A foolish racial act and appropriately forceful response on an SC campus

Seems yet another person decided to do something stupid at Coastal Carolina University. A few months ago, it was a white professor deciding to unnecessarily question the toughness of students who had concerns about what they initially believed could have been a discriminatory act. Now it’s a white student who decided to place posters of a distorted version of Martin Luther King Jr. around campus. Each time, protests erupted. Each time, questions of freedom of expression rose. Each incident illustrates the necessity of teaching people how to better engage on important-complex topics.

Last year, Professor Steve Earnest caused a stir, and generated numerous national headlines, when he inserted himself into the middle of a misunderstanding about a list on a whiteboard that seemed to single out black students. An investigation by diversity officials at CCU quickly determined there was nothing untoward about the list. That’s where things would have ended until Earnest decided to send a mass email saying it was “sad people get their feelings hurt so easily.” Several black students had already been leery of Earnest because of past comments and behavior they felt had not been sufficiently addressed by university officials. Those students had spent months raising concerns about their treatment in the theatre department, including having private Zoom meetings before going public with some of those concerns.

One student said this was among the experiences they endured at CCU:

“Doing work with my acting professor, she commented on my pronunciation of words like ‘that’ or ‘them’ or ‘dat’ or ‘dem’ by saying I talked like a n-----.”

That’s the backdrop for the most recent outburst of protests, this time after Turning Point USA, a conservative club on campus, decided to advance their distorted view of critical race theory with a poster of a quote by King about love driving out hate and this quote from the club’s vice president: “Celebrate Black History Month and Valentine’s Day by choosing love over critical hate theory.”

It was childish, what you’d expect from those unwilling to do the kind of critical thinking that might disturb their ill-informed views. It wasn’t designed to enlighten, to generate thoughtful discussion, only to provoke. It reminded me about what I saw during the Atlantic Beach Bikefest years ago. A group of white men hopped into the bed of a red pickup truck with the largest Confederate flag I had ever seen and slowly drove through the former Air Force Base where vendors were setting up for the only event that transformed Myrtle Beach’s population into majority-black for a few days every year. They had a legal right to drive that flag through a crowd of black people, but it was obvious their goal was mischief, to send a signal about who really owned the place. The crowd ignored them.

But it’s not as easy to ignore those kinds of provocations on a residential college campus. I’m glad students didn’t, instead raising their voices in protests taken directly to the school’s trustees and top administrators, as well as to Turning Point USA. That’s as it should be. College is a place to push and be pushed, to sometimes have students do and say stupid things and other students respond forcefully but peacefully, as happened at CCU. It’s a healthy illustration of free speech in a democracy, which isn’t always supposed to be pretty or comfortable.

That’s why the goal mustn’t be to reduce those types of exchanges, but to improve them. Turning Point USA has a right to engage on complex-sensitive racial issues. Next time, though, they should open a book for deeper understanding before weighing in on subjects they clearly don’t understand.