barriers and consequences for speaking.”
But these protesters faced no formal consequences. The university released a mild statement—“William & Mary must be a campus that welcomes difficult conversations, honest debate and civil dialogue”—and that was that. Having successfully prevented the event from taking place, the activists approached Gastañaga, the thwarted speaker. Some in the audience attempted to have a private conversation with her; the activists closed in, continuing to drown her out. Eventually those students departed, no longer willing to defy the mob.
I emailed Camryn, editor in chief of the Black Voice, asking for clarification regarding the protesters’ motivations. She declined to put me in touch with any of the other activists, claiming that “we have recently become familiar with your work and frankly do not find that it reflects the views of this publication.” I countered that of course my views did not reflect those of her publication but that I was open to being persuaded if she put forth an argument for why I was wrong. Her response was polite, but she steadfastly refused to defend—or simply explain—why her circle of friends thought censorship was the best path to ideological victory.
In the end, Camryn would answer only one of my questions: she confirmed that “shame, shame, shame” was not intended as an homage to Game of Thrones.
In any case, I submit that chanting “Liberalism is white supremacy” is not a good tactic for a movement that needs to win over some liberals, moderates, and conservatives in order to succeed.
Hate or Hoax?
One defense of the campus Black Lives Matter group’s illiberal actions is that desperate times call for desperate measures. Students have witnessed a disturbing and unprecedented rise in overtly racist incidents, acts of vandalism, and hate crimes, this line of thinking goes. White supremacists are openly recruiting on campuses, the anti-immigrant and anti-black alt-right is ascendant, and President Trump’s racially charged rhetoric has provided cover for racist forces to act more brazenly.
“Consider the climate of hatred that’s taking place across the United States,” Columbia University doctoral fellow Kayum Ahmed told me. “Consider what has happened in previous locations where alt-right speakers and fundamentalist speakers have spoken and then the subsequent violence that emerges.”
At first blush, it seems surprising that this staggering and sudden surge in racism is most apparent on college campuses, which are (on paper, at least) the most liberal, tolerant, accepting, non-racist, politically correct places on earth. But it could be the case that Trump’s election made racist students feel safer making their odious views known (thus one #Resistance slogan: “Make racists afraid again”).
On its face, the recent string of racist incidents on campuses would seem to vindicate the left: We said America is a rotten, racist place, and here is the proof. If even progressive university campuses contain a fifth column of students posting racist flyers, spray-painting swastikas, hanging nooses, and throwing bananas at students of color, who could disagree that the extreme and frequently off-putting tactics of Black Lives Matter are a necessary antidote to the poison American voters swallowed on November 8, 2016?
Many on the left predicted Trump’s rise would produce a corresponding increase in hate crimes and bias incidents. Less than a month after Trump’s election, the Southern Poverty Law Center already claimed vindication, releasing a report titled “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Election on Our Nation’s Schools.”13 The fact that it was far, far too soon to measure said impact eluded the SPLC’s experts, whose report was based on unscientific data collected from email subscribers and website visitors—in other words, people who may have already shared the SPLC’s incredibly broad definition of hate. (Note that the center counted Maajid Nawaz, an Islamist turned liberal reformer who works to deradicalize the Islamic world, as an “anti-Muslim extremist.”14 The SPLC later admitted this characterization was erroneous, though it took Nawaz threatening a lawsuit to make the center relent.)
A large majority of respondents said the Trump effect was real: Trump’s election had negatively impacted their schools’ climate or made students feel more anxious. The SPLC report also produced plenty of incidents of supposedly Trump-related bullying: students yelling “Go back to Mexico” and “Build the wall” at Latino kids on the playground, for instance. It certainly cou
ld be the case that kids who are paying attention to the news are repeating what they hear from Trump and his supporters, or feel emboldened to be racists and sexists and xenophobes because of all the excuse-making on the right for Trump’s bad behavior.
