UPDATE: Wednesday May 3, 10:45 p.m.
SMU Student Senate shared the following flyer to convey on-campus unity:
ORIGINAL: Wednesday May 3, 7:40 p.m.
Alt-right fliers were reportedly found on the SMU campus May 3. Sophomore Gaby Gonzalez was one of the first students to see the fliers.
“A friend of mine had posted the flier with a response of her own,” Gonzalez said. “She didn’t tell anybody about it, she just posted it on social media [on May 2].”
Gonzalez saw the flier in person the next morning.
“I was walking to Hyer Hall and saw the flier,” Gonzalez said. “People just kept on crowding around it, wondering what it was — a couple of people took pictures to send to different GroupMes. My first reaction was, ‘Oh no, here we go again.'”
Gonzalez was appalled by the fliers and found that the information listed on them was not new to the SMU community.
“All the websites that are on this flier [are] in direct connection to the websites that were posted in the racists fliers last semester,” she said.
— RELATED: BREAKING: Anti-black fliers distributed, found on campus
Gonzalez said that she believes they have an adverse impact on the SMU community.
“It can be read in several different ways: as heteronormative, it can be read as racist, it can be read as anti-untraditional families — it’s just a whole mess of negative things,” Gonzalez said.
Some students expressed their concerns via social media.
https://twitter.com/adrieannareyes/status/859816671875301376
Student Senate members David Shirzad, Davis Wells, Matthew Lucci, Will Jones, Blake Rainey and Audrey Ngo met at 3 p.m. Wednesday to discuss the fliers and how, or if, they should respond. They agreed to post a response flier conveying unity and acceptance of all Mustangs.
Ngo believes a plan of action is necessary even though those responsible for placing these fliers around campus have not been identified.
“As diversity chair, I’m put in an awkward position where I’m supposed to promote campus unity when we don’t even know who the perpetrators are,” Gonzalez said. “The only thing that is factual is that the content of these websites is very anti-minority, anti-immigrant—it’s very Nazi-sympathetic. The only thing I can do as diversity chair in this situation is to provide some sort of counter-response.”
Ngo expressed her passion for ensuring that every voice on the SMU campus is heard. She plans to take action on the fliers.
“We’re going to post fliers that speak out to students who are afraid to speak up to let them know that there is somebody in their corner and that somebody, especially on Senate, supports them,” Ngo said. “In the future, everything has to be looked at with a pretty detailed eye, however I am working on creating a survey, a very quick one that will be sent out to all different organizations on campus to see what they would like to see from me.”
The Daily Campus will continue to update this article as new information is made available.
