Latest Race Hoax: Slur Posted At College ‘Fabricated’ To Make Trump Backers Look Bad

In the latest manifestation of a persistent phenomenon, a race hoaxer at a college stepped in to fill the gap between demand for racism and the supply — by creating fictional racism in the form of a written slur posted on the campus, school officials say.   

This phony incident took place over Thanksgiving break at Rhodes College, a small private school in Memphis with an enrollment of about 4,000. A dozen sheets of paper that paired a racist message with support for then-recently-elected presidential candidate Donald Trump were left at the school’s National Pan-Hellenic Council Plaza, which is a tribute to the school’s historically black fraternities and sororities. Blacks represent 9.7% of the school’s enrollment.  

According to reported accounts, the hand-written pages said “F*CK NI**ERS, TRUMP RULES.” The school immediately issued a campus security alert about a “reported hate crime of intimidation based on racial bias,” and included a list of “resources available for survivors,” which included personal counseling, along with guidance from the college’s Institutional Equity office.

Black students conducted a silent protest in the lobby of the school’s library, wearing black clothing and posting signs with messages that included “Hold Racists Accountable,” “Stop Racists,” and “Hate speech will not be tolerated.” The university’s Office of Inclusion and Diversity held a paradoxical “open meeting” for black people only. “This is a chance for Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni to unite and develop actionable steps toward institutional change,” an announcement said. 

Here’s how the “incident” was initially reported: 

In what will come as no surprise to regular ZeroHedge readers, the whole thing turned out to be phony, as the school confirmed in a statement to Fox News Digital:  

“Thanks to the tireless efforts of our Campus Safety officers and the Memphis Police Department, the investigation into the hate crime that occurred recently on our campus has ended with the identification of the perpetrator and the conclusion this incident was fabricated. This individual has admitted responsibility…This matter has caused enormous pain to our community, and we are taking the appropriate steps to hold this individual accountable, including all legal avenues that may be available to us.”

Rhodes College’s quest for accountability has its limits: the school is keeping the culprit’s name and relationship with the institution a secret. The college did say the hoaxer reported the incident with hopes of blaming someone else for doing it.  

Between the posting of the racist, Trump-supporting language and the announcement that it was a fraud, black student and Pan-Hellenic Council member Lauren Roberts complained that authorities weren’t working hard enough to find the (non-existent) bigot, telling WREG, “They are saying they are investigating and doing this and that and the third but it’s been two weeks and you still haven’t found anybody that’s kind of like a bummer to the black community, in my opinion.”

The Rhodes College episode is the latest of many campus racism hoaxes. A very small sampling of other such frauds includes:  

• A black male student who wrote racist graffiti on a dorm at Albion College 
• A black female student who reportedly vandalized her own own dorm door at Wayne State
• A black female student who posted a note reading “Black people don’t belong” to her dorm door at Southern Illinois
• Three black female students who falsely claimed to have been victimized by a white mob on a bus at UAlbany

Kentucky State University criminal justice and political science professor Wilfred Reilly wrote a book on race hoaxes and maintains a database which suggests less than a third of reported hate crimes are real. Reilly wrote that, with “absolute confidence,” it can be said that “the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large…We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.”