What if there were two lines between you? One was private and clear — a black person who couldn’t enter the back of your family? The other was public, open to everyone. Why would you put up with that?
The event went off without incident — an FBI briefing of 84 mostly white suburbanites on the potential of illegal terrorism in the United States. But what could have been considered an innocuous civics lesson, so redolent of a Bush administration effort to inoculate his audience from terrorist threats, ended up gifting a flood of poison-pen mail and death threats to the chapter’s head, for his blunt tactics against students — and his use of racial epithets.
Now, a handful of white students and a disgruntled professor say they risk physical harm for dared to question the merits of defending the United States in a global war against Islam, given the very real problems of gun violence and inequality in the nation today.
Activists at Yale University’s administration and campus police have been given a new symbol of resistance. On Nov. 29, a student was arrested for allegedly pointing a gun at a professor whose radical views on American society and global politics she disagreed with. Activists are facing mounting pressure to take the Facebook page down.
From 2001 to 2009, the conservative-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center warned the White House of “The rise of hate in America — Securing the homeland in response to a growing hate movement,” and a new “a growing number of hate organizations” seeking to “combine a patriotic agenda with racial resentment and the fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Tea Party.” What we should call America’s “mental health” gatekeepers?