Harry Targ
White
Supremacy on Campus
Purdue University students rallied and marched to
the theme of “Love Trumps Hate” one week after the presidential election.
Participants in the rally evidenced their concern for the rising environment of
hate and racism brought on by the rhetoric of the recently concluded presidential
campaign. Appeals were made to the Purdue President to speak out forcefully
against threats to communities of color, immigrants, various ethnic groups, and
the gay/lesbian community on campus.
Two weeks later, on Wednesday, November 30, members
of the Purdue community discovered several flyers posted around campus
exhorting students to defend white America from minorities and immigrants. The
source, a white supremacist group called American Vanguard, claimed credit for
posting flyers at several universities across the country. According to the Lafayette Journal and Courier, (Thursday,
December 1, 2016) the website of the hate group declares the following in a
manifesto titled TOTAL WAR: “We fight for a White America, but this can never
happen unless we win the hearts and minds of our fellow White youth. We want to
be at the forefront of the reawakening of White racial consciousness. In order
to do this we must be willing to fight.”
Concerned members of the Purdue university community
have been mobilizing support to urge the administration and faculty to make
strong, pointed denunciations of these flyers and the seeming drift toward more
racist incidents, including threats of violence against people of color. Many
believe that the racist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, sexist, homophobic, and
anti-Semitic sentiments that figured so prominently during the election
campaign have reignited white supremacy
that is deeply embedded in U.S. history.
The
Institute for Global Security and Defense Initiatives
During the same week the racist flyers were posted, Purdue
University announced the establishment of a new research institute on campus:
the Institute for Global Security and Defense Initiatives. The announcement of
this research arm of the campus came as part of a two-day conference bringing
together military officials, CEOs of corporations with huge military contracts,
and selected faculty some of whom supported new war-related research dollars
coming to campus programs. According to
the Purdue Exponent (Friday, December
2, 2016), the new institute will bring together under one roof research that
involves “nanotechnology, social and behavioral sciences, big data analytics
and simulations to produce solutions to issues facing national security and
defense.”
Purdue President Mitch Daniels in his announcement
of the Institute’s establishment said: “We live in a dangerous world in which
we must continuously invent more, discover more, and innovate more than those
who oppose us, and be able to deliver those technologies quickly into the hands
of the people who use them to protect the rest of us.” The new interim director
of the Institute echoed the concern for what he called “solving security
issues.”
Purdue University this year has received $50 million
in advanced defense research projects (including a multi-million dollar research
contract with Rolls Royce to produce “next generation aircraft propulsion
systems”). The hope is that by centralizing all defense-related research, the
university will make itself more attractive to corporations, the Defense
Department, and the new Trump administration, the collaboration that former
President Dwight Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex.”
There are several unexamined premises embedded in these
huge collaborations between the defense establishment, the corporate sector,
and the university. First, President Daniels recently reiterated his belief
that the number one economic problem the U.S. economy faces is the federal
debt. Military spending has accounted for at least half of all federal expenditures
since World War Two, what international relations scholar Andrew Bacevich has
called “the permanent war economy.”
Second, the long-term planning for war is based upon
the proposition that war-making and preparation for war are perpetual needs of the
federal government: not just basic security but ever more advanced investment
of dollars in technological advances, more arms, and more soldiers, and public
and private contract warriors. The dominant narrative of world affairs,
perpetuated by many scholars, defense intellectuals, and pundits, most of whom
have a stake in the war system, is that war is inevitable. Little research
emphasis is placed on war prevention, conflict-resolution, or working with
other nations and international organizations to reduce tensions and violence
in the world.
Third, increased military research and
development, new rounds of armaments,
and the further globalization of the U.S. military will inadvertently accelerate
the drift toward ecological disaster (a concern reflected in other research
spaces at Purdue University). This is so particularly because the military is a
major consumer of fossil fuels today.
Fourth, and relevant to the rise of racism and white
supremacy on campuses across the country is the new defense agenda, illustrated
by the Purdue Institute for Global Security and Defense. The overwhelming
victims of death, destruction, and forced migration around the world today are
people of color. Historically, during the height of the colonial era,
three-quarters of humankind was ruled by a small minority of Europeans and
North Americans. U.S. politicians of both political parties since the rise of
the United States to global power after World War Two have articulated the view
that it is “the indispensable nation” in world affairs. The ideological justification for the United States spending more on
the military than most of the other nations of the world combined is the
premise that it, as one country, has the obligation to decide on the security
of the globe.
The movements initiated by students on campuses to resist
hate and racism are vitally important. Today these movements constitute the
main defense against the resurgence of a new round of white supremacy.
In addition, in the long run it is important for
social movements to see the connections between white supremacy at home and the
belief in American exceptionalism abroad. They are comfortable ideological
bed-fellows. They reinforce each other. They justify each other. And they have
to be opposed together if we are ever to have a secure, multi-cultural world,
where social and economic justice prevails.
