An online group on Facebook.com called “I’m a White Minority @ Ryerson” has been denounced by the Ryerson Students’ Union Board of Directors for encouraging prejudice and has been voluntarily closed by its creator.

At the meeting held on Monday night, an emergency motion was moved by Heather Kere, president of the United Black Students at Ryerson, that the “Facebook group, (I’m a White Minority @ Ryerson) be publicly denounced for encouraging prejudice on campus.” The motion was passed.

RSU president Muhammad Ali Jabbar, who was at the meeting, said that the RSU had decided to take a stand against the website and speak out against it after receiving a number of complaints from members of the Ryerson community.

“My initial reaction after seeing it on Facebook was, ‘Hmm, this is interesting.’ But it wasn’t until I heard concerns from students that we decided to act,” said Jabbar. “It’s a positive step. People are recognizing that what was a joke maybe isn’t a joke.”

Jabbar said that the RSU plans to start a number of anti-racist training sessions and workshops on marginalized communities and publish an anti-racist fact sheet in light of the RSU board motion It will start the program next semester.

“Anything that’s discriminatory or racism should not be tolerated,” he said.
 
According to Quinton Coish, 23, a fifth-year information technology management student and the group’s creator, the group has been voluntarily closed. It was absent from Facebook, a popular online networking website, beginning on Tuesday.

Coish declined to comment on why he decided to remove the group or if he would re-open it in the future.

Coish, who said he heard about the motion informally from a friend, said he’s shocked that members from the RSU have responded to his group with this motion without contacting him personally to talk about it.

“I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from friends and members of my family. I’ve also received a number of negative feedback, but I’m not going to comment on what was said to me,” said Coish.

Still, Coish maintains that he’s done nothing wrong and feels that his association with this group shouldn’t label him as a racist.

“Don’t pin me as a racist, as that’s what this group wasn’t intended to be from the beginning. It was meant to be a joke,” said Coish.

However, Patrick Hunter, communications director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, isn’t laughing at Coish’s intended joke. He said that the Facebook users who choose to join the group and call themselves a “white minority” are insulting and ignoring the fact that white privilege is still a major part of today’s society.

“To them, this group may seem to be innocuous and it’s not hurting anyone. But in fact, what they're doing is placing themselves on par as racialized people who genuinely face the impact of racial discrimination on a daily basis,” said Hunter.

“I think they need to understand the impact racialized people face. It's a painful experience. And I don't think they've experienced that.”

Elizabeth McManus, a 19-year-old (white) interior design student, said that calling whites a minority “doesn’t make sense” because white people dominate in numbers and in positions of power in society.   

“It’s too bad they consider themselves a minority, when we’re dominant,” she said. “We have to respect the other cultures, too.” 

Shoaib Ahmed, 24, a second-year business management student and current communications director for the Muslim Students’ Association, said that the group’s intention of being a joke falls short.

“I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot. They’re making fun of their own and it just doesn’t seem right. Looking at it from the perspective that they were calling it a joke, it would be the same as, during Halloween, someone dressing up as Osama bin Laden. It could give a message where all Muslims are terrorists or just a silly way of attracting attention,” said Ahmed.

He also said he worried the group’s creation may produce a “snowball effect.”

“One day someone does this, the next day someone does something bigger and before you know it, it could get really ugly,” said Ahmed. “It doesn’t seem appropriate.”

However, Thaddeus Mark, 19, a Chinese Christian Fellowship at Ryerson member and second-year mechanical engineering student, said he wasn’t offended with the Ryerson white minority online group.

"On Facebook, you're free to do whatever you want because I believe in freedom of speech when you're on the Internet," said Mark. "But if people feel that way, they're entitled to their opinion. It could offend somebody, but anything could offend someone. You're never going to please everybody."

The online group had more than doubled in size to about 140 members after The Ryersonian published a story on Nov. 22 detailing the group’s existence on Facebook, a popular networking site for university students.

After the story was published, many new members posted on the group’s discussion board in support of the online group’s existence, and encouraged the group’s administrator to keep the website open to foster debate on what they believed was a significant issue on campus. Also after the article ran, several discriminatory comments, including one by a user who spoke of “white power,” were deleted as well.