The Hongcouver | ‘We trolled so hard we became real’: meet the founders of UBC’s White Student Union
Three co-founders of the White Student Union say they want to provoke a serious conversation, and insist they are not hoaxers. And one is South Asian
But they are real. And two of this amiable trio of young men are most definitely students at UBC.
The UBC WSU Facebook page was among dozens of such pages created last month, purporting to represent students at universities across North America. The first was directed at University of Illinois students, and appears to have been created on November 18 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement that has swept across US university campuses.
A handful cropped up naming themselves for Canadian universities including Western University, McMaster, The University of Toronto, the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University. The U Vic page was promptly deleted. Pages named for the others survive, but with only a few dozen “likes” each.
But the UBC WSU page stands as an oddity among its Canadian counterparts: relatively popular (with 900-plus likes), and insistently inclusive, strange as that may seem. It says it welcomes “allies” of other ethnicities (unlike other pages which have boasted of an all-white membership), and includes the familiar BC caveat that it “acknowledges that we are organising and producing content on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples”.
I think it’s an injustice ...the stigmatisation of whiteness