African American students have demanded “safe spaces” on various campuses, to gather and avoid white intrusions and “micro-aggressions.” They have also held Black Lives Matter demonstrations expressing hostility to “white privilege,” and have asserted that views opposing theirs—including support for free speech— should be regarded as hate speech and require institutional discipline. These episodes, still ongoing, have spawned a backlash in the form of “white student union” Facebook pages connected to several universities, and some real world manifestations as well.
Observations:
1. Well, of course they have. “The first white student organization on campus…Striving for equal treatment of students at University of Illinois,” says the “About” page on the Illinois page. I would have been shocked if the racial power play on campuses and the craven and submissive response by administrators to keep peace at the high price of racial division and double standards didn’t spur a backlash, especially with the racist movement Black Lives Matter being treated with the respect usually accorded to The United Way.
I’m surprised the backlash has been restricted to cyberspace. I doubt it will stay there. UPDATE: It isn’t staying there. I had to change the graphic.
2. Are such pages racist? Yes, I’d call them racist. They are certainly racist bait, which is why such pages will never spawn any legitimate or productive debate. There will always be plenty of grossly racist commentary to make the project indefensible.
3. Criticism of the pages are focusing on the fact that they are anonymous. Yik Yak, which is also anonymous, has become the only way to gauge actual campus sentiment about the strong-arm tactics, harsh rhetoric and intimidation by black student demonstrators. Rational student are afraid to speak out, and have a reason to be: anti-white racism is suddenly brave and honorable, and opposing it is now defined as hate speech and anti-black racism. I am resolutely anti-anonymous internet communication, but not under these circumstances. “It is disturbing and cowardly that someone would create an anonymous and senseless social media page specifically designed to intimidate others, including and especially our students campus spokesman Robin Kaler wrote in an email to the campus newpaper, The Daily Illini. What utter hypocrisy. Students slandering the white students on campus as habitual racists at the University of Missouri and others are supported, even as they demand that dissenters be punished for hate speech. Who is intimidating whom?
3. Nonetheless, the double standard pointed up by the “White Student Union” pages is real. The demand for segregated black student-only spaces on campus is racist as well, and administrators are capitulating to the drive for such partial apartheid as if the idea were the height of liberalism. If black students have a right to create a space where they can be “safe’ from the perceived micro-aggressions of white students, then white students must have the same right to shield themselves from the unwelcome hostility of black students, and of late there has been plenty of that. How can this possibly be viewed as anything but a backwards step in diversity, understanding, and race relations? How can faculties and administrations permit it? “Safe spaces” from adversarial arguments and non-conforming ideas is anathema to higher education.
4. Sweet nectar as it may be to the racist bees on campus and on the web, a demand for white “safe spaces” cannot rationally be called unreasonable, not in a period where Black Lives Matter students can run through the Dartmouth library, interfering with white students as they study and calling them “fucks.” That’s not micro-agression; that’s aggression, and all students have a right to be safe from it when they are engaged in the challenging process called “education.”
5.At Dartmouth, an administrator apologized to the demonstrators and called the library assault “beautiful.” Simple question: if white students rampaged through a library and called black students “fucking fucks,” what would be the news media’s characterizations of that?
6. Double standards are not wise, democratic or fair. The patience and empathy citizens have been willing to extend to racial double standards in employment,education and politics are now being pushed to the breaking point in colleges and universities. The campus race-card is being played today from the bottom of the deck and from up the sleeve, and not very subtly at that. If not halted quickly, decades of race progress will be undone in the blink of an eye; this has been the growing threat since cynical activists decided to turn the death of Trayvon Matin into a national crisis.
The Facebook “White Student Unions” are creating the first whiffs of backlash smoke in what can turn into a deadly conflagration.
And they didn’t light the match.
Ethics Alarms 
You know, I think I will just quote a line that says it all.
“This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” – RADM Josh Painter, USN
The Hunt for Red October
And RIP Fred Thompson.
