The University of British Columbia (UBC) has taken down a post suggesting a Facebook page claiming to represent the interests of white students on campus was a hoax perpetrated by online racists.

This followed Breitbart Tech’s interview with the page’s founder, a South Indian student concerned by what he perceived as racism and hostility towards white students.

UBC previously claimed that the Facebook page “appeared to be a hoax.” Earlier in the week, the following post was published on the university’s official website:

Facebook groups claiming to be operated by “white students’ unions” across several North American universities, including UBC, appear to be a hoax. Sara-Jane Finlay, UBC’s associate vice-president of equity and inclusion, said the UBC Facebook group is not affiliated with or sanctioned by the university. A similar article appeared on Yahoo News.

The post has since been removed from UBC’s website, and attempts to access the original web address currently redirect you to a 404 page. Off-site archives of the page can still be accessed.

In a press statement on their Facebook page, the UBC White Student Union welcomed the removal of the post, telling their supporters that people could no longer “pretend they didn’t exist.”

Congratulations everyone. The UBC administration has taken a step towards acknowledging reality . UBC has finally retracted its press release saying we appeared to be a hoax, despite our insistence otherwise. Here is the archive, as UBC has removed it from their website:https://archive.is/4NHYh Through our page activity and contacts with the press, we have proven that we are led by UBC Students and draw support from UBC Students; they’re taking us seriously. Nobody can pretend anymore that we don’t exist and aren’t going to continue fighting. Our critics are sobering up to this fact. They now perceive us as a serious threat to their ideological hugbox. Their attempts to shut us down will fail, and only further vindicate our purpose. We are here to stay.

Since they rapidly emerged in the wake of the racial strife that swept campuses following protests at the university of Missouri, anonymous Facebook pages for white student unions have been the victims of inaccurate reporting by a number of media outlets. The dominant narrative has been that the Facebook pages are hoaxes, set up by trolls from white supremacist internet communities, who have no connection to the universities or students they claim to represent.

The UBC WSU is one of the clearest indicators that this narrative is oversimplified. Not only are the group’s founders genuine students at the university, but they are also led by an ethnic minority, “Rajesh.” In our last report, the student expressed concern at the “stigmatisation” of white identity.

He told us: “I value whites. I’m culturally comfortable among whites. I’ve always grown up around whites. I enjoy the company of whites.”

Rajesh, in other words, is unwilling to stand by while the friends and acquaintances he has known his whole life are being attacked and denigrated by radical racial activists on campus, such as the Dartmouth Black Lives Matter activists who recently stormed their college library to hurl racist abuse at white students. In light of this, reporting on Rajesh’s union by reference to dated stereotypes of white supremacism is clearly inadequate.

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