A group of students at a predominantly white public university in Georgia burned the book of a Latina author who had delivered a lecture on campus after some attendees accused her of "dissing white people."

Jennine Capó Crucet, a New York Times contributor and associate professor at the University of Nebraska, spoke about her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers at Georgia Southern University on Wednesday night. The award-winning book, published in 2015, tells the story of a Cuban American girl from Miami who gets accepted to a prestigious college in New York and struggles to fit into the privileged, predominantly white environment.

The book was required reading for some of Georgia Southern's First-Year Experience classes, according to the university.

On Wednesday evening, the school hosted Crucet, who spoke to the entire first-year class at the performing arts center. When she opened the floor to the audience for questions, some attendees peppered her for criticizing white people, according to the George-Anne, the university's newspaper.

“I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations about the majority of white people being privileged,” one student said to the author, according to the paper. “What makes you believe that it’s okay to come to a college campus, like this, when we are supposed to be promoting diversity on this campus, which is what we’re taught. I don’t understand what the purpose of this was.”

Responding to the student, Crucet said that she was invited to speak at the university and discussed white privilege because "it's a real thing that you are actually benefiting from right now in even asking this question,” according to the George-Anne.

Her answer elicited more questions about race from the audience.

BuzzFeed News spoke with six first-year students, five women and one man, who attended the lecture, all of whom asked not to be named. The students were required to attend the lecture, along with hundreds of their classmates, and said that Crucet attacked white people "for an hour" and assumed that the entire audience was privileged.

"She came to our school and, the audience was predominantly white, and she came in and was attacking white people for an hour, putting all these stereotypes and generalizations on us," said one 18-year-old attendee. "Like all white people are privileged and racist."

Another student said the audience reacted when the author stated that most white people "needed to be removed from authority positions because two-thirds of people in high positions should not be white."

"She wanted everyone to be equal and says she is against racism but she was shitting on white people the whole time," the 18-year-old male student said. "I can understand the message she was trying to get out but I don't know what reaction she was expecting when she comes to a school that's 75% white. I agree there is such a thing as white privilege but the way she was saying it was not OK to our student body."

All of the students who spoke with BuzzFeed News were born and raised in Georgia. One of the students said she is half-Dominican; the rest are white.

After the event, Crucet tweeted that there had been "aggressive & ignorant comments" during her Q&A and thanked "some very amazing, brilliant students" who stood up for her during the exchange.

"At the signing, we hugged & cried," she wrote. "I‘m happy to know them and also legit worried for their safety."



In her replies, several people who allegedly attended the event accused her of "bullying white people."

"The only reason anyone showed up is because it was required and after the racist bigotry you displayed against the white race we should all be compensated for your book. I’m all for equality but not for hate which is what you displayed," one user said.