Georgia college students started burning books because someone called them white

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.

College kids do dumb stuff sometimes. That’s fine; it’s part of learning. And it’s easy to get carried away. People tend to pay more attention to the manufactured “free speech crisis” when it involves liberal students railing against Milo Yiannopoulos and his literal Nazi propaganda. But these things happen at Christian and Conservative schools, too (and often without the same dark money deliberately financing the provocation, at least as far as I’m aware). While I’d argue that there’s a difference between de-platforming and straight-up censorship, neither one is necessarily unique to a particular political perspective.

As a general rule, though, burning books is not a good look on anyone.