Introducing The Next Generation Of Leaders And Thinkers
The Latest

My Black Self Sat Through Two Hours of White Supremacist Hate Speech

byMoyo Ajepe
December 9, 2016

If you don’t live underneath a rock, you would have seen the many trending tweets about Richard Spencer giving a talk at Texas A&M University last night. If you’ve never heard of Richard Spencer, consider yourself #blessed. I’m not going to link any of his abhorring beliefs though, because if you want to learn about white supremacy you can waste 10 kJ of energy opening another tab, typing his name in, and waiting for hatred to pop up on your computer screen.

I am a firm believer in the fact that we need to make an active effort to understand where other people are coming from, so naturally, a group of friends and I marched our black butts to the venue to listen to him speak.

Within the first five seconds of him appearing, he lost all the nonexistent credibility he had. He came out, wine glass (filled with something that looked suspiciously like red wine) in hand, to the cheers of the white supremacists I now know go to school with. Anyone who comes to a talk wanting to be taken seriously whilst also thinking it’s appropriate to get drunk loses any credibility they could’ve hoped to have. There is a time and place for drinking, and giving a “serious speech” in the midst of impressionable young minds is not that time.

Spencer made a lot of claims that night, but he once bring up any facts to back them up. I wish the freedom of speech amendment had a clause stating that if you want to speak to a group of people, you need to have facts to back up every assertion you make. If that was included, his speech would have lasted for five minutes, maybe, because he came without receipts.  One of my favorites lies was his claim that white people were the first on the moon so “the moon belongs to white people.” For someone with so much education, you’d think he would be able to conduct a simple Google search and find that the first living creatures on the moon were dogs from Soviet Russia. Technically, the moon was conquered by dogs and belongs to dogs, and more specifically, Russian dogs.

Even if we were to humor Spencer’s notion that whites “own the moon”, the only reason they do is because they prevented black people from gaining the necessary training to go to the moon or do anything other then doom themselves to lives as manual laborers for white people. He mentioned that the “white people” were the architects of America and that America is built on white bones, but what he fails to realise are the plethora of contributions that the slaves had in sustaining the entire economy of the Confederate states, as well as contributing to inventions that we still use on a daily basis.

He expounded on that point by mentioning the fact  that white people are the dominant race, which is why they conquered America. What he failed to realise and mention was the fact that his ancestors brought their diseases and killed the indigenous people using their germs and guns. (If you haven’t seen the documentary Guns, Germs, and Steel I highly recommend it. It sheds light on the forced conquering of nations at the hands of white people.)  On top of that, it was his ancestors who brought African people, and the first wave of the diversity that he vehemently demonizes, here in the first place.

One African-American student asked him what he was planning to do when he developed his “alt-right elite America”, and of course he didn’t have an answer because he knows his delusions will, god willing, never be a reality.

He preached a lot of  euro-centric rhetoric ,but what he failed to realise is that many European countries that are part of his beloved continent have banned him from speaking. The funniest thing is that “European” is NOT a culture. He says to find pride in being a White European, but there are over 100 languages in Europe that have different cultures. He alludes to the detrimental aspect of “America being a melting pot”, but Europe is also a “melting pot”. European culture is not homogenous. All you have to do is take a 5-hour Eurail journey from England, and you will find yourself in a different country (still in Europe) with language and customs you can’t understand. He doesn’t even realise that he can’t call ” White European” a culture. The culture of Sweden is different from the culture of Serbia even though they are both European and “white” countries. The best part of the whole night was how he had no factual evidence to support his claims for “white genocide” going on in America and Europe. He did not present one fact, statistic, or study to back up any assertion he made. One of his supporters even went up and tried to use Dailymail as a legitimate news source to back up her “white genocide” claims.

I also lost respect for him and a little for my school because an African-American lady didn’t get to finish asking her question before the bodyguards got hold of her and grabbed the microphone from her. Some silent protestors even stood in the middle of the room; a group of Spencer’s supporters made a move and a fight almost broke out. Of course, it wasn’t the Spencer supporters that got reprimanded.

The racists taunts and jeers and instigations got to a point that one African-American girl went to a police officer crying, yet there was no effort to speak to or remove the man that was hurling ignorant and despicable comments. At one point, Spencer even told an African-American man to “fight him”, but no one paid him any mind because who wants to fight someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to be oppressed? He doesn’t actually sympathize with the working-class Americans that made up the majority of his non-student attendance base because he is a spoilt white kid from the suburbs. A lot of videos have been shown about the protests that swarmed and surrounded the building he was speaking in.

