Transcript: Episode 64 (White Student Union)

Nick: Vice did a piece called “The White Student Union.”  This is about a piece about a guy named Matthew Heimbach who is in Towson, Maryland.  He was a senior at Towson University.  He’s graduated now.

Virginia: I wonder who hired him.  The conservative party wouldn’t hire him.  He’s too racist.

Nick: He started this group called, “The White Student Union.”  He phrases it as, “This is to stand up and be equal with the other student unions in the school.” The black, Muslim, Latino student unions.  He wanted a white student union to look out for the interests of the white students.  Going to college, I would have been happy with a place that pointed out scholarships and aid that I could get as a result of being a white male.

Virginia: Are you technically white?

Nick: I’m European.  My name’s Jose, but I’m from Spain.  That’s always a tricky line.  Everybody thinks I’m Mexican.  It’s the exact opposite.

Virginia: It’s not really opposite.  It’s just not that.

Nick: Yeah.  So whenever you look at this stuff, I got pulled aside several times to see what was being done for Mexicans.

Virginia: Couldn’t you have passed for Mexican, had you not said you’re from Spain?

Nick: And then gotten sued for fraud.

Virginia: I’m just asking how rigorous they are.

Leland: You are, technically, Hispanic.

Virginia: How do they prove you’re from Spain?  I’m just curious.  I don’t know how this works.

Nick: Oftentimes, there’s heritage stuff.  You have to prove that for the good ones.

Virginia: So you can’t go down to the courthouse and change your name to “Garcia”?

Nick: No.  You usually have to prove it, and it has to be recent.  Like, more than 1/8^th or something.

Virginia: Because I could probably go digging through my heritage and find out that I was a certain percentage of several different races.

Leland: Almost anyone can go back and find that stuff.

Nick: What are the odds that we’re all related to Genghis Kahn in this room?  It’s pretty high.

Virginia: But, the video goes a lot further than just being white.  They hold hands and pray, they go out and try to fight crime, and then they eat mozzarella sticks.  I don’t understand how that works.

Leland: They go on night patrols where they walk around the campus.  They stated (but never actually quoted any statistics) that crime was primarily perpetrated by black people.

Nick: That’s the other bit.  This kid’s really got it in his mind to not be called a racist.

Virginia: And yet he is.

Nick: I watched this video the first time by myself (without the other members of the podcast).  I don’t really go off on the “he’s a racist” thing.  I was just listening to what he was saying.  I disagreed with a lot of it, but it might be interesting to have a white group on campus.  I took a lot of women’s studies and Latino studies classes in college.

Virginia: Did you feel left out?

Nick: I felt targeted as being the oppressor.

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