As has become increasingly impossible to ignore, academia’s claim that it champions “diversity” does not include the most important and fundamental type of diversity: diversity of thought. Conservatives on college campuses across the country have seen in dramatic fashion over the last few years an open hostility, among both students and faculty alike, to those who hold mainstream conservative views. Kalasia Richer, an unapologetically conservative African American student, recently described to The Daily Wire just how serious that hostility became for her this year.
A Political Science and Communications double major and officer in her school’s College Republicans chapter, Richer says that her opposition to illegal immigration and support for Donald Trump resulted in a series of “violent” threats that were so serious that campus authorities felt it necessary to temporarily “relocate” her from her dorm and offer her a Public Safety officer to escort her to class.
The Daily Wire became aware of her story through her acount of the incident published at the conservative site Raging Freedom, a news site launched in 2017 with the goal of “ending political bias on college campuses” by exposing “legitimate abuses of conservative students.” Richer began her account by emphasizing that the scholarship program she is a part of claims to value “diversity” and equality, but she soon learned those claims are empty.
“Diversity at my school stopped at skin color,” she said. Here’s how Richer began her testimonial:
I am going to be a sophomore at my college this year. I came into my school on a full academic scholarship program that valued diversity and leadership. I was excited to be a part of a program that was filled with leaders who I thought wanted equal treatment for everyone. I quickly learned that this was not the case. I soon discovered that the program was just a way for the school to bring in minorities so that they could indirectly display them during tours and say that our school had so much “diversity.”
This was far from the truth. Diversity at my school stopped at skin color. There was a strict unspoken narrative that minorities on at the school were encouraged to follow and unfortunately for me I did not fit into it. I was not liberal minded, I did not want to be a part of their social justice movements/protest, and I certainly did not want to be known as just another African American student on the campus who believed that the white student body had privilege.
Out of all of her political stances, the two she suggested that were the “most threatening” to her progressive colleagues appear to have been that she “openly supported Donald Trump” and “did not support illegal immigration.”
“The members of diversity leadership program and the building for diversity on campus soon began to develop a hatred for me because I was not following the script that my skin color had supposedly assigned for me,” she said. “I was soon shunned from the members of my scholarship program.”
But when the director of her scholarship program learned of the harassment, he suggested she deserved the backlash.
“I began to get harassed by these members and when it was brought to the attention of the director of the scholarship program, he excused their actions by saying that ‘when you say certain things, people are going to react a certain way,'” she said, adding, “I had very few allies left.”
The threats grew so severe, she said, that campus officials decided it would be best to relocate her.
“One night on campus I had to be relocated because I had gotten threats simply because I was an active conservative on campus who had spoken out against the liberal agenda and illegal immigration,” she said.
Richer told The Daily Wire that campus officials offered her a security escort for the next day, but she decided to decline the offer.
The president of College Republicans of Richer’s university, the name of which we have withheld to protect both students from more potential backlash, confirmed the details of her testimony and stressed to The Daily Wire that the violent threats were directly connected to her conservative political views.
Richer ended her testimonial by making clear that despite the frightening situation, she remains determined to stay true to her beliefs and principles.
“I remain a member of this scholarship program and as this upcoming school year rolls around I will continue to prove to these individuals that diversity doesn’t just stop at skin color,” said Richer. “I refuse to be a trophy for the school to display during tours. I am an African American woman who has a mind of her own and I refuse to mold into something I am not just because it is ‘expected of me.'”
Our campuses need more students like Richer, ones who are willing to push back against the groupthink and remain firm, even amid violent threats.