A college newspaper is under fire for printing these racist, anti-Black Lives Matter comics​

By Charles Pulliam-Moore  |  April 29, 2016 | 3:54pm
Latest

Bryheim Muse, a senior a Wesley College, thinks that Black Lives Matter is a hypocritical movement that amounts to little more than black people “begging other people to fix our problems.”

Muse, who is black, recently worked his thoughts on Black Lives Matter and misogyny into a series of comics that he wrote and drew to be published in The Whetstone, Wesley’s independent, student-run newspaper. In one panel, a woman wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt laments that she’s late for an abortion. In the other, a man in a purple suit is confronted by an anthropomorphized gardening hoe who’s taken offense at being called a “hoe.”

“I was trying to make a point, showing the hypocrisy behind the Black Lives Matter—in one way we’re saying ‘black lives matter,’ but in another way, we’re aborting our children and we’re saying it’s ok,” Muse told WDEL. “The small amount of number of blacks dying from cops compared to the large amount of blacks dying from abortion—these are real issues that our people need to address.”

Some of Wesley’s other black students didn’t find Muse’s social commentary amusing. On Monday, after issues of The Whetstone featuring the comics began to circulate through Wesley’s campus, the school’s administration organized a forum between, Muse, President Robert Clark, and concerned members of the student body.

According to Tiffany Griffin, a senior and member of Wesley’s black student union, Clark seemed genuinely surprised that people found the comic offensive and, initially, refused to apologize for it given that the paper is run independently from the school itself.

“There’s kind of a racial divide at Wesley between the black and white students,” Griffin told Delaware Online. “I don’t think they realized this many people would be outraged by this. A lot of us were wondering why they weren’t expecting it.”

Muse said that while he came to the forum to discuss the ideas behind his comics, other students weren’t interested in speaking and only wanted to tell him why he was wrong. If given the chance to publish the comics again, he explained, he would.

After the forum, Wesley’s black student union published an open letter to Clark demanding that he make an official, public statement explaining that the college did not endorse or support the positions Muse’s comics endorsed.

“As a college campus with a large percentage of minority students,” the union wrote. “More long-term actions are needed in order for the college to resolve the current unrest.”

By Tuesday evening, Clark penned a letter stating that he was “disappointed by the depiction.”

“As president of the college,” Clark wrote. “I apologize to everyone in our family as well as anyone else who viewed and was offended by the depiction.”

 
Join the discussion...