(Video above: University of Alabama students make claims of racism in viral video)
Three University of Alabama students, including the school’s first black Student Government Association president in forty years, released a video last week claiming that racism is so pervasive on campus that at least one of them has been scared to leave her dorm room for fear of being assaulted by white students.
The media quickly latched onto the video as the latest evidence that Alabama — both the state and the university — are hopelessly trapped in a cycle of institutionalized racism and bigotry.
Those of us who live here in the state or attended UA have grown sadly accustomed to being falsely portrayed and caricatured by the national media, but when the same trumped up narratives are advanced by Alabamians, it can be especially hard to swallow.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
The great human rights movements in world history have ultimately been successful for a surprisingly simple reason: The truth was on their side; in the case of the American Civil Rights Movement, the truth that all men are created equal, the truth that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and the truth that those rights and basic human dignity were being denied to an entire group of people.
Success did not come quickly, but the truth won in the end, or to quote Dr. King once more, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
The ends-justify-the-means tactics of the Social Justice Warriors of today — especially on college campuses — stand in stark contrast to the Civil Rights Movement for which they claim to be the new torch bearers.
Over the past several weeks, the University of Missouri has seen its president and chancellor resign over allegations of rampant, unchecked racism on campus.
Various accusations have emerged, very few of which have been supported by any evidence whatsoever.
The Mizzou SGA President at one point warned his classmates to “take precautions” and to “stay away from the windows in residence halls” because “the KKK has been confirmed to be sighted on campus.” He later claimed that he was “working with the MUPD, the state troopers and the National Guard” to address the situation. Every word of that turned out to be untrue.
Meanwhile, students staged mass protests and a “hunger strike” ultimately led to the resignations. It was later revealed that the deeply oppressed individual leading the strike is the son of a railroad executive who made over $8 million last year. That same individual went on to claim that a car in which the university president was riding ran him over during a protest. This was also proven to be untrue.
“But who cares if the whole narrative is built on half-truths or outright lies?” They apparently think. “Even if these particular accusations turn out to not be true, we know oppression is running wild out there somewhere–we can feel it!”
And thus the divisive cause of the new Social Justice Warriors is advanced.
Advancing the narrative at all costs
Just consider the sheer volume of bogus stories the new Social Justice Warriors have either made up perpetuated in recent years to advance their agenda:
“Hands up don’t shoot” was proven to be an outright lie by ballistic and DNA evidence revealed in a Department of Justice investigation, but not before it was used to start race riots and advance the narrative that white police officers are systematically gunning down young black men.
Lena Dunham’s claim that she was sexually assaulted by her college’s “resident conservative” dissolved under scrutiny, right along with Rolling Stone’s debunked “rape on campus” feature and the false rape allegations against members of the Duke lacrosse team, but not before each of those stories was used to advance the narrative that a “collegiate rape culture” was sweeping across the nation.
A reporter’s headline that Memories Pizza in Indiana was “The first business to publicly deny same-sex service” under the state’s new religious freedom law was fabricated and later changed, but not before it was used to advance the narrative that homosexuals were being oppressed by hateful Christians.
Three of the Social Justice Warriors’ most pervasive narratives of the past several years — all started or perpetuated by stories that were completely fabricated.
A lie truly can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
Tuscaloosa
At the core of the recently-released video are a handful of anecdotes meant to illustrate that systemic, institutionalized racism exists on campus at UA.
“I live in a place where after President Obama was re-elected,” a young lady in the video explains, “my parents warned me to stay in my dorm room after I told them that white students were attacking black students and kicking down their doors.”
In a digital age in which information has been so democratized that social media can literally topple dictators, how is it that none of us knew that President Obama’s re-election resulted in white students at UA literally kicking in the doors of black students to attack them? The answer is, of course, because that never happened.
A young man in the video recalls a night when “a group of fraternity guys (drove) by in their truck… yelling ‘Roll Tide, n*****,’ and SGA President Elliot Spillers closes the video by adding another story about being called the n-word by a drunken fraternity member at a party.
Assuming these particular stories are factually accurate, they only serve to illustrate that idiots still get drunk and say ignorant and offensive things, not that the University of Alabama is systematically oppressing minorities.
I did not participate in the Greek System at UA, and to be frank, I’m not particularly fond of it. But the fact of the matter is, during the time the three students in this video have been on campus in Tuscaloosa, the university has actually made some long-needed but very positive reforms. The Greek System is now fully integrated, with each house accepting minorities, and SGA elections are more accountable and accessible, loosening the stranglehold that a bloc of old fraternities and sororities had on campus politics for decades.
