Marcus White, Promethean, March 17, 2017

Posters from the white supremacy group, American Renaissance, were found in campus buildings Wednesday. The posters were discovered in high-traffic areas of the Yellowjacket Union, Swenson Hall and the Holden Fine Arts Center.

Campus administrators were quick to react following several reports by students that posters containing messages and imagery appeared to promote a white supremacy agenda. In an all-campus email Friday, Chancellor Renee Wachter said that campus officials had walked through buildings at UWS finding and removing any additional posters. {snip}

Wachter also said that they have been looking through social media and reports of similar incidents in the area and that campus officials had “touched base with the local Superior Police Department.”

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Since the beginning of the school year, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Alabama has been following an increase in reporting of hate speech and postering incidents on campuses across the country.

“During the (2016) presidential campaign, the racialized rhetoric did a lot to mobilize the far right and white nationalist groups,” said Lecia Brooks, Outreach Director for the SPLC, in a telephone conversation Friday. “They feel that they have a representative in the White House.”

Brooks says that the number of campus incident reports is unprecedented. She said that usually in a year there are isolated incidents across the country, but this year there has been widespread activity in “every region.”

American Renaissance, which is based in the State of Virgina does not view itself as a white supremacy group. “We are race realists. ‘White supremacy’ implies a belief in the superiority of whites relative to other races, or a desire for whites to rule over other races,” said Henry Wolff, assistant editor for American Renaissance. “We hold neither of these views.”

Wolff said in an email to the Promethean that American Renaissance encourages students to hang posters around college campuses. “College campuses have become hostile places for white students,” he said. “From ‘affirmative action’ admissions policies to mandatory ‘diversity’ seminars — which are often naked anti-white indoctrination — and so on, white students are discriminated against and slighted from even before they step on campus.”

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American Renaissance on their website has a guide for students to aid them in placing posters around campuses, as well as a promotional video that advises white people to “take back their homelands” of Europe and America.

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