Madeline Nicholson

Un undergraduate student studying Anthropology and Race Studies at Colorado College in the United States, currently on exchange in Norway with the University of Oslo.

Ekstern Skribent

White Student Unions are student organizations that aim to represent the interests of white students on university and college campuses although mostly recently have become the home of anti-black and white supremacist political activism.

White Student Unions (WSUs) first appeared as the student wing of the white separatist movement in the 1960s, with the first formal WSU at Sacramento State University, which like many of the first White Student Unions quickly dissolved. Although in the 1980s amidst rise of the white supremacy movement WSU too began to resurface. The first WSU with blatantly white supremacist goals and connections was formed at the University of Minnesota in 1992, the university I myself attended in 2015 which years later still had not addressed the rampant white supremacy on campus. While the WSU at the University of Minnesota was initially banned soon debates regarding this violation of the WSU’s First Amendment right to free speech were raised and the University was forced to lift the ban and allow the group to register as an official student organization. The tactic of manipulating the First Amendment right to free speech to propagate hate have resurfaced.

On November 21^st 2015, Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer, a news site described by The New York Times as “a neo-Nazi mixture of message boards and sarcastic commentary,” published a blog post criticizing the reaction of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign administration who had shut down the creation of a White Student Union page just a few days prior. At the end of the post by Anglin he encouraged his readers to create more “White Student Unions” that only exist through social media:

“So, guys. Here’s the plan: Make more of these White Student Union pages on Facebook for various universities. You don’t have to go there. Make one for Dartmouth, Princeton, etc. Go do it now. If they won’t let it on Facebook, put it on tumblr or wordpress or whatever. Get it up, then forward the links to the local media. Just fill it up with pro-White memes and “we’ve had enough of these people” rhetoric. Extra points if you actually go to the school.”

Reverse racism while serving as the foundational ideology of these WSU’s is in fact a myth. Reverse racism describes racism and racial prejudice against the racial majority. Racism is the institutionalization of racial prejudice through systems of power, without the support of power racial prejudice is just that, prejudice.

Within days more than 30 fake White Student Unions popped up on Facebook and social media. While many of these accounts were quickly shut down and never materialized into real student organizations the hate they represented was real. Mathew Heimbach, a student at Towson University in Maryland, founded the Towson University White Student Union in 2012 to serve as advocates for the interests of “persons of European heritage” and to “unapologetically provide a safe space for white students to air their true feelings.”  The groups aims were to raise awareness and protect the white students at Towson from violent crimes perpetrated by black offenders, while also providing a “safe space” for white students to express their white pride. The group has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.

The rhetoric of hate and white nationalism Heimbach’s group and other real WSU’s at other university’s like– the University of California Berkeley, Swarthmore College, the University of Missouri and the University of British Columbia— reflect the efforts of the contemporary white supremacist movement to co-opt and corrupt social justice language. While many of the tactics of the white supremacist movement have remained the same they have adapted to the contemporary political climate, most evidently in the theft of the language of “safe spaces” from the social justice community. Safe space was a term first used by the American LGBTQIA community in mid 1960s to describe a bar or space where one could freely express their sexuality without fear of violence. Contemporarily this term implies intentional spaces for marginalized communities to be together in safety and solidarity. This term implies the threat of violence and marginalization, which is why the coopting of this language by White Student Unions is so profound. The use of this terminology not only reflects the ways in which white supremacy movements are modernizing and adapting, but reflect perceived threats to whiteness, asserting the belief of reverse racism that whiteness is now marginalized.

Reverse racism while serving as the foundational ideology of these WSU’s is in fact a myth. Reverse racism describes racism and racial prejudice against the racial majority. Racism is the institutionalization of racial prejudice through systems of power, without the support of power racial prejudice is just that, prejudice.

The usage of “reverse racism” and “reverse discrimination” arose in direct response to Affirmative Action policies in the 1970s. The accusation of a university promoting racial equality and thus, reverse racism, have remained central to free speech debates on college campuses since the 1970s but recently concerns regarding the threats to whiteness have been rising. According to a survey released in 2015,  52 percent of white Americans said they believe discrimination against them is on par with discrimination faced by black people and other minorities. Other recent studies and surveys suggest that white belief in reverse racism has steadily increased since the civil-rights movement and in their view has become the dominant racial bias in America. This trend appears to parallel the rise of Donald Trump, as a 2016 HuffPost/YouGov poll found that Trump voters think anti-white discrimination is a much more prevalent problem than is discrimination against any minority group.

After the emancipation of slaves in 1863 white America needed a justification for their continued exploitation of black labor and a legal avenue for their violent fantasies of beating and lynching black bodies. The justification chosen was crime, and thus the association with blackness and criminality in the United States was born. The lynch mobs that terrorized black communities from the 1860s through 1960s were often formed under the guise of looking for black criminals. In reality these lynching’s represent an important ritual of demonstrating white superiority and black impotency. While Heimbach’s crime patrols have yet to turn violent they represent the continuation of white supremacists manipulating the fear of black criminality to justify the protection of whiteness.

The co-opting of social justice language to propagate reverse racist beliefs is not the only alarming element of Heimbach’s WSU.  Heimbach’s group explicitly criminalize blackness by insisting that black perpetrators are on the prowl of Townson University ready to target white students.  To address this invented threat Heimbach’s WSU patrols campus to prevent black on white crime. The criminalized anti-blackness these patrols represent are the cornerstone of weaponized white supremacy in the United States. Although the WSU at Townson appears ignorant to the legacy of these patrols.

After the emancipation of slaves in 1863 white America needed a justification for their continued exploitation of black labor and a legal avenue for their violent fantasies of beating and lynching black bodies. The justification chosen was crime, and thus the association with blackness and criminality in the United States was born. The lynch mobs that terrorized black communities from the 1860s through 1960s were often formed under the guise of looking for black criminals. In reality these lynching’s represent an important ritual of demonstrating white superiority and black impotency. While Heimbach’s crime patrols have yet to turn violent they represent the continuation of white supremacists manipulating the fear of black criminality to justify the protection of whiteness.

Whiteness itself was created as an identity category in response to the creation of blackness, most specifically in the fear of blackness. As beautifully articulated by the late writer, poet, and social critic James Baldwin, “See here in this country we have something called a n*****, which doesn’t in such terms exist in any other country I beg you to remark. We have invented the n*****, I didn’t invent it. White people invented him…But you still think I gather, that the n***** is necessary, and well it’s unnecessary to me. So, it must be necessary to you…What white people have to do, is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a n***** in the first place. Because I am not a n*****. I’m a man. If I’m not the n***** here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why.” The rise of White Student Unions makes it clear that America still needs the n***** because in an era of reverse racism without the n***** there is no white man.