That blatant aggression towards his oppositions was not confined to the banquet hall. From the multiple students I have talked to that were actively involved in the protests outside the building and throughout the campus, they can attest to the fact that the riot police escalated the protests. These protesters were exercising their freedom of speech and the excessive rough-housing that these riot police used was absolutely unnecessary. Spencer was not attacked and his supporters were not violently attacked.From the multiple students I have talked to that were actively involved in the protests, they can attest to the fact that the any perceived sparring between the two sides were in reaction to the blatant racists statements and words made by Spencer’s supporters.

I even got into the thick of things when one of his beloved “Make America Great Again” Aggie students attempted to educate me an African, on white genocide in South Africa. If he had bothered to do a Google search he would understand that there is no white genocide in South Africa. The Boers that he thinks are being “killed” are not being threatened that way. Boers came to South Africa and stole the land that they call “theirs” from the black South Africans.  Now that the government no longer hands them everything, they are facing immense poverty. They didn’t bother going to school or learning anything that is employable because during Apartheid South Africa they didn’t have to. You don’t see educated white South Africans complaining about “white genocide” because there simply isn’t any such thing. Yes, you see the occasional phenomenon of black people being given first consideration for jobs in some sectors, but black South Africans are not forming vigilantes to hunt down the Boers! If anything, the onset of white people invaders left Africa and other unjustly conquered lands in tatters. Just look at the tribalism that Africa is still suffering from due to how the Europeans partitioned Africa, the black people still facing institutional discrimination in America, and the exacerbation of the Indian caste system at the hands of the British Invaders.

I came to Spencer’s event with a completely open mind, but it was hard to see past his lewd jeers and taunts. He made fun of the weight of multiple people that stood up to disagree with his views. He made fun of the way autistic people behaved and then went on to justify it by saying we all need to be able to take a joke, and called a white ally trying to dismantle the hatred he was spewing a loser because of the way he dressed. Anyone that has resort to making fun of disabilities or the way someone looks basically admits that they know that their argument is baseless.

After the conclusion of his speech, if you could even call it that, he made a hasty exit out the back door. He knew that he had said a lot of baseless inflammatory words, and I guess he was scared for the discussions that myself and other people sitting in the room would have liked to had with him. In order to ensure his safety, he had the building that my tuition pays to run shut down so he could make his swift exit. That was nothing short of blatant hypocrisy because he spent a good chunk of his speech attacking “safe spaces”, yet he had a whole building shut down because he thought he was in danger. At the end of the night, so many people were laughing over what they had just witnessed that no one even cared enough to want to attack him. The highlight of my night was a girl, called Alayna, showing him some of the facts that he forgot to read while he was preparing his neo-nazi ramblings. Her video has gone viral, and it’s just too good not to share.

After this event, Aggie twitter was ablaze. It was disappointing to see my fellow students condeming the people protesting. A number of white Aggies on Twitter were so vehement in their condemnation for the protestors. They were madder about the fact that people were speaking out against white supremacy and racism than the fact that a white supremacist and racist was speaking at their school. Many Aggies took to twitter to vent their distaste for the Aggies United event that happened at the same time as Spencer’s speech. Why did it take a guy like Spencer coming to our school to cause us to have a large scale event for unity between all races? Why couldn’t this event have happened after Trump was elected or after the countless deaths of unarmed black people this year?

Forty years ago, I would not have been allowed in this school simply because of my skin tone, and anyone that spews rhetoric with the hopes of reverting back to practices like that needs to be protested and spoken out against. White people that have never been oppressed have no business telling people that face forms of discrimination daily the “correct way” to protest. Don’t ever condemn anyone that speaks out against injustice, because simply “ignoring” problems doesn’t make the said problems go away! It was great, however, to see students of every skin tone come together in a dignified and educated way to debase the claims this man made. For the first time ever, sitting in that room surrounded by people who shared the same distaste for Richard Spencer that I did, I felt part of the “Aggie family” A&M boasts about so much.

Author
Moyo Ajepe
Moyo Ajepe is a slightly salty black woman and engineer in training. She enjoys obsessively refreshing twitter, watching soccer, haute couture, and binge watching documentaries. She one day hopes to have her own talk show, run socially conscious businesses, and become BFFs with Rihanna. Do you want her to write for you? Contact her @ [email protected] or slide into her DM @movaughan97 on twitter
Related Posts