Amid a revival of resistance to racial injustice, progressives at Tulane University in New Orleans should have taken great pride in a campus event featuring award-winning author Edward Ball and his new anti-racist book Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy. The work has been highly praised as an important story about the history of white supremacy in the South by scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi and Saidiya Hartman. The event was even to be moderated by University of Kentucky professor of African American and Africana Studies Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, whose research areas include “racial capitalism” as well as prison abolition and feminist and queer politics.

Rather than praise Tulane for tackling the tough subject of white supremacy in the South, more than 500 students revolted in the comments section of the (now deleted) Instagram post announcing the event. Students insisted that the event was “harmful and offensive” and would advance white supremacy. Tulane’s student government (in which I served one uneventful semester) released a statement calling the event “violent toward the experience and work of Black people” and demanding that it be canceled.