Racist in blackface invites K-State students to say the N-word | Opinion
Well, that didn’t take long.
When the Kansas Legislature passed the so-called KIRK Act to prevent colleges and universities from regulating political activism on campus, I warned that lawmakers were rolling out a welcome mat for unsavory characters with even more unsavory messages, causing problems where problems didn’t exist.
So here we are, not even two weeks later, and it’s already started.
The Kansas State University Collegian is now reporting that an apparently white man in full-body black makeup showed up at the Pat Bosco Plaza in front of the Student Union, with a lawn chair and a sign reading: “Say N----- Win Candy.”
For the purposes of this column, I blanked the N-word. But the guy with the sign spelled it out.
The Collegian also quoted from a letter from the local chapter of the NAACP to the university president.
“We have received several reports of this white student in blackface holding up this racist sign on Kansas State University main campus,” the letter read. “Campus police responded and did not remove the individual. We are respectfully asking that the university take immediate action to terminate this inappropriate and egregious behavior.”
The college paper ran a photograph from the incident and posted (and later removed) a video of a physical confrontation prompted by the display.
Meredith McCalmon, editor-in-chief of the paper, told me the video starts with a white student holding what was apparently the candy he got for saying the N-word. Another white student approached and challenged the candy holder to say it again.
Words were exchanged and the student who had intervened slapped the other student across the face before they both walked away.
I can’t help thinking that when my son went to K-State 10 years ago, this kind of racist street theater wouldn’t have been tolerated.
Campus police would have told this guy to take his sign and lawn chair and get off campus. The administration wouldn’t have issued a weak-sauce statement saying “The individual was in a public place exercising their First Amendment right.”
What changed?
We now live in MAGA World, where racism is fashionable once again — from the White House to the Statehouse.
The most recent example was Tuesday, when President Donald Trump’s alleged Department of Justice filed charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center — one of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations — for paying informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and other right-wing terrorist organizations to gather intelligence information for law enforcement.
We’ve seen it in the continued attacks by the Trump Administration and state lawmakers on university programs designed to help minority students succeed — which the president and his toadies in the Kansas Legislature have now declared illegal.
And we especially saw it in the KIRK Act, a law of tribute to slain right-wing campus activist Charlie Kirk. The Act opens all outdoor campus spaces to “expressive activity” — like guys who show up in full-body blackface offering candy to students who’ll say the N-word.
State universities and their students have been delivered a clear message from the Kansas Legislature — tolerate racists and racism on your campus or face punishment.
Gov. Laura Kelly sensibly vetoed the KIRK Act. But legislative Republicans exercised their veto-proof majorities to override her, 85-39 in the House and 29-11 in the Senate.
So now we all know who to blame when grossly inappropriate things happen on our university campuses and hands get thrown.
We also know who to blame when promising young students of color, from Kansas and throughout the nation, cross this entire state off their list of colleges to visit.
This week’s ugly and disturbing racist display at K-State is a step down a road we don’t want to be on. And it’s only the first step.
