More than 70 students, professors and members of the community hosted Soar Above Hate at Florida Gulf Coast University Thursday, beginning on the Library Lawn.
The university has faced hate speech incidents throughout the school year, including two drawings on white boards depicting the lynching of black people, the keying of a student’s car with a gay slur and white supremacy flyers recently displayed around campus.
Maggie Hambrick’s Rhetoric of Social Movements class initially proposed the rally. The course in the upper-level undergraduate communication track “examines the rhetorical impact social movements have upon a culture, including their influence on identity formation.”
“They had to come up with what are the issues, demands and strategies for how they wanted to lead the protest, and they came up with the idea for Soar Above Hate because they felt like they wanted it to be relevant to our campus,” Hambrick said.
Student speakers and performers from S(he) Will Fade shared stories from sexual violence and assault survivors. Thalia Vazquez’s spoken word poem opened for the group.
“My fight for justice will never end,” Vazquez said. “My soul will soon create a new song filled with words I’ve been holding for way too long. My rape story has become my rallying call. ”
S(he) Will Fade member Nikoletta Pappas led the group across the campus.
“With the hate speech incidents that have happened on campus, we don’t want that to represent us,” Pappas said. “We are such a diverse school that welcomes many different ethnicities, races, and we would just rather promote love speech rather than any of this hate speech that’s affecting our campus.”
Though the Soar Above Hate movement came from Hambrick’s course, it involved participants from other campus protests this school year, including Bryan Oliva-Infante, who led the campus anti-Trump Strike4Democracy.
“I’d say there’s a lot of similarities just because like the hate speech going on on campus is kind of from the same audience that supports Donald Trump’s immigration policies, that supports against women’s rights,” Oliva-Infantes said.
Soar Above Hate comes soon after nine faculty members sent a letter to University President Wilson Bradshaw confronting the university’s lack of response to the racially charged incidents on campus.
The group behind this rally hopes the protest inspires the university to change its policies regarding hate speech; however, the university police department has explained the allegedly hateful speech is still within one’s First Amendment rights.
