The Black Menaces are a group of students who are known for posting videos in which they ask their white classmates questions about race, identity, and politics. They are now spreading their group to campuses all over the US.
Since February, when they started their TikTok account, the students at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, have gained 725,000 followers. In their videos, they can be seen asking their white classmates things like, “Would you date a bisexual person?” and “What do you do to fight racism?”
Sebastian Stewart-Johnson, Nate Byrd, Kylee Shepherd, Kenneth Dorsey, and Rachel Weaver, who make up the group, released a video on Wednesday with the news.
She says in the video, which is called “EMAIL US TO START ONE WHEREVER YOU ARE,” “We want a Menace chapter at every mostly white college and university in the country.”
In a recent interview with NBC News, Stewart-Johnson talked more about the plans. She said that the group is officially starting chapters at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, Tulane University, and San Francisco State University.
Stewart-Johnson said that already, students from more than two dozen schools across the country have shown interest.
He said that the goal of the expansion is to help the Black Men’s organization large protests and push for changes across the country, such as making it so that schools have to teach classes on race.
Eventually, he said, he hopes that the Black Menaces will divide the new chapters into four regions based on where they are and create a new TikTok account for each region.
Stewart-Johnson said in an April interview, “As black students, we’ve felt the isolation and “ostracization,” so we wanted to show what we go through in a way that millions of people could see.”
People who are asked questions in Black Menaces’ TikTok videos often look uncomfortable. But the Menaces said it is important to get their classmates to think critically about things like race, gender identity and expression, and other problems that affect people who are on the outside.
Byrd said, “We like to make people uncomfortable and give them things to think about that they probably haven’t thought about before.”
Stewart-Johnson said that he and other black students often felt like they had to teach their peers. This made him think of the Black Menace. As members of the Black Student Union, the group felt that their efforts to make the school more welcoming were not heard.
BYU is also connected to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is also called the Mormon church. Most of the students at the school are white, just like the church. In 2018, only 6% of the 16 million Latter-day Saints in the world were black.
Many of the group’s TikTok followers seem excited about the expansion already. Many people wrote about schools where they wanted the Menaces to start chapters in the comment section of the Wednesday announcement.
