Humorless conservatives freak out over a '#StopWhitePeople2k16' training at SUNY Binghamton

This is exactly why white people need to be stopped.

It’s the first week of school at New York’s SUNY Binghamton and students are returning to campus and getting back into the swing of college life. Part of that includes training for Resident Assistants, the students responsible for enforcing rules in campus dorms. One of those training sessions, however, didn’t go down so well with some off-campus folks.

This screenshot of the “#StopWhitePeople2K16” session description was posted by the Binghamton Review, a conservative, student-run publication (its Twitter bio says “You’ll get your degree from Binghamton University, but your education from Binghamton Review“).

The course description seems fairly innocuous. It describes itself as a primer on the importance of diversity in society and an open discussion on the topic.

The right wing media couldn’t seem to get past the session’s name, with headlines interpreting it as meaning Binghamton R.A.’s were being offered literal training on how to “stop white people.” If such a thing existed, I can think of a few moments in history where it could’ve been more strategically deployed.

The outrage steamrolled from there to social media, where conservative users quickly concluded that white people are the real victims of discrimination in America. SUNY Binghamton was soon trending on Facebook with posts like these.

So, about that name. An interesting thing happens if you do a search for #StopWhitePeople2k16 on Twitter and scroll backward through time. See if you can pinpoint on this screenshot the exact moment where the tweets stop being about Binghamton University.

Go back farther than the last day and suddenly the content of the hashtag completely shifts. No more outraged alt-right bros saying this is proof of the race war in America. Just silly posts by mostly younger Twitter users of a variety of racial backgrounds joking with their friends.

It’s almost as if the #StopWhitePeople2K16 name was a joke that the older conservative news audience was singularly unprepared to get.

That was the conclusion Binghamton’s vice president of student affairs came to. In a statement released Wednesday, Brain Rose said the university reviewed the content of the session and found no “anti-white” content.

“The program title “#StopWhitePeople2K16″ was drawn from a familiar hashtag in use on Twitter, and was not invented by the program facilitators,” Rose wrote in the statement. “It is my understanding that the hashtag is commonly used ironically.”