Burning Books By Writer Jennine Capó

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Students at a Georgia public university burned copies of the book by Dominican-born writer Jennine Capó Crucet, accusing her of "attacking the whites."

Videos, Instagram Stories and other content circulating on networks shows how students from Georgia Southern University - located in Statesboro, southeast of Atlanta - took copies of the book Make Your Home Among Strangers and burned them on grills to grill meat in one of the dormitories of the educational institution whose student body is mostly white.

The burning occurred after the talk that Capó gave in the auditorium this Wednesday, October 9, to discuss the book, whose reading was required in one of the first semester students' classes. The play is about a young Cuban-American from Miami who is admitted to an elite university in New York and feels out of place.

According to the local newspaper The George-Anne, Capó Crucet began to answer the students' questions at the end of the talk. One of them complained saying, “I noticed that you made a lot of generalizations that most white people are privileged. What makes you think it is okay to come to a university campus like this, where we are supposed to promote diversity, which is what they teach us? I don't understand what we are supposed to do with this."

The writer replied: "I came here because I was invited and spoke about the white privilege because it is something real and because you are privileging it right now by asking your question."

There the spirits began to heat up and the questions of the students began to rain. "She came to our school and the audience was predominantly white," a student who attended the reading explained to Buzzfeed. "And she spent it attacking white people for an hour, blaming all these stereotypes and generalizations on us."

A video shows how the books were burned on a grill located next to Eagle Hall, on the university campus:

Capó shared in a tweet this photo prior to the celebration of the talk:

"I think [this book] represents us very badly," Carlin Blalock told The George-Anne. "It makes me feel like these people make us see as a school and as ignorant and racist students."

For his part, John Lester, vice president of strategic communications and marketing at the university sent a message to the aforementioned newspaper defending the freedom of expression of students but condoning any type of violence: “Although it is among one of the constitutional rights of students, to burn Books is not something that adheres to the values of the Goergia Southern nor is it something that encourages civil dialogue or the debate of ideas'.

As for the writer, for the moment she has not spoken and on Twitter she only said that she will speak about what happened very “soon”.