Back when I was in college, the big campus group at Georgia State University, a large commuter school in Atlanta, was the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth wing of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party.
So it was a bit jarring to see this item by Laura Diamond in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Fall semester won’t start for several weeks, but Georgia State University has already received a handful of complaints about a new student club — the White Student Union. Freshman Patrick Sharp said he started the club so that students of European and Euro-American descent can celebrate their shared history and culture and discuss issues that affect white people, such as immigration and affirmative action.
The club is not an official student group recognized by the university….
Georgia State is highly diverse, with whites comprising 38 percent of the student body, followed by blacks at 35 percent, Asians at 12 percent and Latinos at 7 percent.
“If we are already minorities on campus and are soon to be minorities in this country why wouldn’t we have the right to advocate for ourselves and have a club just like every other minority?” said Sharp, 18. “Why is it when a white person says he is proud to be white he’s shunned as a racist?”
You’d hope this dude learns enough in college to figure out the answer to that. I’d recommend a few history classes. But it sounds like he’s already made up his mind:
He said he expects critics to call him and the group racist.
“I’ve already heard some of that and I don’t care what they have to say,” Sharp said.
Sharp said he was inspired to start the union after viewing videos and interviews with Matthew Heimbach, who started a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the Maryland club as a “hate group” and two of its members recently advocated for racial segregation at a Conservative Political Action Conference.
Sharp said that doesn’t concern him.
“All we want to do is celebrate white identity,” he said. “This is about being in touch with who you are as a white person and being proud of that.”
Yeah, it’s always been tough to do that in Georgia. Sometimes you even had to wear a mask.
