The Washington Post’s editorial board is pointing a finger at President Trump after American University reported finding bananas scrawled with racist messages hanged around campus from little nooses.
The banana incident, which was reported last week, comes not long after Taylor Dumpson, a junior, became the university’s first African-American female student government president.
It’s unclear who is responsible for stringing up the produce, and the university is still investigating the matter. Nevertheless, despite the paucity of details, the Post’s editorial board went ahead this week and hinted Trump may be partly responsible.
“Two-bit provocations such as hanging nooses on campuses play on emotions made raw in the wake of a presidential campaign that featured the vilification of minorities and barely veiled race-baiting,” the board said.
They added, “For university administrators, the challenge is to address that legitimate pain with sensitivity and make crystal clear that racist signs, symbols and speech are off-limits. For students, whose outrage is legitimate, it’s worth considering that the more campus life is disrupted by such provocations, the more the provocateurs win. Don’t let them.”
The Post would do well to exercise greater caution.
For starters, there has been no shortage of fake hate crimes since the Nov. 8 election where the so-called victims have been the perpetrators. Newsrooms have done great damage to their credibility by rushing to report or comment uncritically on these incidents.
A Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana, for example, claimed in November that two white men wearing Trump hats ripped her hijab from her head and stole her wallet a day after the Nov. 8 election. Her claim was widely reported as fact until local police announced that the woman had fabricated the entire story.
In May, St. Olaf College’s president, David R. Anderson, revealed in a campus-wide note that an incident involving an African-American member of the student body finding a racist note was based entirely on a fabrication. The note, which received a great deal of uncritical media attention, “was not a genuine threat,” he wrote, adding that the student who supposedly found the letter was motivated by a “strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.”
Also this month, prosecutors in Indiana charged a man for writing “Heil Trump” and “Fag Church” on his own church. The man, organist George Nathaniel Stang, originally told authorities he found the graffiti Sunday morning before services. He admits now that he did it himself as part of a larger campaign to “mobilize a movement after being disappointed in and fearful of the outcome of the national election.”
“I was fearful, scared and alone, too, in my fear. I guess one of the driving factors behind me committing the act was that I wanted other people to be scared with me,” Stang explained.
There are more examples, but you get the picture.
It’s entirely possible American University is the victim of an honest-to-God racist attack. But given how often these sorts of things have fallen apart in recent months, it wouldn’t hurt for places like the Post to hold fire until more information is available.
