Let me square with you real quick. You spend enough time around Clemson—as I have—and you’ll be treated to a barrage of hokey platitudes. “Clemson’s different,” we heard at Orientation when i stepped on campus in 2004. When I went to games as a child—sitting in Section UI of Memorial Stadium’s lower deck—I learned that “there’s something in these hills,” an allusion to an old writing from Joe Sherman on the things that make Clemson special. We’re told that Clemson’s a family, that it holds a unique place in major American academia as a small-knit community that can offer the thrill of Saturday night football without the soul-crushing enormousness of a typical state school.
It’s practically beat into your head if you’re the sort of child whose mom or dad went to Clemson. Mr. Knickerbocker’s store on the corner of College Avenue is where bad goes to die. As you cross the street onto campus and Clemson’s Bowman Field, you’re in a sanctum of sorts.
Let me tell you something else—it’s all bullshit. It’s a carefully crafted narrative designed to inflate an already turgid sense of self-importance that permeates the Clemson community. Clemson’s fine. It’s a school with a beautiful campus, a rising national profile, and a unique sports culture. Surely there’s something that ties together Clemson in such a way that its fans can out-travel schools three times its size when football’s playoff season rolls around. But none of that makes Clemson immune from the same sort of bigotry, institutional racism, and deeply-bred contempt of the Other that’s long permeated campuses in the South and elsewhere.
To accept the traditional view of the Clemson “family” would require one to turn a blind eye to how it’s maligned its minority step-children. Earlier this week, a yet-to-be-identified person hung bananas on a sign that sought to educate students on the role that black people played in building the university. And today, it culminated in the apparent arrest of peaceful protesters who had begun a sit-in at Sikes Hall, the university’s chief administrative building.
But that’s only a small snapshot of the problem. Clemson’s issues with race didn’t start this week, nor did they start when students began the See the Stripes campaign to spark change on campus.
Clemson long ago courted the worst sorts of racism and racists. Ben Tillman, the controversial proponent of “lynch law,” compared blacks to apes when he wasn’t busy establishing Clemson as we know it today. Clemson’s most prominent building still stands in the center of campus today to honor Tillman, a fact that’s prompted protests in hopes of cleaning from Clemson the shit-stain that it’s earned endorsing a domestic terrorist. Clemson was built, like many universities of the late 1800s, by blacks snatched from the streets on fake crimes through convict leasing schemes. The approach was simple and all-too-familiar. Newly formed police units throughout the South arrested blacks en masse on trumped up charges, then put them to work building all sorts of things.
Clemson accepted the papers of avowed segregationist Strom Thurmond, establishing a building in honor of his “dedicated public service.”
You don’t have to stroll very far down the tree-lined lanes to find a building or statute that honors someone contemptible. And worse, it doesn’t feel much like that legacy’s been left in the past. When protesters called for the removal of Tillman’s name from the building in 2014, they were greeted with vitriol that proved their point, mostly from counter-protesters who demanded that they simply “get over it.” Nevermind that Clemson’s history’s been marred by a host of incidents like the recent banana hanging, including a 2006 “Living the Dream” party in which students dressed in black face and placed oversized pillows in the back of their pants.
There’s a family at Clemson, for sure. But it’s dysfunctional. It’s a patriarchy dominated by whites, males, and always with the Christian ethos, from the top down. To investigate the individual responses to protesters from all-too-typical racists would be a waste of time. They’re precisely what you’d expect them to be—calls for protesters to “go somewhere else if they don’t like it,” and more open calls for individuals to deliver bananas to the protesters just in case they get hungry. Spend any time on Yik-Yak (which is apparently a thing that people younger than me do) and you’ll find veiled threats of violence from anonymous tough guys using the Internet to obscure their hate in the great tradition of their grandfathers, who used white hoods to do the same.
It’s not the individual response that’s ultimately troubling. It’s the official response from those in power, and it started quite a while ago with a brain-dead response from David Wilkins, the chairman of the Clemson Board of Trustees. Wilkins buried his head in the sand, and brushed students and faculty off by suggesting that the university’s stopping of its honorarium of a racist murderer would be meaningless, or as Wilkins put it, “symbolic.” He trotted out a tired tripe to suggest that naming the building after Tillman would allow the university to learn from a man he described as an “imperfect craftsman.” He said this without a bit of irony, not even addressing the requests from protesters that Clemson could, at the very least, add a plaque to Tillman Hall outlining Tillman’s crimes.
And it continued this week when University President Jim Clements produced a letter in response to the recent calls for action. Clemson students had released a list of demands of the university, calling on leaders to do more to make Clemson a campus free of intimidation and hostility. While many of those students camped out overnight in Sikes Hall, Clements released a letter outlining all of the wonderful things that Clemson has done for “diversity” over the last couple of years. It was a slap in the face to the students actually toiling under an insidious cruelty that seeks to make Clemson more mine than theirs. Those students are smart, and they know that even in 2016, they’re considered interlopers in an otherwise beautiful tradition. We, the lily whites brought to Clemson because our mothers before us happened to go there, are the protectors and creators of something special. They, the often-first generation black students who’ve happened to choose Clemson, are cool so long as they don’t touch anything. Play some football. Make a contribution. But certainly don’t think about doing anything to make the place yours. That’s how it is, and if you look with the right set of eyes, you’ll see that this exclusionary tradition robs from minority students the inclusive experience that they’ve otherwise earned.
Clemson administrator Almeda Jacks, happy to take pictures with football stars Shaq Lawson and CJ Spiller when she’s celebrating the university’s exploits at the National Championship Game, told students that they were “lucky” the university was letting them camp out in the building that rakes in tens of thousands of dollars from those students every year. Jacks later threatened those students with something beyond arrest, according to protesters. She told them they’d face “suspension, expulsion, probation, who knows?” She’s continuing the culture of intimidation that allows white students to think it’s alright to hang bananas on trees. She’s embodying the sort of exclusionary tradition that’s long told black students at Clemson that if they don’t look like me, they better skirt through their four years without calling the university on any of its enormous bullshit.
That’s where we are today. A university refusing to stop honoring a virulent racist having students arrested for demanding that the university take notice of the grievances faced by black students. A university with administrators so scared of the backlash of its backward alumni base that it fails to recognize that the protesters—using their brains, their words, their voices to peacefully call for change—are precisely the sort of thing Clemson should be celebrating. But we’re not. We’re calling the cops. Because we’re Clemson. A family.