Campus Hate Crimes During the Trump Era: The Rhetoric of Conflict During the 2017 Unite the Right Rally at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
Kathleen Kirk, Darina Lepadatu · 2023
This chapter situates the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s definition of hate crimes and the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers’ definition of hate speech within the context of Academia. The crisis studied is cultural polarization in the U.S., specifically the 2017 Unite the Right Rally of White supremacists at the University of Virginia. This momentous event “served as a wake-up call and exposed many higher education institutions to a threat they had not previously considered: Clashes between extremists and the protestors who oppose them” (Thelen and Robinson 2019 , 219, 445). The authors trace how rising tensions about race across the U.S. became manifest during the Rally and how university officials responded to the crisis. The authors show that the university also engaged in transformational crisis communication, leading to a reassessment of its culture and engaging more fully with its historical relationship with slavery.