Apparently, their grief wasn't “intersectional” enough.
University of Missouri student groups organized a vigil to honor the victims of the Orlando shooting — only to have a group of Latino activists, including a school official, interrupt it to complain that it wasn’t focused enough on racial issues.
“I wish this many people came out to our racial demonstrations and our Black Lives Matter movement,” Mizzou graduate Tiffany Melecio said to a crowd that The Columbia Missourian estimated at about 800 people, according to an article in the College Fix.
“Those are things you don’t consider when you are white or when you are an American,” she added.
Melecio, who also identified herself as bisexual, then went on to complain that when people talk about race, they just talk about “the black and white dichotomy.”
“We never take the time to talk about the shades in between – like mine,” she said.
Yes — 49 people murdered and all Melecio can think to do is talk about herself. Yes — 800 people gathered to support the LGBTQ community (a community which she herself is a part of), and all Melecio can think to do is complain that they weren’t supporting the Latino community enough while doing so.
“As much as it is awesome that there’s so many people here today, but it’s, like, who are you really here for?” said Melecio, insinuating that the mostly white crowd didn’t care about Latino people the way it cared about gay people.
At that point, people began to protest, with one woman shouting out, “We’re here for everybody!”
“We are here to be uniting, not dividing, which is what you’re doing now,” shouted Carl Brizendine, whose husband Daniel (a Mizzou student) used to live in Orlando and knew people who had been “shot at” during the attack, and even had one friend who had lost his partner.
#related#People were visibly upset at the interruption — and understandably so — but the activists weren’t backing down.
“So you feel uncomfortable with the fact that people who are murdered are Latino people?” Multicultural Center Coordinator Stephanie Hernandez Rivera said.
“That is a personal problem,” she continued. “You cannot be an ally to one person.”
At that point, The College Fix reports, people started leaving, and one man cried into another man’s shoulder.