As my mother was wont to say, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Although arguably understandable, this “white student union” stuff is dumb, bush-league, rude, mean, juvenile, unacceptable, uncivil…. I could go on, but I won’t.
A wrong can incite another wrong if the first wrong is openly affirmed or condoned.
The academy and the media have turned into dopey jerks, which fact is on full display. They need to be ignored. To deply another old maxim, cooler heads need to prevail.
‘deploy’, not ‘deply’
Things like what are happening on campuses are why it’s good to have anonymity to some extent online, and why we should be cautious in giving up our privacy. When one risks persecution for saying what they believe, sometimes anonymity can be the only defense, regardless of how many others abuse it.
Someone who demands that the university punish hate speech by students should ask themselves if they want someone like Donald Trump to adjudicate what constitutes hate speech.
https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/20/donald-trump-has-now-trashed-the-1st-ame
This had to happen, of course. That it hasn’t happened over the course of the last fifty years is a testament to the patience and sense of fairness of white students. But there has to be a limit. The black radicals have become so drunk on their perceived power that they have seemingly come to believe that whites are cowardly and easy meat. (I recall a number of articles from the 1970’s in “Jet” and “Ebony” magazines that openly forwarded this concept. It’s not new.) The worry is, of course, that both races will become radicalized out of a sense of self-defense. Perhaps this became inevitable when the black radicals received what appears to be a collegiate and federal sanction. Some have speculated that the purpose behind this is to deliberately provoke racial conflict in America as a pretext for an ultimately permanent state of martial law. I wish I could say for sure that they’re wrong. But there will be more conflict on campus. You can only push people so far until they say the hell with it and look to themselves.
Here is Jared on ‘White Identity’: http://www.amazon.com/White-Identity-Racial-Consciousness-Century/dp/0965638391
I find the write-ups almost as interesting as the material itself.
The ‘white identity movement’ (though inevitably, and simply by mentioning the concept it invokes waves of resistance that rise up from the outside as well as from the inside), connects to a larger alternative right movement. It transcends American politics, and American small-mindedness, and encompasses developing and varied ideological platforms that are, among many things, far more interesting and thoughtful that the liberalized mush that infects our thinking. In order to begin to think in terms of ‘white identity’ one will have to confront a vast ideological position, a propaganda position essentially, and then begin to think in ‘free’ terms. The implication is that until one can do this, one is not really thinking freely.
Once one has arrived at such a platform, one is better positioned to be able to think in terms of defence and defensive strategies. It is true that, right now, the ‘white community’ is simply scared down to its boots by the mere idea of rampaging Blacks who remind them of their ‘privilege’. And they have no argument against it. They simply turn to jelly and … run. (Or bust out in tears).
At bottom, and despite the tenets of American civil religiosity, it has to do with ‘identity’ and the right of all people, and any people, to define themselves to themselves and to strengthen and articulate their identity. True, one can recoil from the endeavor and take refuge in liberal fantasies. But it is all the more interesting to break those shells completely.
“…the patience and sense of fairness of white students”.
You could also just as truly say the stupidity, the weakness and the cowardice of white students who have – is this not true? – surrendered their capacity to think freely and honestly to a structure of liberalism which has really REALLY messed things up.
I’m so sad that we can’t seem to identify ourselves by things that go beyond race. I’d prefer to align myself with eternal truths no matter what ethnicity I am. One eternal truth is that. there really are better values and societies that embrace them produce better results. Better in terms of encouraging people to be the best they can be by allowing freedoms to achieve their highest potential. The United States of America had one of those societies at one time. Or, as close as it’s possible given human nature.
This actually scares me more than the original rioting…so-called ‘protests’ that destroyed businesses and residences…because the push-back has the potential, if not outright likelihood, of becoming aggressively violent. Since one side (and it is a shame that there even has to be a “side”) is already pre-disposed to violence, I suspect that the push-back will be just as violent.
