BUZZ
Liberal columnist rushed to blame free speech law, Trump
A guy holding a provocative sign with the n-word on Kansas State University’s campus is actually black, not a white guy blackface, according to the student newspaper.
Last week someone showed up at the public university campus holding a sign that read “Say [n-word] win candy.”
The incident understandably upset a liberal columnist, but he also rushed to blame a recently passed free speech law as well as Donald Trump supporters. He later had to amend the article after it came to light the sign holder was not a white person in blackface.
“When the Kansas Legislature passed the so-called KIRK Act to prevent colleges and universities from regulating political activism on campus, I warned that lawmakers were rolling out a welcome mat for unsavory characters with even more unsavory messages, causing problems where problems didn’t exist,” Dion Lefler wrote in The Wichita Eagle on Friday.
The KIRK Act, named for Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, aims to strengthen free speech rights on campus.
Lefler chalked up the racist incident to the Act, as well as Trump and his supporters.
“We now live in MAGA World, where racism is fashionable once again — from the White House to the Statehouse,” he wrote.
Lefler also said “we all know who to blame when grossly inappropriate things happen on our university campuses and hands get thrown.”
“We also know who to blame when promising young students of color, from Kansas and throughout the nation, cross this entire state off their list of colleges to visit,” he said.
It turns out that the person to blame, following his logic, is a black guy.
Yesterday, Lefler ran a column sort of apologizing for rushing to judgement, although he did not acknowledge it was a black person who had the sign. All he said was it’s not true it “was a white person made up to look Black.”
He also held fast to his criticism of the KIRK Act and said the law “hamstrings administrators’ authority to regulate activism on campuses and gives extremists nearly unfettered access to what is essentially a captive population of young people
The “blackface” rumor came from a local NAACP chapter, according to The Kansas State Collegian.
“We have received several reports of this White student in blackface holding up this racist sign on Kansas State University main campus,” the Manhattan chapter wrote to school leadership. “Campus police responded and did not remove the individual. We are respectfully asking that the university take immediate action to terminate this inappropriate and egregious behavior.”
As reported by the student newspaper, “The NAACP later clarified they could not confirm whether the individual was actually a student, or what race they were.”
