White Student Union Trend Continues to Grow

As Black Lives Matters protests continue on college campuses across the country, not all students are happy with the turn of events.

At the University of Central Florida, a group has formed in response to protests. The White Student Union at UCF claims on its Facebook page to have been formed to counterbalance the “explicit hostility to white students, faculty, and culture, and to the freedoms of speech and association” organizers say have been present in the protests.

While not a registered UCF student organization, the group’s presence on Facebook is garnering much attention. On Tuesday, the page had just over 200 likes. By Wednesday morning, 410 people had liked the page. The effort appears to have been launched on Nov. 21.

In a statement to the press regarding the group’s formation, founders stated the unofficial organization was launched in response to a Black Lives Matter sit-in on the UCF campus in Orlando.

“We felt it was necessary for white students to organize to protect white interests on campus,” the statement reads. “We were emboldened by the expansion of WSUs across the country and decided to debut our own WSU here at UCF. We hope to be a countervailing voice against intolerance, and we want to provide a safe space for white students on campus.”

See Also:

• Black Lives Matter Protesters Shot in Minneapolis
• Princeton Students Rally Against Former U.S. President

USF spokesman Chad Binette told the Knight News the school is aware of the group’s presence. He, however, says it is not affiliated with the school and it is not a registered student organization.

The formation of White Student Unions on college campuses is becoming a growing trend in the wake of highly publicized racial unrest at schools across the country. At Missouri State University, for example, the group Concerned Student 1950 recently staged a number of protests. Its members issued a series of demands that included insistence on the resignation of Missouri University System President Tim Wolfe. As protests at Mizzou continued, Wolfe issued his resignation Nov. 9.

Protests similar to those witnessed at Mizzou have sparked up across the country. At Ithaca College in New York, students staged a Nov. 10 solidarity walk. Some 600 students and faculty took part in that event, decrying what they say have been weak responses by President Tom Rochon to allegations of racism on campus.

UCF isn’t the only school to have a White Student Union spring up in response to Black Lives Matters movements. More than 30 schools now have WSU pages on Facebook, according to USA Today. The University of Illinois was reportedly the first, but others now include George Washington University, Ohio State University, Stanford and the University of Texas – Austin, among others.

Facebook has reportedly taken down some of the WSU pages, but as of Wednesday morning, UCF’s remained.

“We are not a racist or white supremacist organization,” the UCF page’s media statement says. “We do not desire to discriminate against non-whites or to diminish their cultures.”

While the rapid spread of WSU pages has been blamed by some on “either a white supremacist group or 4Chan users,” according to USA Today, the UCF posting insists that is not so in its case.

“It is possible that some WSU pages are trolls, but many are not,” the statement proclaims. “Many WSUs, some with whom we are in contact, are sincere efforts to create safe spaces for white students--including ours. We are neither a joke nor an attempt at satire, but an earnest project to protect free speech, free association, and white interests.”

It is unclear at this point if the UCF group intends to petition to become a registered student organization. As of Thursday, no similar Facebook page had been created for the University of South Florida campus.

Photo courtesy of the UCF Facebook page