Even if you’ve been living under a rock this summer, you’ve probably heard about the attack on the historically black Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17.
Dylann Roof, a young white man, sat with a group of mostly elderly black worshippers for an hour before opening fire, killing nine and terrorizing black people across the country.
Despite what some pundits have claimed, the reasons behind Roof’s vicious attack are made clear by photos he posted of himself online showing him displaying the Confederate battle flag and other white supremacist symbols.
His so-called “manifesto,” posted online just before he traveled to Charleston to commit mass murder, is a horrifying racist diatribe that can also be used to induce vomiting in a medical emergency.
What does Roof have to do with us here at IU? We’re not racist, right? We have our Culture of Care and our school-funded T-shirts proclaiming we “won’t stand for hate.” Yet white supremacists are here — in our town, on our campus and in our classes.
The Traditionalist Youth Network, or Trad Youth, is a white supremacist organization founded by Matt Parrott, from Indiana, and Matt Heimbach, who previously presided over the Towson University White Student Union.
It has survived at IU like a malignant tumor, led by Thomas Buhls until his graduation this past spring.
Apparently unaware that it is 2015, several IU students have joined the organization, whose achievements include hurling sexist and racist slurs at other IU students and protesting a protest against rape.
Am I suggesting the IU students involved in Trad Youth are planning a Roof-style shooting spree? Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure. How safe can IU students and faculty of color possibly feel knowing white supremacists are in their midst? How safe can we feel knowing some of our classmates go home and write Roofesque racist polemic on the Trad Youth website, either under their own names, as Thomas Buhls does, or under pseudonyms?
Are the online essays that attempt to justify racial segregation, female subjugation and other supposedly “traditional” values all these white supremacists are up to, or do we have to fear physical violence from them as well?
If you think this could never happen here, I have some bad news for you: It already has. In 1999, white supremacist and IU student Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, then the same age as Roof is now, went on a shooting spree from Chicago to Bloomington, targeting black, Asian and Jewish people.
He injured at least nine people and killed two others, including IU graduate student Won-Joon Yoon. And what was Smith involved in before he went on this rampage? Writing and distributing racist and white supremacist literature, of course.
The pattern is disturbing. White supremacists write ignorant, racist, hateful rhetoric and distribute it — in pamphlet form in 1999; online in 2015. Then they put their words into action, taking innocent lives in their misguided quests to create some sort of all-white utopia. For Trad Youth, that utopia’s name is Avalon — yes, really — and the organization claims on their website they are actively trying to create it here in Indiana.
Trad Youth is dangerous. White supremacists are dangerous. The IU administration needs to take the threat of white supremacy on campus seriously, or we could lose another Won-Joon Yoon.
woodsmj@indiana.edu
*This comment thread is closed however, you may write a letter to the editor at editor@idsnews.com or share your opinion at opinion@idsnews.com.
