On Nov. 19, 2019, just before the Thanksgiving break, flyers appeared on the UTM campus asking if students were “proud to be white?” and suggesting that if they were, they should “contact like-minded people,” giving a website address.
More disturbing still these white supremacists circulated a second flyer at the same time – this one headlined, “Hey white man, just what is it gonna take to get you to fight back?” Under this headline the flyer depicted a huge goonish-looking black man in cartoon fashion, drooling. His eyes are hungrily lusting over a dazed and battered-looking white women he is dragging along beside him.
Looking on from behind we see a frowning white man. The man’s shoulders are stooped, his hands are in his pockets, his body is facing the wall and his head is turned, staring at the couple. He is obviously upset by what he sees, but is seemingly unable to do anything about this “horror.”
These flyers are dangerous, extremely dangerous – the “hey, white man” flyer, especially so.
“Hey, white man” perpetuates an old stereotype about the black man’s supposed uncontrolled sexual aggressiveness, a stereotype that whites have used to justify murdering and jailing black men thousands and thousands of times. However, making it all the more dangerous is the fact that most of our students do not understand the history of this stereotype or of the oppression out of which whites created the stereotype. Students do not understand this history, and they are more prone to buy into the stereotype.
Here is the grim reality: white men created this stereotype by projecting onto the black man the white man’s own practice of sexual aggression – the white man’s rape of black women. White male slave owners with absolute control over their human “property” raped black women, just as they would use any other property they owned. Does anyone doubt this? It was not just the slave owners, but their sons, brothers, cousins, friends and overseers all took part in violating black women with complete impunity.
To understand the “hey, white man” cartoon, reverse the colors in the cartoon and you have the truth: the brutish, sinful, animal lust-driven white man is salivating over the black woman he owns, as the black man, with his hands at times literally chained behind his back, can do nothing but look on despondently. This is the reality we’ve turned on its head, making the victims – black men and women – into the villains; that’s the stereotype and its origin.
Unfortunately, not many people in the United States know this real history. Although, we all know the stereotype, and in the recesses of our hearts, many of us still hold the stereotype as true.
And the hardness of the times in which we live make young white people all the more vulnerable to white supremacy. Many folks around here, our students and their parents, are struggling to make ends meet. Many of us are living month-to-month and hand-to-mouth, racking up credit card debt or pay-day loans, and hoping that our expenses will ease off a little in the coming months so we can catch up.
In an environment in which more and more of us find ourselves scrambling for survival, hating and blaming black people for the problems we face, becomes increasingly attractive to young whites today. Sadly, this is a path right out of the history of poor whites in the South.
Compound these vulnerabilities with the sexual ignorance and insecurities of many young men as they enter adulthood and we have a perfect storm of anger and confusion. This opens up the road to explicit white supremacy for many of our young white men.
So while we can applaud the Chancellor for his quick response in this incident, gathering up and destroying as many of these flyers as people could, the danger is still here. The danger is here not because we failed to scoop up every flyer, but because we have young people at our school who are susceptible to the explicit white supremacy we saw on our campus in November.
We have only one way in which we can secure the minds of our young white people: safeguard them from the appeals of this new, yet old, white supremacy. The lock against any of our students falling prey to white supremacy is teaching them the truth about race in this country, the truth about the role that black people have played in the building of this country, the truth about the unfairness and cruelty and indifference of far too many whites and the tremendous courage and resilience of black people resisting their oppression.
A required class in African American history is the only defense we have against open white supremacy making deeper and deeper inroads onto our campus and into our society.
The real test for our campus is not how loudly we denounce white supremacy, how “disgusting” we find it, but how steadfastly we commit ourselves to really educating our students in the history of this country, a country born in white supremacy.
UT Martin needs a required class in African American History.
David Barber is a professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin and the author of A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed and a recent essay, “The Failure of Higher Education: A Tale of Two Diplomas.”