It’s just hard to wrap one’s head around the assertion that a bright young man who was elected SGA president by the overwhelming majority of his peers is being hopelessly oppressed on the very campus he was democratically chosen to represent.
To Spillers credit, he has used his significant influence on campus over the last week to engage in a more constructive dialogue with UA leadership, including President Stuart R. Bell. Those conversations — and the measured, proactive response of the UA administration (in stark contrast to Mizzou) — led to Dr. Bell announcing Wednesday that he has directed the university’s Strategic Planning Council to add a central diversity officer and develop a new diversity plan as part of its work. He has also charged two senior administrators with assessing UA’s current diversity initiatives.
But while UA’s administrative and student leadership were working to build consensus, a more radical group of agitators sensed the divisive atmosphere slipping away and jumped in to stir things back up.
The group, which has dubbed itself “We Are Done,” has released a lengthy list of demands that includes requiring all students to take a “freshman diversity course that teaches students about race, gender and sexuality,” and forcing the college to fund a “women’s and gender resource center” and a “safe zone,” presumably where oppressed groups of students could huddle away from the mean world outside.
Even President Obama, a Social Justice Warrior himself, expressed concerns this week that such an approach on college campuses trains people “to think that if somebody says something I don’t like, if somebody says something that hurts my feelings, that my only recourse is to shut them up, avoid them, push them away, call on a higher power to protect me from that.”
This is the moment where students like Mr. Spillers will decide whether they are sincerely — even if misguidedly — pushing for reforms they believe are necessary, or, to paraphrase Bruce Wayne’s wise butler Alfred Pennyworth, they just want to watch the campus burn.
It is no coincidence that these campus protests are spreading nationwide in the fall before an election year, just like the Occupy Wall Street movement — which was propped up by well-funded organizers and Madison Avenue PR firms — did in 2011. Intelligent University of Alabama students on both sides of these issues should resent that they are being used as pawns in a much larger game and should reject radical elements seeking to hijack genuine concerns to advance their own selfish agenda.
The media
Amanda Bennett, the young lady in the video who recalls the horror of Obama’s re-election night on campus at UA, is the student and campus-editor-at-large for the Huffington Post, which explains why the liberal media outlet had the video posted first. It has now been shared over 165,000 times on Facebook.
Additionally, Alabama sports website and liberal political blog al.com posted the video shortly thereafter, along with an in-depth interview with Ms. Bennett. What the interviewer did not mention in his article, however, is that his brother managed Mr. Spiller’s campaign for SGA president, making him more of an advocate for their cause than a journalist.
Some dishonest members of the Alabama media bemoan the negative perception of our state around the country and abroad, then turn right around and fuel it with trumped up racial narratives, damaging the state they claim to love for the sake of getting clicks on their blog.
During the height of the Ferguson riots, a handful of al.com bloggers exhaustively searched for an Alabama angle to the story. They ultimately resorted to stoking the fire of racial division in Birmingham, seemingly in hopes that the unrest would spread and they would have a shot at their own Pulitzer Prize and a desperately-needed spike in traffic. It was like watching a firefighter trying to set fire to a house in an attempt to place himself in the middle of the action.
Truth
In the two-week period between the Missouri SGA President’s initial Facebook post and the first mass protest on campus, there were not any other students standing up to say, “This is not true.” Not until the campus was embroiled in protests and anti-First Amendment insanity did other voices begin to emerge. By then it was too late, and because of that the university won’t be the same any time in the near future.
University of Alabama students from all backgrounds need to have the courage to stand up and say, “This is not an accurate depiction of the school I love,” because you are dealing with people who have made it clear they don’t mind being dishonest to advance their agenda.
People who are truly seeking justice ultimately want reconciliation. As Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “With Malice toward none, with charity for all.” That is not what these individuals are saying — not by a long shot.
It appears they looked at what was happening in Missouri and were jealous they were not in the middle of it, the same way some Alabama media watched with envious eyes the clicks the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was getting at the height of the Ferguson riots.
This cannot be allowed to stand, whether you are a UA student, alumnus or just somebody who cares about justice–true justice.
While we were at work making a living to provide for our families… While we are at the ball fields with our kids… While we were at church worshipping… While were were living our lives, the new Social Justice Warriors were marching. They were agitating, organizing and “occupying.”
The difference now is, they’re not doing it on TV. They’re doing it right here at home. And if people don’t step up and make sure the truth is exposed, we may soon be the ones on the TV.
Activists are desperately trying (and failing) to recreate the Mizzou racism scandal at Alabama https://t.co/gVFFuG5CUt
— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) November 19, 2015
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