OK, someone—and the surveillance video shows exactly one man wearing black clothes—hung bananas by strings that resembled nooses at three locations on the campus of Washington, D.C.’s American University during the wee hours of the morning on May 1. The banana-hangings were plausibly a racial hate crime: The three bananas were marked with the letters AKA—presumably for Alpha Kappa Alpha, a black sorority on campus—and May 1 was the date that Taylor Dumpson, a member of the sorority, took office as AU’s first African-American student government president. The university has said that Dumpson was also targeted for trolling by Andrew Anglin of the anti-black and anti-Semitic (and lately, anti-Trump because of the president’s Jewish son-in-law) website the Daily Stormer.
If the noosed bananas represent something nasty directed at Dumpson and aren’t a hoax, I hope American cracks down hard on the perp or perps for defacing the campus and violating basic standards of civility. But the investigation of the incident so far hasn’t turned up any reported leads (meanwhile the university has provided Dumpson with security personnel). What’s distressing is this: Even though American’s response to the banana incident has been outrage and concern from the initial discovery of the nooses, campus leftists have used the incident to mount a massive protest against the university’s supposed inaction—and to issue a list of demands to the administration that mostly center around the desires of the protesters themselves. Just to make their point, the activists blocked roads and a tunnel in the center of the American University campus on May 5, shutting down both ingress and egress.
Even more distressing was the administration’s complete capitulation to the demands from the very moment the protesters set up their blockade. Here are the students’ three demands, encapsulated on a protester’s poster in diction that suggests the protester didn’t learn much in freshman English:
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For the remaining of the semester, the Bridge [a campus coffee house] will become a sanctuary for people of color.
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All POC [“people of color”] students get extensions, and should not be penalized for already scheduled finals after the incident.
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A separate investigation team based out of the university (composed of a group of non-biased expert contractors) that can investigate cases of racism and discrimination brought against the institution of American University.
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the protesters vowed to continue blocking traffic until university officials acceded to all three demands. Here’s the Chronicle report:
That’s called getting results.
And the student-activists at American already have a laundry list of demands in hand for the next steps beyond that “just a minimum” that they believe the university should be taking. The demands include “training programs for AU faculty to deconstruct oppressive behavior in the classroom” hiring quotas for “professors of color” and divesting from “the Israeli Apartheid State” (the Daily Stormer would probably agree with them on that one), not to mention a freeze on tuition increases, more financial aid, and a “decolonialized” curriculum.
There’s a lesson to be learned here about paying the Danegeld and not being able to get rid of the Dane. It’s one thing to take steps to deal with an alleged racist attack on a student. It’s another to let other students shut down your campus until you do the “multicultural” things they want.
