A diversity council at one small college admits to posting racist flyers on campus

“A notice to all white Americans: It is your civic duty to report any and all illegal aliens to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. They are criminals. America is a white nation.”

Flyers with the above message were only briefly posted Monday at Gustavus Adolphus College, a small, liberal arts college in Minnesota. According to media reports, people ripped them down within five minutes.

All the same, they’ve created a firestorm of controversy, leading some students to fear for their classmates and raising tensions among the student body of less than 2,500 people.

“I have friends of color who were very afraid,” one sophomore told KMSP.

“With those posters being put up yesterday in the manner that they were, to me just made my fears come to life and had me believing that if someone could be that vocal about their feelings about immigrants … who knows what else they would do,” another student told Southern Minnesota News.

But as it turns out, the people posting the flyers didn’t actually agree with their message. Instead, they were conducting a social experiment aimed at educating students on issues of bias and racism.

Gustavus’s Diversity Leadership Council, which represents nearly two dozen student groups on campus, admitted to posting the flyers Monday after images of them circulated on social media. In an email sent to the student body that it later posted to its Facebook page, the council said, “we hope that members of the campus community will reflect on today’s events and join us in ensuring that no one student or group of students are ever a victim of this form of discrimination.”

Yet many accused the council of doing more harm than good by making it appear as though racists were actually trying to intimidate or report minority students.

In response, the Diversity Leadership Council apologized to those were negatively impacted and admitted that “the language in these images may be hurtful.”

The posters were actually approved by the college’s administration, who told KMSP the experiment worked in that multiple people contacted them about the posters to complain, displaying “the kind of positive bystander interaction we would hope for.”

However, the school’s dean of students, JoNes VanHecke did say she thought “a message to students earlier in the day would have been a good move in retrospect.”

Potentially contributing to students’ confusion and fears was the fact that extremely similar posters were seen at the University of Maryland less than two weeks ago. In that case, the poster also had a link to the website of a white supremacist organization, per the Washington Post.

As Mic also reports, other racist posters have appeared on college campuses around the country in the past several weeks, including the University of California San Diego and Rutgers University. While some incidents, such as the one at UCSD, were later to be determined to be like that at Gustavus, others appear to have been posted by white supremacists.

This story was originally published March 24, 2017 at 5:20 PM with the headline "A diversity council at one small college admits to posting racist flyers on campus."