Continuing a trend found on other college campuses, a poster reading “IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE” was found taped to a lamp post on Bascom Hill earlier this week.
The message — which has been found on campuses ranging from the University of Alberta in Canada to Tulane University in New Orleans — appears to have originated from the anonymous online message board 4chan.
Posts on the board suggest the goal of the campaign is to “trigger” people by posting these signs around college campuses and other locations. Members of the anonymous board predict that this message will begin to expose liberals as “anti-white” and “create a division amongst the left even more.”
One post found on the message board encourages viewers to fax these posters to their local politicians, while another anonymous user suggests spray painting the message, saying, “That shit won’t come off
The poster found on Bascom follows incidents of white nationalism on the UW-Madison campus.
Recently, a university graduate student left his teaching duties after a blog post claiming he posts racist messages to social media and currently belongs to a white supremacist group went viral. The student, Dylan Bleier, had previously left Oberlin College after allegedly vandalizing buildings with anti-Semitic and racist messages in 2013.
Rena Newman, a UW-Madison student who tore down one of these posters on Bascom, called the campaign “white nonsense” and a symbol of hate.
“[The movement is] responding to a strawman argument — no one has ever said it isn't okay to be
UW-Madison spokesperson Meredith McGlone said the posters were removed from Bascom because they were in violation of a policy prohibiting flyers,
McGlone said in an email that the university works “to enforce this policy consistently, without regard to the content of the posters.”
