‘This Is Where We Are, America’: After a Latina Author Talks About Race at Georgia Southern U., Students Burn Her Book

Monica McGiven

When Jennine Capó Crucet went to Georgia Southern University on Wednesday to discuss her book with freshmen, the topic of race was almost certain to come up. Her 2015 novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, tells of the challenges a young Latina faces while navigating life at a majority-white college. For students in Georgia Southern’s “First-Year Experience” class, it was required reading.

But during a question-and-answer session after Crucet’s talk on the Statesboro campus, a vocal group of students at the majority-white university objected to her comments about white privilege. Shortly after the event, a group gathered around a grill and burned a copy of Crucet’s book.

Twitter

Late Wednesday night, Crucet posted a since-deleted video of the book-burning on Twitter, writing, “This is where we are, America.”

The author, an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, was also slated to speak Thursday at Georgia Southern’s Armstrong campus, but the event was canceled due to what the university called “unforeseen circumstances.” On Twitter, Crucet said the cancellation resulted from the university’s inability to guarantee the safety of her or the students due to the state’s open-carry gun law. The university said the event had been “canceled at the request of the author’s representative.”

Crucet did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment, though she later issued a statement describing her experience of the events.

The university removed its video of Crucet’s talk from the internet, according to Georgia Southern’s student newspaper, The George-Anne. The newspaper reported that students began challenging the author after her comments about white privilege.

“I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations about the majority of white people being privileged,” one student reportedly told Crucet. “What makes you believe that it’s OK 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.”

Crucet told the student she had come to the campus because she was invited.

“And I talked about white privilege because it’s a real thing that you are actually benefiting from right now in even asking this question,” she said.

The fallout from the Q&A later spilled onto social media, where Crucet tweeted about the “aggressive and ignorant” comments that had been made. In response, some students accused Crucet of “dissing white people” while others lambasted their white classmates for burning a book written by a woman of color.

One student, who has since deleted her Twitter account, ripped the pages out of her copy of the book and sent a photo of it to Crucet.

“Work on your ignorance and racism towards white people,” she tweeted, according to a screenshot.

“Nobody cared about your s----y book,” another student tweeted. “It was your racist speech and rude Q&A. You spent an hour of our time promoting racism. If Twitter heard what you actually said during that speech, they would NOT have your back right now.”

In response to a question from The Chronicle, the university said in an emailed statement that it was “not planning any actions against the students involved.”

“While it’s within the students’ First Amendment rights, book-burning does not align with Georgia Southern’s values, nor does it encourage the civil discourse and debate of ideas,” the statement said.

Jalon Ross, a Georgia Southern senior and peer-leader supervisor who teaches one of the first-year courses, said in a video posted on Twitter that Kyle Marrero, the institution’s president, also had told him the students would not face consequences for the book-burning.

Ross said Marrero had told him that if the books had been burned on the ground, rather than on a grill, the culprits would have been punished.

“When I heard this from President Marrero, I expressed my concern,” Ross said in the video. “And I told him that, as a school, we have to make sure that we don’t push these things under the rug. Because if we don’t either act about it, or speak about it, or do something, it’s almost like we’re condoning it.”

In a statement posted to social media, Russell Willerton, chairman of Georgia Southern’s department of writing and linguistics, said the department was “dismayed and disappointed” by the students’ “destructive and threatening” actions.

“Our department values stories and how they reflect parts of the human experience,” he wrote. “We also value discussion and debate of important issues from all sides and perspectives.”

Lauren Fisher is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @lauren__fisher, or email her at lfisher@chronicle.com.

Update (10/14/2019, 5:23 p.m.): This article has been updated to remove a sentence stating that students showed up outside Crucet’s hotel. Conflicting accounts of the incident make it unclear whether or not students visited the hotel.

Update (10/12/2019, 5:05 p.m.): This article has been updated with a link to a statement by Crucet.

Clarification (10/11/2019, 5:12 p.m.): This article has been updated with Georgia Southern’s emailed response to The Chronicle’s questions. An earlier version of the article stated that the university did not respond. A university spokesman said the email was sent on Thursday night. The reporter did not receive it.