News that an American university student in Baltimore, Maryland is starting a White Student Union is being met with outrage across the country, but also growing interest on campus.
Matthew Heimbach is a fourth-year American history student at Towson University, who founded the group only a few weeks ago.
Since then, he said the number of students interested in joining the group has gone from six to more than two dozen.
Although not yet formally affiliated with the university, the White Student Union is Heimbach’s latest foray into student politics.
His previous campus group, Youth for Western Civilization, was controversial and short-lived.
Heimbach said responses to Youth for Western Civilization’s protest against Sharia law and the spread of Islam in the West, as well as its “traditional marriage night” event were “insane” and “criminal,” but eventually led to its shutdown last spring.
The idea for the White Student Union is relatively new but Heimbach said it isn’t the exclusionary, discriminatory group it’s being painted as.
“The way the media promotes stories like this is they tell you no students want to do it and they say it’s crazy, neo-Nazi students.”
He said concerns the group will be white-only and “anti-everyone else” are unfounded.
“Pro-white is exactly what it says, it’s pro-white,” Heimbach said. “A black activist isn’t saying ‘I’m pro-black and I hate everything else.’”
The difference between the White Student Union and Youth for Western Civilization is the emphasis on activism, he said.
While Heimbach describes his previous group as “pure political activism,” he said the White Student Union will be part support group, part educational and celebratory, as well as part activism.
But critics say the very idea of a White Student Union is shameful.
An online petition calling on Towson University president Maravene Loeschke to denounce the group’s creation has over 1,000 signatures.
In a comment on the petition, Imani Lester of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, wrote to say she’s reconsidering studying at Towson because of the White Student Union.
“If this ‘white only group’ is something that the president of the university allows I want nothing to do with the school or the environment,” she wrote.
Heimbach said Facebook removed the White Student Union group on the grounds that it is “hate speech” and temporarily blocked him from using his personal account.
The Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C. said it has sent more than 1,500 letters to university president Loeschke asking for her to “denounce bigotry.”
The White Student Union “brings us back to Jim Crow days,” the center’s press secretary Donna De La Cruz said via email.
According to De La Cruz, the suggested reading on the group’s website includes readings from racially-motivated hate groups and other “hate activists,” such as Jared Taylor, who Heimbach has invited to speak to the White Student Union in October.
While Heimbach said the group is meant to “lift my people up, not take anyone down,” Taylor’s beliefs aren’t exactly in the same vein.
In the 2005 edition of his magazine American Renaissance, Taylor said “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”
For now, the administration is staying out of the controversy.
The university’s vice-president of student affairs Deb Moriarty said the White Student Union isn’t registered as a student organization, but if Heimbach goes through the proper channels he is well within his rights to become one.
“We’re trying to keep the slate clean until there’s any evidence that it is in fact a repeat, but at least the establishment of this group at this point has not brought back some of the language that made for a difficult climate last spring,” Moriarty said, referring to the reaction over Heimbach’s previous group Youth for Western Civilization.
As for the White Student Union’s negative press, Heimbach said there are “always a few hiccups,” but if the two dozen interested actually become regular members he said it would make the group “one of the biggest political groups on campus.”
