Student Government Campaign: If You Believe Police ‘Exist to Protect You,’ You Have ‘White Male Privilege’

According to a poster for a campaign sponsored by the student government and Residence Hall Association (RHA) at Missouri State University, “If you’re confident the police exist to protect you, you have white male privilege.” 

The poster — along with others alerting students to signs of Christian privilege, class privilege, able-bodied privilege, cisgender privilege, and heterosexual privilege — went up in a dorm on the campus Saturday night. They’ve reportedly been taken down since then, but not before images were obtained and published by the Daily Caller. 

Saying that trusting the police automatically makes you both white and a dude is pretty dumb, so it’s no surprise that MSU president Clif Smart attempted to disassociate the poster from the school on Sunday night by tweeting that “MSU is not sponsoring this poster, [Missouri State RHA] is.” 

Um… just one problem. As the Caller points out, RHA falls under the umbrella of MSU’s residence life department — which is an official university department that is funded by student fees charged by the university each semester. 

RHA has also since tweeted a statement, explaining that the controversial posters had actually first been brought to campus last academic year. It did not clarify why they had since been brought back, but it did say that it was “proud” of them. 

Now, both the RHA’s statement and a tweet posted by the student government did insist that the groups do respect and appreciate campus police officers — which I guess must mean they were written by privileged white men.