By this point I’m sure almost everybody on campus has heard about the extremely problematic UBC White Student Union page that has popped up on Facebook over the weekend. The page claims to “unapologetically provide a safe space for white students to air their true feelings about the future of our nation, discuss and reflect on the lessons laid down for us by our great writers, philosophers, and artists, and develop a positive program to restore the pioneering will and greatness of our unique and virtuous people” and that the page is needed because “white students at UBC are now an ethnic minority”. UBC has made it known that they are in no way connected to this page and it has been discovered that this page is most likely a result of trolls.
There have been mixed reactions to this page which I find very troubling. In all of my classes we have discussed how offensive and problematic this page, and other identical pages for other institutions, is however these pages are gaining more and more followers each day. Some people may think these sites should be taken as satirical but some take them seriously. Some people I have talked to write off this page once they find out that they were not created by any UBC students, however how does this make it better? It shouldn’t matter who created the site because UBC students have been showing their support for this type of rhetoric by liking the page (As I write this the page has 543 likes). These types of rhetoric promote racist colonial tropes and are completely inappropriate and offensive. The fact that UBC student continue to like this page indicates a larger racist problem on campus that I think we all, or at least I did, was mostly a thing of the past.
