Vignette #3: Stickers and Stereotypes: How Myths about College Campuses Hide Miami's Fascism Problem
In this episode, we discuss the pervasive nature of white supremacy among college and university campuses, with focus on Miami University, and how covert racism thrives in environments built upon institutions that don't want to isolate any of their members while protecting hate speech as free speech.
Critics’ focus on college campuses’ perceived “SJW” problem has let racism and fascism on campus be overlooked or even celebrated as an act of defiance. The Proud Boys, a national hate group who is known for violence at protests, has advertised itself on Miami’s bulletin boards as a community for young men to be “proud chauvinists” and retreat from an SJW-riddled campus that “hates the west.”
When Nicole, a Miami senior, confronted a Proud Boy as he was posting recruitment flyers, saying that they made her Mexican partner afraid to visit Miami, he responded “Why? Does he have a reason to be afraid of ICE?”. She also remembers that same Proud Boy trailing a post-Al Paso antiracist march, wearing the Proud Boy’s classic yellow-striped polo and shining a light into the treetops along their path in an attempt to make the marchers feel surveilled by unknown allies. Only now that she is no longer on campus does she feel comfortable outing herself as one of the speakers at that night’s demonstration, where she testified about being unable to bring her friends to campus because of their fear of ICE and racist encounters.
What makes the Proud Boys proud? The art of making hate into pride and discrimination into defiance
Anthropologists against hate: how analyzing propaganda reveals fascists’ worldviews
Intimidation is an aspect of neo-fascist actions on campus that is unacknowledged by campus administration. In addition to the Proud Boys, a far-right group known as Patriot Front has also plastered Miami’s campus with anti-immigrant, anti-multiculturalism, and anti-gay stickers and posters over the last four years as both a way to recruit new anti-“SJW” members and intimidate already-marginalized people on campus. Anthropologists have various tools to identify covert racism and the different tactics they use to prevent themselves from being condemned by campus administrations.
Do you assume colleges are mostly right-wing or left-wing?
Words like "SJW", "snowflake", and "libtard" work to silence and put down anti-racist, anti-discriminatory viewpoints while making people who say racist things seem brave for standing up against the “liberal stronghold” of college campuses.
Miami, like all college campuses, has a reputation among conservative outsiders for pandering to liberals and leftists. Complaints about universities changing terms like “freshman” to “first-year” and phasing out terms like “on deaf ears” have been amplified by conservative news sites, social media feeds, and politicians to present colleges as anti-free speech and under a leftist ideological gridlock. This sort of rhetoric has led to state legislation that censors coursework that could “make anyone feel bad for their race”- an anti-white guilt gag law that primarily targets critical race theory, gender studies, and critical analysis.
Despite this, these small, often underfunded academic departments are still targeted and censored under the guise of defending free speech. The term “SJW”, or “social justice warrior”, is a term often used to attack college students, staff, and faculty who focus on fostering a less hateful, more inclusive campus: rather than standing up for marginalized students against racists, they’re painted as overly sensitive academics who hate whites, straights, and the American way.
This portrayal of college campuses as liberal strongholds not only encourages policies that police and limit marginalized voices on university campuses, but also allows direct attacks on them. Stereotype-driven anti-diversity animosity has manifested in digital attacks on academic departments’ ZOOM seminars and smear articles criticizing the personal tweets of Miami’s 2020-2021 student body president; not surprisingly, the seminar harassed with racist, anti-semitic, and homophobic slurs was hosted by the Global and Intercultural Studies department, and the student body president’s tweet that was shared and targeted was her voicing her frustration towards anti-black police violence as a Black woman- Miami's first to serve as a Student Body President.
Patriot Front
Image Captions
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"AMERICA IS NOT FOR SALE PATRIOTFRONT.us" Pictured are two shackled fists raised towards the sky, the chain connecting the cuffs is a dollar symbol, this sticker is above a previously scratched off and indiscernible Patriot Front sticker
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"AMERICA FIRST PATRIOTFRONT.us"
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"BETTER DEAD THAN READ PATRIOTFRONT.us" Pictured is the Communist hammer and sickle with an arrow show through the head of the hammer.
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"ONE NATION AGAINST INVASION PATRIOTFRONT.us" Pictured in the "O" is the Patriot Front stylized eagle logo.
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"KEEP AMERICA AMERICAN REPORT ANY AND ALL ILLEGAL ALIENS THEY ARE CRIMINALS CALL: 1/866/DHS/2ICE PATRIOTFRONT.us" Pictured is an eagle with its wings outstretched, its torso covered by a shield with red and white stripes, in its talons are three arrows each, and above its head are thirteen starts in a semi-circle overtop the Patriot Front stylized eagle logo.
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"LIFE OF OUR NATION LIBERTY OF OUR PEOPLE VICTORY OF THE AMERICAN SPIRIT PATRIOTFRONT.us"
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"NOT STOLEN CONQUERED PATRIOTFRONT.us" Pictured is the partially scratched out Patriot Front sticker with a picture of the continental United States in the center between the text
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"OURSELVES AND OUR PROSPERITY" Pictured is the partially scratched, out with sharpie on top, Patriot Front sticker saying "RACISM IS SO 1600. It's 2019"
“Free Speech”? How stance-taking reveals positionality, politics, and persecution.
"The Miami administration claims that since the signs do not contain true threats, obscenity, fighting words, incitement to imminent lawless action or defamation, they are protected as free speech.”
- The Miami Student
Anthropologists like Robin Lakoff (2000) describe how the First Amendment went from “a thorn in the conservative side” because of its ability to protect marginalized voices and viewpoints to a weapon used against disenfranchised, non-majority perspectives due to a change of framing. By positioning racist and discriminatory views as marginalized beliefs, policies against hate and bias “can be framed as an attempt to wrest from us our historical right to use whatever language we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want,” thus making anyone who denounces far-right or covertly fascist speech “out to be opponents of free speech” and anyone who says such offensive statements into “all-American defenders of the First Amendment” (Lakoff 2020).
Pretty impressive reverse, isn’t it? Miami’s administrators and staff kept this popular position in mind when they were asked to comment about the Patriot Front propaganda stickers: they made it explicitly clear that the only reason Miami would take them down is because they violated Miami’s signs, posters, and banners policy’s specifics on sizing and promoting a specific event, not because they posted messages like “CONQUERED, NOT STOLEN” by the Myaamia Center. Similar to Miami’s reactions to racist statements that sparked moral panics, deans and directors were able to say that they supported anyone who would be offended by these statements but were also explicit about how their hands were tied when it came being able to block such statements or enact consequences on the people who shared them.
This excessive makes sense if you take away the stereotypes about liberal college campuses and consider how Miami’s 2017 incoming freshman assigned reading was done by an author publicly supports policies banning Critical Race Studies from school campuses and who has considered running to replace Ohio’s Rob Portman in the 2022 senate elections.
Here, anthropologists’ observations on how positions on free speech are adopted and dropped to meet political ends are especially relevant: Miami’s administration is under pressure to “defend” racist free speech by the same political agendas that advocate limiting antiracist speech, even those who support legislation to eliminate entire academic disciplines.