The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire suspended five members of its football team after they were accused of posting offensive posts on social media. The students ridiculed Black Male Empowerment, a student organization on campus and included a photograph of a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning ceremony with the post.
The post that included the photo of the cross burning, read “For all who can’t make the BME meeting, [name of student] and I are holding a WME tonight at 7.” A response said: “Idk why you guys are wasting wood burning a cross tho. Honestly just find someone who doesn’t have the same views as you or looks a little different and burn them.”
University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Chancellor James Schmidt stated that “some things might blur a line between what’s racist and not racist. But, nothing is more racist and really strikes at the heart of terror, for frankly a lot of our faculty and students on campus, than seeing an image of a burning cross and klansmen standing in the background.”
The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire enrolls nearly 11,000 undergraduate students. African Americans are just one percent of the undergraduate student body.
the racist event at Eau Claire is very disappointing to me. I was Dean or the College of Arts & Sciences at Tennessee State University in 1988-2001. We engaged a faculty exchange program for one semester with Eau Clare campus to help foster diversity and racial understanding, whereas TSU was a historically black university (HBCU) and Eau Claire was a geographically isolated and heavily traditionally white institutionally white institution (TWI). Whereas racism is an embedded disease that progressively worsens when not persistently treated, it quite disappointing that our generation of deans did not do enough to help train the next generation of school teachers and college faculty to handle the new out breaks that resistant strain of American racism . We must stop the 1789 start of the use of racist terms (white, blach, red man, etc.) to describe and distinguish amongst us as Americans. There are no “blacks” and no “blacks. The European American (white) supremacy policies ordained by the founding fathers and enforced, strengthened,
and continued by European American (white) supremacy) practices (daily) and taught prejudices are the basis of this generation of college students contracting this disease (racism) from their parents, schoolmates, teachers. professors, and church officials. America and its governments and institutions must stop visualizing and catecorizing its citizens and all others within colored racialist boxes.