Re: “White Identity”

I was appalled at the tone of the coverage of IU’s most notorious hate-monger in the recent story titled, inexplicably, “White Identity.”

While I have no way of knowing whether Mary Katherine Wildeman sympathizes with Thomas Buhls’ “message of traditionalism, homogeneity” (Since when has racism been traditional? Have we forgotten the socially constructed nature of the very concept of “race”?), her entire article came across as sympathetic, portraying Buhls as a misunderstood crusader rather than a misguided and dangerous racist.

Several things disturbed me about this article.

First, I want to be very clear that Buhls does not speak for me as a white person. I, unlike Wildeman and the Indiana Daily Student, understand that “advocates for white identity” is nothing more than doublespeak for “potentially violent racists who hate anyone unlike themselves,” and that the “crime patrols” against “black predators” referenced in the article are just a modern-day version of a lynch mob looking for victims.

Second, I take issue with the uncritical way in which Wildeman and the IDS have adopted Buhls’s terminology, essentially allowing him a platform to spread his hatred by not doing their duties as journalists and as human beings. “Chalking for traditionalism,” reads the large bold print on the front page of last Friday’s IDS. “Learn more about Thomas Buhls’ beliefs and activism at idsnews.com.” How much do we really need to learn about Buhls’s beliefs? The only thing I am interested in learning about his so-called “activism” (were KKK members engaging in “activism” when they burned crosses in people’s front yards?) is when it will stop so that our campus will no longer be terrorized by his hatred. Terms like “traditionalist school of thought” and “a lifestyle based on values of Christian fundamentalism and orthodoxy” make Buhls’s racism sound like just another political and religious
perspective.

If the IDS has always been where journalism goes to die, this article was the absolute nadir. I call on the IDS and Wildeman to apologize to the IU community and to refrain from celebrating this racist scum any further.

— woodsmj@indiana.edu