Presence of racist propaganda rises, campuses report
NEW YORK — Reading, writing and arithmetic are competing with more and more racist rhetoric on U.S. college campuses, a new report finds.
Instances of white supremacist propaganda showing up on college campuses trended higher in the recently completed academic year, according to the AntiDefamation League report published Thursday.
That follows a major spike in documented cases of white supremacist fliers, stickers, posters and other material in the 201718 academic year, the antihate watchdog group said. And it’s only getting worse. The justcompleted spring semester saw more extremist propaganda on campus than any preceding semester, the ADL said, with 161 incidents on 122 different campuses across 33 states and the District of Columbia.
Occurrences of white supremacist propaganda in noncollege settings also spiked, with 672 instances in the first five months of 2019, the ADL said.
The recent surge in college campuses points to greater efforts within hate groups to recruit young, impressionable minds, while the overall increases reflect a political climate where white supremacist rhetoric is increasingly tolerated, ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said.
White supremacist groups are working social media to push their message to the masses and, in turn, have achieved a level of influence in the political discourse not seen in decades, Greenblatt said.
In 2017, President Trump refused to denounce white supremacists involved in a deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va., instead saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.”
The ADL report documented 313 cases of white supremacist propaganda on college campuses between Sept. 1, 2018, and May 31, 2019, all of them stemming from organizations associated with what’s known as the altright movement.
The 201718 tally marked a 77% increase from the previous academic year.