Campus Police Guard 'White Racism' Classroom After Racist Threats Against Professor

A Florida Gulf Coast University classroom was prepared with a police presence in expectation of backlash against a “White Racism” course set to begin Tuesday on campus.

The Fort Myers, Florida, college campus assigned two university police officers to stand guard outside the classroom as the school rolled out the controversial course, the Sun-Sentinel reports. The course’s professor said at least two students had approached him with safety concerns as the spring semester course begins Tuesday.

Assistant sociology professor Ted Thornhill says he has received a barrage of emails disparaging the course as racist and he claims several emails were littered with racial slurs directed at him personally. He forwarded 46 pages of the hateful language-filled emails to FGCU police along with several voicemail messages that repeatedly call him the racial epithets. Much of the feedback challenged the course’s validity and claim its material is racist against white people.

Thornhill says there are 50 students enrolled in the course and said reactions since the course's inception have been "upsetting but perhaps not entirely surprising given the nature of these more rabid white racists."

"I can call a black man a n***** when it's appropriate, and I do," one of the callers said in a voicemail obtained by the News-Press. "I am not ashamed of it. It doesn't make me a racist. If Jay-Z can say it and a black man can say it, I can say it."

According to the course description and syllabus, the FGCU class covers the concept of race and examines “the racist ideologies, laws, policies, and practices” that have allowed for “white racial domination over those racialized as non-white.”

The three-part course seeks to "interrogate the concept of race; examine the racist ideologies, laws, policies, and practices that have operated for hundreds of years to maintain white racial domination over those racialized as non-white; and discuss ways to challenge white racism and white supremacy toward promoting an anti-racist society where whiteness is not tied to greater life chances."

As International Business Times previously reported, the course was first announced by Florida Gulf Coast University in November and backlash from students and social media was immediate.