Bogus Racial Incidents on College Campuses

There have been a lot of bogus “racist” incidents on college campuses, incidents staged by leftists and members of minority groups, aimed at promoting a “diversity” agenda by making people believe that the modern college campus is just crawling with racists. And thus there needs to be a full court press to indoctrinate the entire student body into the shibboleths of political correctness.

A few examples can be found in Ann Coulter’s book Mugged.

White Gangs at Columbia University — 1987

In March 1987, eight months before Tawana Brawley became a household name, black students at Columbia University made the rather incredible charge that mobs of white students were beating up black students on campus. About a dozen blacks claimed to have seen or been victims of these racist attacks.

In the 1980s, American colleges were sturdy sentinels against the merest hint of a racist thought. There were seminars on racism, posters against racism, bake sales against racism, racism “awareness” days, articles denouncing racism, consciousness-raising sessions about racism. More resources were devoted to studying racism than studying history, chemistry or math. It would be hard to find a single person on an American college campus, at least post-1980, who would have one good thing to say about racism.

Moreover, the alleged perpetrators of these racist beatings at Columbia weren’t teenaged toughs with criminal records in a working-class neighborhood: They were college students at an Ivy League school.

But blacks claimed that whites were so terrorizing them that they were afraid to walk alone on campus. According to their spokeswoman, Barnard student Cheryl Derricotte, it was “open season on black people.”

The usual nonsense ensued. There were sit-ins, administration building take-overs, and noisy rallies outside the fraternity house said to harbor the white racist thugs. Fifty people were arrested as a result of the anti-racism protests. Most of them were white. Twenty-three Columbia students staged a sit-in at 1 Police Plaza in lower Manhattan to demand the arrest of the white students they claimed were beating up blacks on campus.

Black students formed a group to protect themselves from the marauding white mobs and — in what was always a good sign — hired C. Vernon Mason as their lawyer. “The message has gotten out,” Mason said, —“that black students are not safe on the Columbia campus and someone is going to have to answer for this.”

Newsweek quoted Frank L. Matthews, publisher of Black Issues in Higher Education, saying that he blamed the surge of college racism on white students’ “reading the messages” from the Reagan administration. Of course, another theory is that it was black students “reading the messages” from a media that gave full-court press to even simulated racist incidents and refused to hold black people accountable for false reports.

If you are not a journalist, it will come as no surprise that, after painstaking investigations by both the police and the very politically correct university, the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. According to dozens of eyewitnesses, it was black students who had started a fight with white students late one night after a dance, and then made up the cock-and-bull story about roving white gangs targeting blacks.

None of the newspapers and magazines that had reported the original story about white racists stampeding through an Ivy League campus ever got around to mentioning that it was a lie—not the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek or Time magazine. Careful readers had to wait for this admission in the Christian Science Monitor about a year later:

[T]he the university report on the incident, which relied on the signed statements of 22 eyewitnesses ...differed substantially from the account given by the blacks and used by the news media in reporting the story. [I]n the Columbia account, the actual brawl was provoked by a group of five to seven blacks outside the hangout. [T]heir story of “a white lynch mob” has since been discredited.

No charges were brought by the university or the police against the students for filing a false police complaint.

The national news coverage of a story about Ivy Leaguers as latter-day Bull Connors triggered dozens more of these incidents at campuses around the country. These were all hoaxes, too. But no matter how absurd the idea of marauding white students attacking blacks on college campuses, the false charges kept coming and liberals kept believing them.

Sabrina Collins, Emory University

A few years later, in 1990, Sabrina Collins, a black premed student at Emory College, claimed to have been the victim of a campaign of racial ha­rassment — “die, [N-word], die” had been painted on her floor, bleach poured on her clothes and typed death threats slipped under her door. Even her stuffed animals had been mutilated. As a result of these incidents, Collins fell mute and had to be hospitalized.

Hundreds of students held a rally to protest racism as a result of what had happened to Collins. One student, Leonard Scriven, denounced what he called the “pervasive system of racism” at Emory. At a meeting of students and faculty about the incident, a newly formed black student group, Students Against Racial Inequality, submitted a list of demands, including more black students and faculty members, two new centers for the study of African American culture . . .and the firing of the director of public safety, Edward A. Medlin.

The public safety office had already responded to Collins’s allegations by equipping her dorm room with additional locks, a portable motion detector and an alarm system. Safety officers patrolled her hallway as well as the area outside her dormitory building. The office of public safety had called in local, state and federal investigators. But the students against racial inequality wanted this poor guy’s head.

