The white students gathered around the fire, speculating why parts of the book were not already engulfed in flames. “It’s a hard cover!” shouts one male student in a video amid laughs as ripped- out pages burn, torn from a novel written by a Hispanic author who had suggested white people are treated differently in society.
That angered some students at Georgia Southern University.
In response to Jennine Capó Crucet’s talk on the Statesboro, Ga., campus Wednesday, where she focused her discussion on white privilege, students gathered at a grill and torched her novel “Make Your Home Among Strangers” — about a first-generation Cuban American woman struggling to navigate a mostly white elite college.
“What makes you believe that it’s okay 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,” one student said at the microphone, the paper reported. “I don’t understand what the purpose of this was.”
Crucet responded that white privilege was evident within the question itself.
Other students had a different reaction and used photos and videos to troll Crucet on Twitter. One student sent a photo of ripped pages to Crucet over Twitter.
“Enjoy this picture of your book!” a tweet captured by the George-Anne said. “Have a nice night, Jennine. :-)”
*** The university is not planning to discipline any students for the burning incident, said Jennifer Wise, a university spokeswoman.
“While it’s within the students’ First Amendment rights, book burning does not align with Georgia Southern’s values ***
Crucet said on Twitter another event scheduled for Thursday was canceled “because the administration said they could not guarantee my safety or the safety of its students on campus because of open-carry laws.”
Wise said the event — a discussion with some first-year classes — was canceled at the request of Crucet’s representative.
Other students were dismayed over the book burning, a violent rejection of speech most notoriously associated with Nazi Germany.
“It makes me feel like we are being represented really badly. It makes me feel like these people make us look as a school and even as a freshman class really ignorant and racist,” Carlin Blalock, a freshman music education student, told the George-Anne.
“Just seeing it happen, I know they didn’t read the book or they didn’t care. It’s so disrespectful to even think about doing anything to that book because that’s her life story. I wish I could have been there to do something about it.”
PEN America, a speech and literature advocacy group, said the book burning was “deeply” disturbing in a statement.
“Book burning has a long history as a tactic to intimidate, silence, and denigrate the value of intellectual exchange,” said Jonathan Friedman, the group’s campus free speech director.
“Students have the right to exercise their own freedom of expression and book burning is also a protected act of expression. But this symbolic gesture aimed not just to reject or refute ideas but to obliterate the very paper on which they were written.”
Friedman also said the university’s statement did not go far enough in response.
“It behooves the university to educate its students about why book burning is so inimical to open discourse and free expression.”
Crucet concluded her Friday statement on the incident by saying that her “book began as an act of love and an attempt at deeper understanding."
“I hope GSU can act from the same place and work to affirm the humanity of those students who might understandably feel unsafe in the aftermath of the event and the book burning, and that the campus continues the difficult and necessary conversation that began in that auditorium.”
