Students at American University burned flags in protest of Donald Trump’s election victory Wednesday.
A crowd of students gathered on the AU quad in a protest led by the Black Student Alliance (BSA) that featured multiple flag burnings, chants of “f— Trump,” and verbal confrontations between students.
The public relations co-chair for the BSA, who performed one of the flag burnings, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the burning was symbolic of “the coming of a revolution.”
“The American flag has represented this imperialist, white supremacist, hegemonic masculinity,” Isaiah Young told TWS. “People want to use [the flag] as this thing of, ‘oh, great freedom,’ but … this country was built off the backs of enslaved people, indigenous people.”
Young acknowledged that “some people might view” the flag burning as “disrespectful,” but said that it put him at peace.
Gail Hanson, AU’s vice president of campus life, came to the “spontaneous demonstration” after a post-election vigil she attended at the campus spiritual center nearby.
The vigil, Hanson said, was meant to provide solace for “people who needed a quiet place to reflect and talk.” Asked about Johnson’s flag burning, Hanson said that AU is “very protective of freedom of expression.”
Chris Simpson, a professor in the school of communications, came to witness the demonstration unfolding. “Obviously people wanted to protest the Trump victory,” he told TWS, praising the students’ strong “democratic expression.”
Simpson said he prefers a spontaneous protest to an organized vigil, which could be an “indirect suppression of democratic rights” in his words.
“The sort of pseudo-psychological ‘let’s process these problems’ approach becomes a way to both defuse the situation … and to manage discontent into inaction.”
The protests also featured verbal confrontations between a small number of Trump supporters, who did not appear to know about the protests beforehand, and other members of the AU community including the BSA.
Nathalie Harrod, a black female Trump supporter and senior at AU, told TWS that she was approached by a group of angry protesters who saw her Make America Great Again hat and began shouting “f— you” and “f— Trump and all his supporters.”
“[They were] telling me that I hate myself [and] asking me how a black woman could vote for Trump,” said Harrod, who for more than a half-hour stood at the center of a crowd of her fellow students and defended her position.
Another student at the protest told TWS that a Trump supporter standing with Harrod at the center of the crowd, who was also wearing a Make America Great Again hat, ran back to his dorm because “he felt unsafe.”
