Editorial | What can we do?

Illustration by RUPALI INGLE, Illustrator

On April 9, Public Safety reported that the Folkish Resistance Movement, a white supremacist group, had graced our campus to post its organization flyers — likely in an attempt to recruit members.

Our instant reaction, we discussed as an editorial board, was a collective, “Again?” 

Just a little over a month ago, Public Safety reported a potential white supremacist protest on campus, planned by the group DesertKreig. Across 2020 and 2019, the group Patriot Front targeted campus four times. 

Another day at Chapman.

As a whole, this cycle has become numbing. Public Safety or Chapman administration sends out an email about a white supremacist group coming to campus or some other racist incident. Students are outraged and demand some sort of aggressive response from the administration.

The university mentions its solidarity with affected communities, but doesn’t always offer concrete plans or information that addresses community concern or instances of perceived racism. This is in part due to the fact that the institution can’t always release information on internal investigations, even after they’re completed. 

Surely enough, the days and years go by, and as students enter and leave the campus in four-year periods, they’re likely required to reinvent the wheel and galvanize their own efforts — like the March 3 Ethnic Studies Summit counterprotest — from square one.

Thus, this visit from the Folkish Resistance Movement may just become another point in a timeline, leaving a prickling sensation that makes it easy for students to say, “Just Chapman being Chapman” once the next Outlook notification pings our ears.

But that’s just not enough.

Although plenty of student organizations, faculty and staff members have been doing work to try and change Chapman from the ground up, our campus has faced this cycle over and over again. It’s time for every single student, professor, staff and administrator on this campus to answer a couple of crucial questions.

Why, at a very root level, does this keep happening? Why are white supremacists targeting Chapman specifically? What is it about our institution? 

There is an issue growing exponentially — not specifically concerning Chapman itself – with white supremacist groups targeting college campuses. In 2019, for example, the number of unsolicited propaganda postings reported at universities nearly doubled from 2018. 

But the fact that groups continue to come back to Chapman’s campus in particular, for years now, is concerning. The fact that a member of Folkish Resistance felt comfortable enough to roll up to campus in a baseball cap, shorts, sneakers and a backpack is concerning. It’s advertising 101, really. Why post a flyer in a place you don’t think you’ll get recruits? And more importantly, how do we fight this perception that we are a community susceptible to enlisting in hate groups?

Here’s the thing: we as community members know there’s been tremendous progress made on campus by both students and administrators. The university is expanding faculty and staff diversification and studies of minority communities, which students pushed for as they continue to fight on the ground for change. Yet we, at times, feel powerless when the root of the ability to prevent these white supremacists from strolling through campus comes from an administrative level. 

We understand investigations involve a bureaucratic process. We understand it takes time, and there are privacy restrictions and legal limitations to what can be shared with the community. But if that’s the case, then please — President Daniele Struppa, Dean of Students Jerry Price, Chief of Public Safety Randy Burba — please give us at least an idea of your plan moving forward to keep these groups off campus, make Chapman a less enticing place for that type of rhetoric and ensure the physical safety of our minority students. We just want something.

We’re already terrified to go back to school because of a global pandemic. We’re terrified of another shooting happening in our neighborhood. We don’t want to live in the trepidation of running into a hate group in a place we want to feel safe — a place we want to call home. 

Flyers imprinted with Ku Klux Klan (KKK) propaganda were found littering downtown Huntington Beach April 4. A planned White Lives Matter rally was instead met by a much larger counterprotest April 11 at Huntington Beach Pier. Anaheim, where hundreds of students currently live in the Chapman Grand Apartments, served as a central hub for the KKK in the 1920s.

We are not far removed from these communities. It’s possible that the next time there’s another Ethnic Studies Summit on campus, DesertKreig may very well show up.