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The Media Brought the Alt-Right to My Campus
June 16, 2017
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/media-alt-right-evergreen-college.html?referer=https://t.co/YOM70C6lPZ
Olympia, Wash. — Evergreen State College is always an unusual school, located on the outskirts of the eclectic town of Olympia, Wash., but something about the end of the school year inspires people to really let their freak flags fly. Drum circles and students with colorful hair and piercings are commonplace, and it’s not out of the ordinary to see the circus club practicing acrobatics.
This year is different. Many students are leaving campus as quickly as they can, and some, fearing for their safety, say they won’t come back.
A few weeks ago, a video clip of students demonstrating outside the office of Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, went viral. In the clip, students can be seen shouting at Mr. Weinstein and calling him racist. Mr. Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in a “Campus Craziness” segment and sat for interviews with many other media outlets.
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Weinstein wrote that students attacked him verbally “seemingly out of the blue” after he objected to an event in which “white people were asked to leave campus” for a day. He said that the college had “slipped into madness.”
As a student here, I know that the truth is more complicated. The protests were part of a planned week of action over several incidents that had sparked a schoolwide discussion on race. A series of emails that Mr. Weinstein sent to an all-faculty list were a small part of this. In one email, he objected to the design of an equity council that would guide faculty hiring to improve racial equity. In another, he voiced his opposition to a new structure for the Day of Absence, an Evergreen tradition since the 1970s.
The tradition was inspired by a Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a town disappear so that the populace is forced to recognize their vital contributions. In previous years, students and faculty of color would leave Evergreen for a day and hold off-site workshops while white students stayed on campus.
This year, the organizers decided to hold workshops for white people off-campus instead — a reversal of the original concept. The intention was to put the focus on students of color, and highlight their contributions within the Evergreen space. The off-campus event was optional, and students who wanted to participate had to enroll: The workshops could hold only 200 people. Evergreen has about 4,000 students. There was no way the whole school could have been forced to participate.
Yet Mr. Weinstein declared that this event structure was “an act of oppression” against white people.
It is important to point out that Mr. Weinstein was within his rights to question how these initiatives were structured. But his critiques seemed to diminish the very purpose of them. Students wanted him to understand why these initiatives were so important to so many in our community.
What can’t be seen in the viral video of the student protest in his office is that students started by calmly stating their concerns. The way he responded to those concerns made students feel invalidated. It may have seemed inappropriate that they let their emotions escalate in frustration, but that doesn’t mean there was no context.
But the media saw in Mr. Weinstein a self-proclaimed progressive who appeared to be vilified simply for voicing a dissenting opinion. Evergreen students were accused of violence and of trying to enforce a divisive political correctness.
The fallout from that coverage hit our campus like a hailstorm. It may not have been his intention, but Mr. Weinstein’s many interviews effectively became a call to arms for internet trolls and the alt-right. Online vigilantes from 4chan, Reddit and other forums swarmed to unearth Evergreen students’ contact information. They have harassed us with hundreds of phone calls, anonymous texts and terrifyingly specific threats of violence that show they know where we live and work.
After I published an essay on Medium to explain the protesters’ side of the story, my full name, phone number and home address were posted online, and I was bombarded with hate-filled messages. I found my name and personal information on message boards, along with rape threats and discussions about which racial slur fit me best (the consensus was the N-word). It took three days to get my personal information taken down, and for others it took longer.
In the past few weeks, the school has been shut down four times because of threats, including one from an anonymous caller who said, “I’m on my way to Evergreen University now with a .44 Magnum. I am gonna execute as many people on that campus as I can get a hold of.”
Downtown Olympia has seen a sudden influx of visitors wearing Nazi and white supremacist regalia. Campus buildings have been scrawled with graffiti that says, “Diversity Equals White Genocide” and “No Safe Space For Commies.” Swastikas and racial slurs have been chalked and painted on Evergreen property.
Yesterday, the campus was mostly shut down after 3 p.m. because Patriot Prayer, a right-leaning protest group that espouses a love for guns and President Trump and a hatred for so-called snowflakes, descended on the campus for a “free speech” rally. Patriot Prayer was recently in the news for marching in Portland, Ore., after the killing of two people by a white supremacist who was aligned with the group, even though the mayor of Portland pleaded with them to postpone their event.
While recent events may have brought negative attention to my school, I am proud of students here who found a way to create change. In the movies, protests always look heroic, but they tend to be messy in real life. Weren’t the protests of the 1960s unpopular and messy sometimes, too?
After a series of petitions and protests by students, George Bridges, the president of Evergreen, agreed to require bias training for the staff and faculty and create better protections for undocumented students. It wasn’t everything the students had asked for, but it was a step in the right direction.
Bret Weinstein’s interview with Tucker Carlson aired on the same day students met with President Bridges. We were surprised to hear Mr. Weinstein’s claims, which seemed far removed from what we had witnessed, and saddened to see how almost overnight his version of events became the entire narrative.
Mr. Weinstein’s story about Evergreen’s regressive campus culture fit neatly into many misconceptions about the “new left,” so it seemed to go unquestioned. However, for many students, staff and faculty at Evergreen, the harassment that came after the negative coverage of the protesters was a shocking and bitter twist. It is not lost on us that students of color are the ones who have been disproportionately targeted. ------
“There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” -Albert Camus
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