The SPLC is a widely respected organization that has done a lot of terrific work tracking racist hate groups. But data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which publishes yearly updates on the frequency of hate crimes, tell a less depressing story about what’s happening in the country right now. According to the FBI, there were 6,121 bias incidents in 2016. In the previous year, 5,850 incidents were reported to the FBI. That’s an increase—yes, an increase—of 271. But here’s the catch: 257 more law enforcement agencies reported data to the FBI in 2016 than in 2015. If each of those agencies notified the FBI of just one additional hate crime, it would make up the difference almost entirely.
Did the FBI uncover slightly more hate crimes in 2016 than 2015 because Trump unleashed a wave of hate, or because the agency did a better job of gathering accurate information than it had in previous years? The latter seems more likely.
Looking further back, the idea of a 2016 spike seems even less credible. In 2007, the FBI reported 7,621 bias incidents, a thousand more than in 2016. White Americans—the population most at risk of being motivated by Trump to engage in racist activity—represented a whopping 63 percent of all perpetrators in 2007, according to the FBI. By 2016, just 48 percent were white.
The data showed a slight increase in the number of anti-Hispanic incidents since 2015, but still fewer total incidents than in 2012, 2010, 2008, or 2006. Anti-Jewish hate was on the rise relative to 2015, but still down compared with 2012. Anti-black animus was unchanged since 2015, and substantially down since 2006. An uptick in anti-Muslim hate in 2016 was probably the result of the FBI changing the way it classified such incidents. As my colleague at Reason magazine, associate editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown, put it, “Obviously, small upticks can turn into big ones over time and are worth keeping an eye on. But looking at a decade’s worth of FBI hate crime data shows the folly in making too much of year-over-year fluctuations.”15
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics data, the rate of hate crime victimization in 2015 “was not significantly different from the rate in 2004.” What’s more, “the absence of statistically significant change in rates from 2004 to 2015 generally held true for violent hate crimes both reported and unreported to police.”16 This information doesn’t include the Year of Trump, and it’s always possible things are about to get a lot worse. But the data we have tend to show that the hate crime rate has stayed basically the same, or even dipped a bit, over the long term. This is in keeping with trends relating to plain old not-necessarily-motivated-by-hate crime, which has plummeted massively since the early 1990s.
I experienced a lightbulb moment when I testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in May 2018.17 (Disclaimer: I am a member of the D.C. Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, an appointed volunteer position.) The other members of my panel were local law enforcement officers who work in task forces specifically designed to track and combat hate crimes. These panelists conceded that the vast majority of police municipalities—88 percent—report zero hate crimes. Some of these include very large municipalities. Baltimore County, for instance, reported just one hate crime in 2016, for a population of 831,000 people.
Is Baltimore County blessedly hate free? Probably not. The authorities there just don’t compile good hate crime information. And here’s the important thing: if Baltimore County did a better job with its reporting in 2017 and 2018, it would appear that hate was increasing in Baltimore County. (Just two reported hate crimes would mean a 100 percent spike in hate!) Better reporting of a problem can disguise itself as a worsening of said problem. Over time, as various law enforcement agencies get better at tracking hate crimes, it will appear as though there are more of those crimes—but this just means they were undercounted in the first place.
But what about all the recent incidents of racist, sexist, and anti-LGBT hate on college campuses specifically? Focusing just on college campuses, the picture seems at first glance pretty dark.
