There was an Emmanuel AME massacre where nine were left dead. There was a policeman that shot a fleeing unarmed suspect in North Charleston: that was the spitting image of police brutality. Then at Clemson University in S.C. this past year we have had racially bigoted off-campus entertainment that doesn’t focus on our respective history but on the criminal character that some of our fellow citizens are plagued with.
We’ve also had had hyper-dramatic students at the College of Charleston who disapproved publicly of my former supervisor Glenn McConnell being president because he previously supported a historic flag to be flown that is an indelible mark of our state’s history; that was nonsense. Meanwhile, at the University of South Carolina-Columbia, we have had cultural matters that shouldn’t be created by college administrators and some students.
A USC Vice President told some Daily Gamecock Reporters in 2011 that ‘back in the day’ they would use water hoses to stop disruption quickly after an NPHC event. Furthermore, in 2015 a USC student was videotaped making culturally combustible remarks on a classroom white board. The former issue at USC was ‘resolved’ with a painting in honor of some notable black USC alums being placed in the back of the Russell House Student Union. The later issue has not been publicly discussed at any time since the initial news reports on it.
I spoke with a political science professor at USC this week who said the concerned students organized a meeting with college administrators with NO response after querying them about this instance of racism. Mizzou and Ithaca didn’t put up with any of these bunkum-like reactions from their superiors and we should request for a more responsive reply at all times from our college officials, too. It seems like we swept both of these incidents under the rug and bought a drawing from an artist in one situation to hush the complaints that were coming from USC students of all pigmentations.
Now, I believe many affected people are startled to object to the manner in which things are being dealt with on campus due to what happened to the Occupy Columbia protestors at the State House in 2011. There are ostensibly some trust issues in police relations and their independence from politically restless elected officials. My former boss Gov. Nikki Haley illegally ordered the Bureau of Protective Services to arrest law-abiding protesters in 2011 and ended up on the wrong end of a federal lawsuit because of it.
On top of this, people are watching the demonstrations in Ferguson, the dragging of a young girl in Spring Valley, and the shooting of multiple unarmed people around the state by police. We do not want any part of that at all (laughs). I was even graetly concerned when one of my female friends decided to picket on the Statehouse grounds for Egypt in early 2011.
I didn’t know what the Bureau of Protective Services would do because I was serving as an aide there for nearly a year and they were still asking me which office I worked in, even with an identification badge from the Budget and Control Board that stated all the information they needed. So, I didn’t want one of my female friends to get strip searched or possibly arrested due to a overanxious police officer swayed by the personal political speech of a governor, even though law enforcement is protected by law at all times against any type of useless intrusion.
It displays a very shabby political system when peaceful protestors can be expelled from property that they own by people who are supposed to be protecting the citizens. Yet, murderers like Dylan Roof and Michael Slager have several bodyguards with them at all times at the taxpayers’ expense. And that’s why there’s some displeasure with the techniques of policing in a lot of citizens’ minds when they prove to be officers of discourtesy instead of courtesy.
Jordan Thomas Cooper is a 2015 graduate of the University of South Carolina with a degree in History and a 2010 graduate of the Real Estate School of Success in Irmo. He is the first African-American to serve in both the governor and lieutenant governor’s office as an aide and first to serve in the Inspector General’s Office in S.C. (Haley)
He is also the first to serve in the top three offices in the gubernatorial line of succession in South Carolina (Haley, Bauer, McConnell). He happens to be the second black presidential campaign speechwriter in American History and the first for a GOP presidential campaign (Bush 2015). He also played football for Coach Steve Spurrier.