Eneale Pickett, a second-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was done with polite, comfortable conversations about race, so he debuted an in-your-face clothing line with shirts and hoodies featuring slogans like “ALL WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACIST.” Now, he’s getting death threats.
Pickett told UW’s student paper, The Badger Herald, that he started Insert Apparel after another black student was spit on and called racial slurs in one of the university’s on-campus dorms in March.
But when he posted the first “white people” hoodie on Sept. 30, Pickett said Facebook suspended his account for four days. On Facebook, he documented some of the hate-filled vitriol users have sent him on the site, along with Twitter and his Etsy page.
He also said fellow students who’ve misunderstood his message have lodged hate and bias reports with the university, saying that calling white people racist amounts to hate speech.
“A lot of people want to talk about race in this very nice way,” Pickett told WKOW. “If for this conversation to happen, you need to be comfortable, that’s a problem.”