Left-wing media outlets are stoking the fires of indignation after a female professor’s speech on the evils of whiteness did not receive support from from a mostly white audience on the Georgia Southern University campus.
Jeanine Capo Crucet’s novel Make Your Home Among Strangers revolves around a Latina protagonist who enters a prestigious college but finds that “the privileged environment feels utterly foreign, as does her new awareness of herself as a minority,” according to her website.
The book was required reading for students according to the university.
Multiple students reported that they felt singled out and targeted by Crucet’s lecture about white people:
During a question-and-answer session, some students questioned why the author had been critical of white people.
“I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations about the majority of white people being privileged,” one student said, according to the student newspaper, The George-Anne.
Capó Crucet tweeted later that some people had made “aggressive & ignorant comments,” during the question-and-answer session.
Some students apparently walked out of the talk and congregated nearby. It’s unclear how or when, but they started burning the author’s books,which was chronicled by social media postings:
Crucet is also the author of a piece of literature entitled My Time Among The Whites, described as a “collection of essays on feeling like an ‘accidental’ American and the tectonic edges of identity in a society centered on whiteness.”
It’s unclear what reaction the University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor expected when talking about “whiteness” in front of a predominantly white audience, but after several “aggressive & ignorant comments” Crucet said on Twitter that she cried with students after the lecture.
Also want to say: I met some very amazing, brilliant students at @GeorgiaSouthern tonight. Many of them were the ones disrupting the aggressive & ignorant comments during the Q&A. At the signing, we hugged & cried. I‘m happy to know them and also legit worried for their safety.
— Jennine Capó Crucet (@crucet) October 10, 2019
Several students reportedly destroyed copies of Crucet’s book and accused her of race-baiting on Twitter, which opened the floodgates for a predictable outpouring of outrage on social media and left-leaning websites.
Crucet released a statement on Twitter which said the night’s events felt “devastating:”
Here’s my official statement about what happened at the @GeorgiaSouthern event — and please direct all questions or media requests to James (dot) Meader (at) picadorusa (dot) com.
Much love and gratitude to all those who’ve shown support here and elsewhere. Abrazos to you all. pic.twitter.com/9uEuALUlvs
— Jennine Capó Crucet (@crucet) October 11, 2019