Alana*, a student at Howard University, was taken aback by the deification of Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination on 10 September. As an Afro-Latina genderqueer senior at the historically Black university in DC, she found it off-putting when she saw an image on Instagram of Kirk hugging Jesus. “He wasn’t this national hero or politician,” Alana, who is using an alias, said. He was “just a white man with a loud opinion.”
The sentiment on the historically Black university’s campus, she said, is that Kirk’s rhetoric about marginalized communities was hateful and that they are being unfairly blamed for his death.
