5 times higher ed cried ‘white supremacy’ in 2018

1.  That time some conservative students tried to buy coffee in their MAGA hats

Students at Fordham University staged a protest against “white supremacy.”  The hour-and-a-half-long protest consisted of chants like “hate speech is not free speech” and signs reading “White Supremacy Kills.”

“Fordham’s policies and protection of white supremacy is putting people at risk,” one student shouted into a megaphone. Another explained that the protest was meant to elicit a response from university administration.  

When asked to provide evidence of white supremacy on their campus, protesters recalled an incident to The Fordham Ram in which a student in charge of an on-campus coffee shop was disciplined for asking College Republicans to leave because of their Make America Great Again gear.

Protesters said showing up to the coffee house in Trump swag was “threatening behavior” and argued that Fordham’s actions constituted “protection of white supremacy.”

[RELATED: Fordham punishes students over MAGA hat incident]

2.  The professor that went full #Resist in her course syllabus

California State University-Dominguez Hills professor Dr. Brooke Mascagni included in her course syllabus an explanation that President Donald Trump “won the 2016 election by appealing to hatred and bigotry.”

The syllabus went on to blame the January government shutdown on Republicans. 

“Moreover, the Republican Party controls the executive and legislative branches of government, yet couldn’t manage to keep the government running on the one year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration,” it said.

“And, oh yeah, Russia interfered with the U.S. electoral process and our president is under investigation for obstruction of justice,” Mascagni added.

”Future generations will wonder how the people of what was once considered the greatest democracy in the world elected a white supremacist, misogynist, narcissistic, volatile, belligerent, uninformed, stubborn, failed businessman and orange reality star to the highest office,” she wrote.

3. The ‘White Supremacy’ checklist

In case you aren’t sure whether or not you’re a white supremacist, a Linfield College English professor made a handy checklist to help you figure it out.

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt published her checklist in a January Inside Higher Ed op-ed meant to help individuals determine whether or not they were actively “supporting white supremacy.”

Transgressions on the list included working “in a position of power in a predominantly white institution” and not making an effort “to change the white supremacist power structures within your departments, committees and institutional decision-making process.”

A desire to suggest “‘stellar’ (mostly men) and obviously ‘white’” colleagues for promotions and recognition also helps to aid white supremacy, according to Dutt-Ballerstadt. This type of thinking lends itself to an unacceptable “logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.”

[RELATED: Prof claims ‘civility’ is a euphemism for ‘white supremacy’]

4.  The ‘white supremacy’ event held in response to Ben Shapiro’s campus visit

Jewish conservative commentator Ben Shapiro paid a visit to the University of Minnesota for a speaking engagement. The event spurred an ample amount of controversy on campus, as Shapiro’s speeches often do.

In response to this controversy, the university’s Women’s Center scheduled its own event titled “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump: An Anti-Racist Teach-In” directly before Shapiro’s speech. The event had the stated goal of “mapping the connections between white extremist groups and American conservatism today,” as well as “unpacking the ways white supremacy manifests itself in systems, language, and culture.”

“We do not know whether Ben Shapiro is a white supremacist,” organizers of the event told Campus Reform. “What we know is that we have received an outpouring of support.”

5.  The ‘Pyramid of White Supremacy’

Students at Maryland’s Salisbury University are required to take a course called “Diversity and the Self” in order to obtain an elementary education major.

This year, the course employed the use of a “Pyramid of White Supremacy,” which ranked different actions that, in theory, allow white supremacy to exist. The actions were placed in a hierarchy, with “indifference” on the bottom, all the way up to “genocide” at the top.

“In a pyramid, every brick depends upon the one below it for support,” a caption explained. “If the bricks at the bottom are removed, the whole structure comes tumbling down.”

Actions such as “remaining apolitical,” saying things like “politics doesn’t affect me,” and “avoiding confrontation with racist family members” were classified as indifference. The next level was titled “minimization,” and included things like speaking over people of color, or believing in a post-racial society.

Step by step, the pyramid increased in severity, from “veiled racism” such as the “bootstrap theory” of lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, to “discrimination” such as “stop and frisk,” to “calls for violence” such as cross burning, until the analogy comes to a close with the “genocide” section.  

Salisbury students were quizzed on the pyramid, which implied that phrases such as “Why can’t we all just get along?” were complicit in supporting the mass murder of individuals based on race.  

“This class was extremely difficult to get through if you did not think like a liberal. Instead of teaching diversity, this class taught us that being white was a bad thing,” one student told Campus Reform. “We were told that we were only privileged because we are white and basically we did not actually work for what we have.”

[RELATED: Student op-ed calls white people ‘an abomination’]

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @celinedryan