A Missouri university is scheduled to hold a talk on free speech after cellphone video captured a student yelling at a campus visitor to remove the “Make America Great Again” hat he was wearing.
The incident showed a black female student emotionally yelling at a police officer and the person wearing the hat at Missouri Western State University.
“It’s a symbol of white supremacy! I don’t want to see that! I wake up every day and I see my people getting killed!” the woman shouts.
The police officer responds, saying, “Hold on. Listen. What you’re doing right now doesn’t help the matter. You yelling and screaming does not—”
“Do you know what that hat symbolizes?” the woman says, interrupting the officer. “All I want is for him to take it off. I don’t want to see that!”
The officer asks the woman to calm down but she says, “I don’t want to talk calmly. I want him to take that off.”
Snowflakes are still melting 2-years after @POTUS @realDonaldTrump‘s HISTORIC @WhiteHouse win!
If this #MAGAphobia student gets TRIGGERED this bad by a red hat, she may have a rough time finding a job in the real world.
Retweet if you STAND BY THE STUDENT WEARING a #MAGA Hat!???????? pic.twitter.com/sy404JpbfR
— Oliver McGee PhD MBA (@OliverMcGee) April 7, 2019
Videos were uploaded online by the student newspaper The Griffon News but later deleted. “The Griffon News has decided to remove the videos that were posted on Friday due to legal reasons and in order to protect the persons involved due to the rise in death threats and threats of violence,” it stated.
The video was re-posted by a political consulting group, X Strategies, and circulated by Oliver McGee, a former Obama administration official who is now a supporter of President Donald Trump.
The incident took place in late March. In response to the incident and other events, administrators wrote on a flyer circulated by The Griffon News that, “our campus community is invited to a discussion of the politics and political ideologies of free speech and hate speech as well as the practice of information literacy when confronting inflammatory content in the media.”
The event was scheduled for April 9.
On April 9th there will be a discussion in Spratt 205 speaking about Free Speech vs Hate Speech. Please feel free to come on out and be part of the conversation! pic.twitter.com/adt2h2Dq1u
— The Griffon News (@TheGriffonNews_) April 5, 2019
A listening session took place on April 1, three days after the incident, drawing about 50 students, faculty, and staff.
“Free speech is one of our core values and another is respect,” Kent Heier, a university spokesman, told the Kansas City Star. “We are 100 percent supportive of free speech. We preserve the right to free expression for all those on this campus, students, staff, faculty, and visitors.”
University President Robert Vartabedian said in a statement that, “Ideally, we would express our views and listen to views different from our own not with an intent to start or win an argument, but to understand and be understood. That can be a challenge in a community like Missouri Western’s, where we have such a diversity of backgrounds and opinions. But it is vital.”
Dossou Ndiaye identified herself as the student who was shouting at the police officer and visitor. In a video posted to Facebook, she claimed that she spoke to the visitor calmly and that he listened to her before the police officer arrived.
“I went up to him peacefully and I went, ‘Hey, why are you wearing that hat?’” Ndiaye said. “’Why do you think it’s okay to wear that on this campus?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and took the hat off.”
She said that an “older white man” then approached the pair and told the visitor to put the hat back on.
Ndiaye said that she identifies as a black woman, a Muslim, and an immigrant. She incorrectly said that the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat when he killed dozens of people at a mosque in March.
