I’ll admit, I don’t totally get it, either.
My inbox this week — a week featuring students’ race- and bias-related demands leading to the resignation of the University of Missouri president — has been full of challenges as similar questions started to swell: Could Mizzou be a warning for Purdue University?
Show me the racism. Document it. Prove it, if it’s going to lead to the dismissal of a president of a major Midwestern university and drag the good name of institutions, including Purdue, through the mud. If you can’t, quit talking about it.
Based on my experience, and working from that sort of inbox-logic, there really is no racism on campus. It hasn’t happened to me. Must not be there.
So how much stock can you really put in a guy like Daronn Maul, a junior in mechanical engineering, who was checking his phone a couple hundred people deep in the crowd of a Friday afternoon rally called by the Purdue Social Justice Coalition and others?
“Damn, a banana suit,” Maul said to a friend.
He was looking at Yik Yak, a social media app geared for university campuses that gives the freedom of posting anonymously. Yik Yak was fairly active during the rally outside the Class of 1950 Lecture Hall. Here’s the one that stopped Maul.
“I think it’s about time to throw on the banana costume and head for the protest.”
“Shaking my head, shaking my head,” Maul said. “Black people. You know, look like monkeys. Must want a banana. Get it.”
Yeah, but … there’s no racism. Show me.
“All the time like this,” Maul said. “That’s not right at all.”