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Sunday, March 28, 2004

Who took my baby away?

My campus was visited by the KKK last night. This isn't a terribly normal occurance. See, this last week, we had a "Person of Color Takeover Week." This involved the three official student of color groups doing various demonstrations, speakouts, and so forth. The students here are fairly radical. Or militant, even. And they have a fairly specific ideology. One of the things they talk about a lot is "crackers." Most of the time, cracker is used as a derogatory term for a white person. But here, many people use the "technical definition" of cracker as a slave driver who "cracks the whip."

So anyway, one of the things that was done by the people of color on campus was they wrote a bunch of chalk messages all over the ground. One of them said "Die cracker." Some students, either not knowing the definition being used, or ignoring it, called the media and said they were feeling threatened. The media came, and did a highly biased story about the students who were feeling threatened and the flyers they put up (about brotherhood, sharing, etc). The whole story had the air of "look at the poor white students at the wacko college and all the things they have to put up with. And those dangerous people of color!" Despite that most white students either actively or passively supported the people of color takeover. It was a perfect example of the dangers of American news style. This happened on Wednesday.

Saturday night, around 11pm, as the POC people were starting to host a party to cap the week off, someone discovered a bunch of KKK flyers scattered around campus and town. The party was canceled, and seemingly the entire campus that cared came to my building for some massive meetings and actions.

I have one of the flyers here in my room. It's a beautiful piece of idiocy, as might be expected. The Ku Klux Klan seems to like exclamation points. In fact, looking over the six-page piece, called The Flame, I counted two sentences that ended in periods. The Klan is also saying of recruits that "You must be an honest person who believes in non-violence, but self-defense!" A non-violent Klan, huh? I was also impressed by the Klan's lack of sexism in their flyer. They say "man or woman" and "Klansperson." Very post-feminist.

I ended up going on patrol on campus last night. Yeah, I'm a pacifist, but holding my glass bottle, the Klan doesn't need to KNOW that. Not that I expected to run into anyone. I figure it was a couple people who saw the news and decided to fuck shit up. But you never know....
- Unknown, 2:44 PM
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