GWU Student President: Activist Groups’ Leadership is Too White

George Washington University has another controversy on its hands with regards to its campus activism. This time, its student body president endorsed a progressive effort to push for more diversity among student activist groups’ leadership ranks, according to The Federalist.

Howard Brookins III, the student body president, affirmed that GW’s “passionate and active community of leftists” permitted white students to dominate student activism. He called on other left-wing groups to follow the letter’s demands.

The progressive “Students Against Imperialism” group issued a letter that claimed there are too many white leaders among GWU’s on-campus left-wing organizations. The letter said that as a part of the “GW Left,” non-white students “have felt consistently excluded from several organizing spaces and actions.” The group is a pro-Palestinian group and said that these allegedly exclusionary tactics promote “blatant apartheid apologism.” It also denounced Zionism as “racism.”

Continuing the race-driven rhetoric, the letter lamented this new “norm” to place white students front-and-center in student organizations.” The group asked all left-wing student organizations to “prioritize people of color” in leadership positions and “visibility on projects.” The letter demanded that all groups make a statement that outlines their organization’s steps to fix the diversity leadership issue.

Earlier this year, several pro-Palestinian student activists participated in a progressive website’s video about Trump’s pro-Israel (and allegedly anti-Palestinian) policies. During the video, one of the activists repeated a false anti-Semitic claim that tried to discredit the Holocaust. The female activist said that Anne Frank died of typhus and did not die in a Nazi concentration camp. The activist and the progressive website, NowThis News, denied that it was a Holocaust denial talking point, but both were embarrassed by the video.

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