So many identity-hawkers cum cult imperialists, so few ethics. The disgusting spectacle of them all, and the contempt that they all have for individuals’ free thought and overall liberty, makes me want to flip the bird at every sign of them, and give them the “five families’ dismissal” (from a scene in the movie, The Godfather):
“They’re all animals, anyway – let them lose their souls.”
Anyone can take a [insert slur here for an individual of a particular identity] out of a ghetto, but increasingly, it seems, too many [re-use same slur here, in plural form] are too foolish to want to take the ghetto out of themselves.
The thought of “safe spaces” encompassing the campus worlds like a hundred little yurts of hate, fear and incomprehension reminds me of other separations that weren’t such a hot idea either, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUoT0a9Rkac
Is it perhaps possible that, on a macro level, the chief force that has put ‘identity’ in its sights and seeks to nullify it as a way and means for the individual to structure his Self in his life, is a market system? A transnational cluster of varied power that has developed, consciously and decisively, or merely spontaneously and practically, an ideology of being which is presented to the man of today as the ‘correct way to be’?
It is fairly obvious, reading the few posts here, and noting (or imagining that I note) the fear to come forward and present ones identity and identification in racial/cultural terms. That is to say ‘I am white and I define/defend myself, my people, my culture and my civilisation, and seek to solidify my identity, and my self-valuation, around myself and my valuations’. This is a statement that cannot be made. The implications of making it terrify. One gets queasy and shaky just in thinking the thought, and the thought gets trapped and shot down by thought anti-bodies in a fore-chamber of the mind. One can hardly think the thought to oneself, in the silence of one’s own self.
Every identity EXCEPT white identity is allowed and sanctioned, indeed supported. Identity is, according to Alain de Benoist, a ‘dialogical’ construct or process. One doesn’t invent oneself, and the individual cannot exclusively choose his identity, but identity is dialogical and created and supported through reflections coming back to one from one’s surroundings. The Other – friend or foe – works to create the identity one has (is). Yet strangely, but obviously, white identity is not allowed. And here, in a couple of comments, one notices the resistance to allowing it. White people are terrified of establishing white identity. The reasons why this is so are complex, no doubt, but I suggest that the failure to be able to identify is a result of a nefarious work of undermining … One struggles to name WHAT is being undermined. We all might say ‘Occidental culture is being undermined’ (and then ‘Woe is me!’ and all manner of impotent exclamations for people swallowed by decadent processes), but it is beginning to become apparent, to me anyway, that the object being undermined is essentially The Self. It is the capacity – and the self-interest – to structure identity and to claim it and own it. Everyone should I think be aware, or become aware, that it is not allowed that white people identify as white people. Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Indians, and everyone else is allowed their identity and identification, but whites are not. You have been trained to melt when someone pushes on your identity, and you identify with a group identity (a dialogical assault against your identity) that is thrust into you: a penetration, an invasion. I would further suggest that this is an effort and a process that is linked to an ideologically-driven undermining and deconstruction of white identity with (at least I think this is so) Marxist ideology. But then there is links to the world-system that is being developed – a mercantile system with political and ideological tenets – and a world ‘communistic’ system.
So, to begin even to be able to look at ‘what has happened’ and what is happening, seems to involve an almost overwhelming critical effort. And since few have time for that effort, it is easier to absorb a quasi-ideology of the present, and to allow that to determine ones identifications.
I suggest that white identity and I mean this in the most concrete, even the most belligerent sense, needs to be reclaimed. It needs to be re-inhabited, resuscitated. Allow me to be even more bold: It needs to be defended with gusto and with demonstrations of power. This is the point – Isn’t it? – where just saying this produces a queasy sensation. Your knees start to knock a little. You clearly see the ramifications of these choices. And you shy away, a COWARD. ‘Oh no, it is more complex than that!’
I suggest that the dialogical nature of identity is the reason why this is so, and that other powers and interests have far too much power in determining your own relationship to your identity, too many tentacles of interest that weave themselves in and out of your being.
Cut them away.