‘It’s okay to be white’

Flyers littered college campuses, including TU’s

In the first few days of November, universities, high schools, and liberal institutions all across the nation responded to flyers with a message they deemed hateful and inflammatory: “It’s Okay To Be White.”

The flyers were distributed anonymously Halloween night and in almost all cases were quickly removed, but not before causing enough of a stir among the schools’ respective student bodies and administrations to receive national attention. Some have been posted as recently as Nov. 13. 

Locally, these flyers were posted on TU’s campus in the early hours of Nov. 1 and prompted some unrest among students—but mostly just irritation or indifference.

“Whoever hung these up must feel attacked by contemporary debates,” said TU student Katy Nichols. “Maybe instead of getting defensive, you can see how to help counteract systemic oppression, which is the real subject here, not the color of your skin.”

Through a campus-wide email, TU President Gerard Clancy accused the distributors of the flyers of trying to divide the student population. More specifically, Clancy identified the action as “a deliberate and coordinated effort to create racial tension.”

The coordinators belong to /pol/, the political board of the imageboard website 4chan. Some of the board’s anonymous users might perfectly embody Hillary Clinton’s idea of “deplorables,” as a good portion at least pretend to embrace alt-right ideologies. The distribution of these flyers is among the more harmless trolling efforts organized by its users, but the intent is more important than the action.

The flyers acted as a sort of proof of concept, an experiment meant to prove that the left-wing movement in America had begun to outwardly demonize whites. One user, in a thread labeled “white general,” wrote about the flyers: “Put it EVERYWHERE, but especially in places where it will freak out the SJWs and provoke comically paranoid overreactions. Again and again and again, until society is completely divided between gibbering, blubbering, demoralized leftists, and everyone else is wondering what the fuck is wrong with them.”

Needless to say, it was a faulty experiment, as liberal institutions across the nation recognized the intent behind the words and responded accordingly.

“It is not the words; it is the context in which the words were used and the intent of the originators,” said Clancy. “That makes a difference. In this case, the 4chan originators’ flyers implied to me biases against a majority population that I do not believe exist. At TU, every member of our community has a seat.”