BuzzFeed, for instance, reviewed more than four hundred alleged bias incidents reported to the Documenting Hate project since Trump’s election. Describing the data as revealing “a shock of hate speech,” BuzzFeed’s writers “confirmed” (BuzzFeed’s word) 154 of the incidents, which occurred at more than 120 different university campuses. “More than a third of the incidents cited Trump’s name or slogans; more than two-thirds promoted white supremacist groups or ideology,” wrote authors Mike Hayes, Albert Samaha, and Talal Ansari. The piece was titled “‘Imagine Being Surrounded by People Who Hate You and Want to See You Dead,’” a quote from a University of Virginia student recounting what it felt like to watch the alt-right marching in Charlottesville in August 2017.18
One of the frustrating things about trying to understand hate crimes on campuses is that the perpetrators are almost never caught. In BuzzFeed’s review, just 5 percent of the cases involving vandalism or threats were solved. What’s more, “at least three investigations led college officials to conclude that a racist incident was a hoax,” wrote the authors. I emailed the authors to clarify whether the three hoaxes were among the 5 percent of solved cases; that was the only interpretation of BuzzFeed’s counting that makes sense to me, as it would suggest that a very large proportion of the cases where we actually know what happened were something other than what they appeared to be. None of the authors responded. As I wrote in an article for Reason at the time, that’s a shame: “If BuzzFeed is going to run the deliberately inflammatory headline ‘Imagine Being Surrounded by People Who Hate You and Want to See You Dead,’ its writers should be able to answer questions about whether the data support this nightmarish fantasy.”19
I’ve written about hate crimes and bias incidents on college campuses for years. I cannot underscore this enough: we usually have no idea who’s responsible. I’ve seen enough verified cases to make the assertion that some of them are genuine acts of malice perpetrated by racists—often nonstudents. A panic at the University of Missouri in 2015, for instance, is confirmed to have been the work of far-right racist troll Andrew Anglin, who used social media to trick students into thinking the KKK was coming to campus to gun down student activists.20 And at American University in the fall of 2017, a middle-aged man was caught on camera sneaking into a campus building in order to post racist flyers. This was just the latest in a series of racist incidents at American: earlier in the year, some male students allegedly opened a black freshman’s dorm room door and threw a banana at her. This perpetrator was never publicly identified, nor were motives disclosed in any of the cases.
I spoke with Jenna, an American University sophomore of color who wants to be a journalist after she graduates, about the banana incident. I asked her whether the instances of racism felt out of place to her.
“I think you could find this in almost any sort of predominantly white space,” said Jenna.
Jenna was one of twelve students who met with American University administrators about the racist incidents. Activist students rattled off a list of demands, and administrators committed to meeting most of them.
“I was actually really surprised that the administration was really willing to work with us,” said Jenna. “But I kind of feel as if there’s really no other option, seeing as how the very last protest … we pretty much blocked off the entire school garage, so cars were completely backed up.”
Indeed, in May 2017, activists blocked traffic from escaping the Bender Arena tunnel, trapping cars in place for over an hour until the administration agreed to their demands.
“There was a pregnant lady who was trying to get out,” Ma’at, one of the activists, told me. She confessed that the presence of the pregnant woman gave her pause. “At that moment, I was like, ‘Dang, we should let her out.’ But activist Ma’at was
like, ‘Nah, if we let her out, we’re about to be here till midnight.’”21
She ultimately decided that if the woman really needed to go somewhere, she could get out of her car and call an Uber. “We weren’t preventing her from leaving,” said Ma’at. “With big risk comes big reward.”
One of the students’ demands was for the university to designate a certain café, the Bridge, as a “sanctuary” for students of color. Administrators demurred, but offered up a different room for a sanctuary instead.
Activists also asked administrators to grant exam extensions—not just for the student who had allegedly been on the receiving end of the thrown banana but for any student of color who asked.
“I took my last final today,” Jenna told me. “It was extended by four days, which I was very grateful for. And the school made that a very easy process.”
Another of the activists’ demands: racial sensitivity training for faculty members, facilitated by an activist group that calls itself the Darkening.
“They usually are working with different clubs on campus and they hold Darkening trainings where they try to make new clubs really racially sensitive, and just educate them and things like that,” said Jenna.
Another banana incident generated an outcry of a different sort. During a fall retreat for Greek life students at the University of Mississippi, Makala McNeil, a leader of a historically black sorority, spotted a banana peel hanging from a tree outside the window of her cabin. The sight of the banana peel had students of color in tears, owing to the historical legacy of racists using bananas to suggest that black people deserve the same status as apes. Officials canceled the retreat; an administrator, Alexa Lee Arndt, told a local newspaper, “I felt it was imperative to provide space immediately to students affected by this incident to allow them an opportunity to voice their pain and concern.” It turned out the safe space was unnecessary: the misplaced banana peel was not intended as an act of malice. A student, Ryan Swanson, eventually admitted that he had eaten a banana, and—failing to find a trash can—placed the remains in the tree.
