Everyone who has been anything in the civil rights movement “was a menace to society,” said Kylee Shepherd, a Brigham Young University (UT) senior and one of the five founding members of the Black Menaces. This student group started a TikTok account featuring videos of them posing race and identity questions to their primarily white classmates, from what Juneteenth commemorates to if institutional racism exists. Since February, the five friends have gathered over 724,000 followers and 28 million likes. They hope to give students of color a platform where they can tell their own stories.
“For so long, non-BIPOC people have been speaking on behalf of BIPOC people,” Sebastian Stewart-Johnson, a junior at BYU who helped found the Black Menaces, told Inside Higher Ed. “And now we’re able to take the leadership aspect and role and have our own voices amplified about the things that directly are affecting us.”
Ten chapters have been started so far with students from at least 70 campuses expressing interest in starting their own chapters, reported Inside Higher Ed. The Black Menaces’ goal is to have a chapter at every predominantly white institution.
Read more about this movement here.
