'I Just Love White Men': White Man Aims Racist Rant at Columbia Students of Color

The young man, dressed in a blazer and button-up shirt, was hopping off the ground outside a Columbia University library early Sunday morning as he continued.

“We are so amazing,” he added as the students, some of whom were filming him with their phones, yelled back in outrage.

“I love myself,” his voice cracking as his screaming intensified, “and I love my people!”

In the backdrop of his racist tirade, Columbia’s campus in New York was mostly empty in the hours before dawn.

Now, heading into a grueling final exam period, students on campus are contending with the outrage and backlash sparked by a viral video that shows the young white man, whom the school’s newspaper identified as a student, spoutingwhite supremacist remarks at a group of students of color.

The episode comes less than two weeks after a Columbia professor’s office was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti.

In a statement posted on its website on Sunday, Columbia University administrators denounced the episode, calling it “deeply disturbing” and “racially charged.”

“We are alarmed at the rise of incidents of racism and hate speech in our world today,” the deans of three Columbia schools said in the statement, later adding that Columbia stands “firmly against white supremacist language and violence.”

“Our community will not waver in its support for those of any faith, race, gender, sexual orientation, background or identity,” the deans said in their statement.

The university said it was investigating Sunday’s episode.

The video, one of multiple clips of the encounter that were posted on Twitter, has been viewed more than 1 million times. It starts with the white student pronouncing, “We built the modern world,” a claim he repeated several times during a 54-second clip. He went on to bellow his views on the white race, occasionally using profanity to punctuate his point.

Throughout the video, members of the group of students of color pushed back against his comments. One called him a “degenerate,” using an expletive to emphasize the argument. At another point in the video, when the white student asserted that “we” saved billions of humans from starvation, several students rebutted his point by reminding him about slavery.

“Look, I don’t hate other people,” the white man said in a hoarse voice at the end of the video. “I just love white men.”

The person who posted the viral video to Twitter did not respond to a request by The Times for comment.

In a statement Monday, Columbia University said it would create a “working group on bias incidents” in response to both Sunday’s events and the graffiti found in November.

The announcement came after several minority student groups insisted that the university take action to prevent similar episodes on campus.

In a Facebook post Sunday, the school’s Black Students’ Organization decried the rant and said it would discuss possible measures to respond.

Columbia’s Student Organization of Latinxs, a group for Latino and Latina students, also called on the school to hold the white student accountable for his comments. In a separate Facebook post, it said the incident was part of a larger “institutional problem that is perpetuated by its administrative, academic, and business practices.”

Columbia’s Organization of Pakistani Students also asked the administration to “create a safer space for marginalized communities on campus” in a statement posted to Facebook on Monday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.