Rice U is latest to face racist messages
Just days before Houston’s Rice University geared up for its move-in day and its annual welcome week for new students, racist flyers were found on campus, the latest incident in a rise of racist propaganda found on college campuses across the U.S.
The flyers depicted four women of color biting a glove labeled “America” and included the phrases “Send them back!” and “Deport the commie brown infestation.” The women resemble U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley — who were recently labeled the “squad” after President Donald Trump tweeted that they should all return to their countries. (Only Omar was born outside the U.S., in Somalia, and each congresswoman is an American citizen).
The private university is investigating the flyers, which were first reported to campus police by a staff member Thursday. Rice President David Leebron stated in a tweet that they appeared to be the same as ones posted at several Seattle synagogues and churches days ago and likely have ties to a neo-Nazi organization.
A Houston television station said a group associated with the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, claimed responsibility for the flyers. The website publishes hateful and racist content disparaging people of color, Jews and women. It’s also been known to promote Hitler
and espouse Holocaustdenial theories.
The flyers are the latest among a surge of hateful propaganda distributed across college campuses in Texas and across the U.S. During the 2018-19 school year, the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks extremist activity, documented 313 cases of white supremacist propaganda on campuses, a 7 percent jump from the year before.
In 2017, the University of Texas at San Antonio was a target: Patriot Front, a Texas-based neo-Nazi group, hung a banner on a university footbridge reading, “America is Our Birthright.”
Flyers, banners and stickers allow hate groups to espouse their beliefs and target new supporters while keeping their members anonymous. Sometimes, their flyers aren’t overtly racist. Instead, experts say, hate groups are trying to insert themselves into mainstream conservative politics.
Reports of the propaganda’s presence is growing beyond college campuses. One day after a gunman killed 22 people in what’s being called a hatefueled attack in El Paso, a white supremacist group called American Identity Movement tweeted an image of its logo on a poster outside the municipal building in Allen, the hometown of the shooting suspect.
Between 2017 and June 2019, more than 230 incidents of hateful propaganda were reported in communities across Texas — a phenomenon that has dramatically escalated this year, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
One group is responsible for more than twothirds of those incidents: Patriot Front, a white supremacist group formed after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally two years ago in Charlottesville, Va. Since 2018, the group has been linked to more than 870 reports of racist propaganda across the country, more than 40 percent of all such incidents.
The flyers posted at Rice come just weeks after it announced that it would start a task force on slavery, segregation and racial injustice this fall in order to address the university’s controversial past, which was chartered with a hefty endowment in 1891 strictly for “the white inhabitants of the City of Houston, and State of Texas.”
Enrollment figures last year showed that 33 percent of the nearly 7,000 students at Rice were white, 26 percent were Asian, 16 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 7 percent were black.
Drew Carter, president of Rice’s Black Student Association, said the recent incident is not representative of the university’s community, though there is much work to be done.
“We know these types of assailants exist. We know that’s not what we are,” Carter said. “We’re working on how to be proactive and be reactive to microaggressions and racist rhetoric that (will) not only stop individuals from perpetuating that stuff, but really educating why it’s so hard and why we won’t accept it,” he said.
Cordero Lopez, a Rice sophomore who posted a photo of the flyer on Twitter, stated that it made him “utterly disgusted and heartbroken.”
Lopez’s tweet garnered attention from fellow students and the public. By Monday afternoon, it had 590 re-shares on Twitter.
Leebron, the university president, responded to Lopez soon after he shared the photo online, calling it “indeed disgusting.”
“It would be so at any time and any place, but especially offensive just before our new students arrive,” wrote Leebron, adding that someone had witnessed a person tacking the flyer onto one of the university’s entrances and reported it to Rice’s police department.
“It is, as you say, heartbreaking that such people feel empowered to commit such despicable acts,” he wrote to the student.