After a thorough inquiry, the Georgia. Bureau of Investigation concluded that Collins had perpetrated the racist acts on herself. Her fingerprints were the only ones on the letters and were arranged on the page in a pattern indicating that she had put the letter in a typewriter; the letters had been composed on a typewriter in the library she frequented; and, finally, the letters also spelled “you’re” as “your” — as was Sabrina’s habit. The incidents had begun just as Collins was being investigated for an honor code violation for cheating in a chemistry class.

No charges were pressed against Collins. The story vanished. Let’s just hope the head of public safety was allowed to keep his job.

Gilbert Moore, Jr., Williams College — 1993

Fake racist incidents on college campuses became as common as Madonna’s music. Against a background of daily lectures against racism, some racist letter or graffiti would materialize, there would be a generalized gnashing of teeth about the pervasiveness of racism and then the perpetrator would always turn out to be a black student.

At Williams College in 1993, hideous racist messages were found on the door of the Black Student Union. An uproar ensued. Two days later, Dean Joan Edwards announced to general relief that the culprit had admitted responsibility and was being punished — but neglected to mention that the student was black until two weeks later, as the rumor mill went wild.

Junior Gilbert Moore Jr. said he had put up the racist notes as a response to actual racism at Williams — of which there was no evidence or he wouldn’t have needed to fake it — and to encourage more dialogue about racism, because twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week was not enough. The college rose to the challenge — by suspending him for one semester. Enraged that a black student would be held responsible for anything he did, some black students denounced the harsh penalty, threatening to leave Williams. Moore concluded: “The system . . . has failed me.”

Alicia Hardin, Trinity International University — 2005

Federal investigators must have been getting bored with the hoax hate crimes on college campuses they kept being asked to investigate. After OJ, even the media’s hysteria was muted. Nonetheless, when three students at Trinity International University, a small Christian college near Chicago, received threatening racist letters in 2005, scores of newspapers across the country ran with the news.

A New York Times article on the alleged hate crime was bristling with references to the Christian nature of the school: “Christian College Secludes Students after Hate Letters ...a small Evangelical Christian college ...a conservative Bible-based school .. more than 20 students held hands in a circle to pray . . . Affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America, the university mission statement says that its education is based on ‘the authority of God’s inerrant word, Holy Scripture,’ and that it seeks an international identity with ‘people drawn from every tribe and tongue.’”

As is required by law, Jesse Jackson met with the victims of the letters, reporting that they “feel like a target is on their back because they are black.” Charlie Dates, a black student getting his masters in divinity, did not sound especially worried. He told the Times, “Crazy people do crazy things. It’s nothing to be terrified over.”

There was big coverage for the initial allegation. You would not read in the New York Times, however, that the perpetrator turned out to be a black student, Alicia Hardin. She had staged the racist incident because she “wanted to switch schools.” But as soon as she confessed, the Times lost interest in the story.

So did most of the newspapers from around the country that had given banner coverage to the original story. Only a handful bothered informing their readers about the investigation’s results. When the hoax part of the story was reported at all, it usually showed up in demure, hundred-word items buried deep inside the newspaper. 

Instead of bemoaning the runaway popularity of Fox News, the liberal media might consider cutting into Fox’s popularity by not aggressively hiding the news.

None of the racist incidents sweeping college campuses ever turned out to be true. They were either the normal bumps and jostles that come with being a human being — or, more often, they were complete frauds perpetrated by wannabe victims.

Here at Marquette

Which brings up a supposed evidence for racism at Marquette. From a statement signed by a few dozen leftist faculty:

The evidence for Marquette’s racist climate is manifold: explicitly racist comments such as “black lives don’t matter” on the social media site YikYak; racist graffiti in the campus library; daily microaggressions and more.

Somebody needs to produce the offensive Tweets from Yik Yak; at the moment we don’t see anything objectionable. Of course, the comment could have been removed. If there was such a comment, it could have been a hoax, or indeed could have been a lament about the low value put on black lives.

Likewise, we would like to see the “racist graffiti.” In this era when everybody has a smart phone, there must be an image, right? And is it a hoax too? Even if some racist did it, he’s not likely to repent and see the error of his ways due to some Stalinist reeducation.

As for “microaggressions,” the concept is defined absurdly broadly to include things at which only somebody with a chip on their shoulder would take umbrage. Indeed, some perfectly reasonable expressions of opinion are defined, by campus leftists, as “microaggressions.”

The simple fact, of which anybody who knows Marquette students is fully aware, is that they are not racist. Do they sometimes hold opinions that campus leftists don’t like? Opposing affirmative action, for example? Or believing that the biggest problem blacks have is not white racism but the small number of black children who have a dad? Most certainly. And they have every right to believe those things.

But that’s something leftist faculty don’t accept.