Latina author Jennine Capó Crucet recently spoke to students at Georgia Southern University about her novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, about an Hispanic girl who feels out of place at a predominantly white college. According to the student newspaper The George-anne, the conversation was quickly derailed by angry college students who think it's racist to point out when things are racist:

"I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations about the majority of white people being privileged," one respondent said into the microphone. "What makes you believe that it’s okay to come to a college campus, like this, when we are supposed to be promoting diversity on this campus, which is what we’re taught. I don’t understand what the purpose of this was."

For the record, Georgia Southern University has about a 6 percent Hispanic population.

After the event, several students called the author out even more explicitly on Twitter (although those tweets have been deleted, The George-Anne still has the screenshots). Then they gathered together outside of a dormitory and did what awful mobs throughout history have always done: they burned books.

so after our FYE book’s author came to my school to talk about it... these people decide to burn her book because “it’s bad and that race is bad to talk about”. white people need to realize that they are the problem and that their privilege is toxic. author is a woman of color. pic.twitter.com/HiX4lGT7Ci

— elaina⭐️ (@elainaaan) October 10, 2019

College kids do dumb stuff sometimes. Read the rest

A working paper from a pair of political scientists analyzed World Values Survey data to trace the rise of support for authoritarianism in America to a growing sense among white people that democracy's commitment to giving everyone a vote would soon erode their privilege, as the growing population of racialized people started to vote for fairer policies. Read the rest

Before 28-year-old Trump supporter Rupert Tarsey was the freshly minted secretary of the Broward County GOP, he was Rupert Ditsworth, a student at the exclusive, high-priced LA Harvard-Westlake School, where he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor after taking a fellow student out in car, then hitting her over the head more than 40 times with a claw hammer and then choking her and dragging her out of the car, leaving her by the road with her skull split open. Read the rest

Less than a year after Ammon Bundy and his terrorist pals were found not guilty for their takeover of Oregon's Malheur Federal Wildlife Reserve (which included a fatal shootout four terrorist pals of Cliven Bundy have been exonerated by a Nevada jury for their 2014 standoff in which they insisted -- at gunpoint -- on the right to graze their private cattle on public lands. Read the rest

CJ Hunt was at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville when he spotted this young man in white supremacist uniform (white polo and khakis) running away from counterdemonstrators, then turning abruptly and stripping off while insisting that he was not really a Nazi and had just shown up for fun. Read the rest

Senator Paul Ryan is so, so excited about all the white interns in his selfie.

[via] Read the rest

Newly released court documents show that Brock Turner, the former Stanford student convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside of a frat house, behaved in an “aggressive” and predatory way towards other women just one week before the attack.

The 471 pages of documents released Friday by the Santa Clara County Superior Court show that Turner lied to investigators about having no experience with using drugs and alcohol before college. Read the rest

The Getty Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, established a program to create opportunities for college under grads, from cultures typically under represented in the arts, to get paid while gaining experience at real, interesting jobs. The Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program is so good that white woman Samantha Niemann is suing them for discrimination, as she feels she should be a recipient.

Via CBS LA:

Niemann — who is of German, Irish and Italian descent — was told by a Getty Foundation representative that she was disqualified from applying because of her race and national origin, the suit states.

A student at Southern Utah University with a 3.7 grade-point average, the lawsuit argues Neimann was “well-qualified” for the internship.

According to the Getty Foundation’s website, the Multicultural Undergraduate Internship program is aimed at encouraging “greater diversity in the professions related to museums and the visual arts.”

The program supports “substantive, full-time summer work opportunities for college undergraduates from cultural backgrounds that have traditionally been underrepresented in the arts,” the website states.

Ron Hartwig, vice president of communications for the J. Paul Getty Trust, issued a statement in response to the lawsuit, which read in part: “Over the past 23 years Getty grants have supported over 3,000 internships at 152 organizations throughout the county. We review and revise all of our grant categories from time to time and over the years have made a number of policy and procedural changes to the internship program.”

Several months ago – due to inquiries from potential applicants as well as internal and external discussions – the Getty modified the eligibility criteria for 2016 to state that applicants must be members of an underrepresented group, including but not limited to, those of black, Asian, Latino, Native-American or Pacific-Islander descent, according to Hartwig.