In February 2012, Oberlin college threw out two students for allegedly posting anti-gay, anti-Semitic, and racist messages around campus. After those messages became public, the school canceled all classes for the day. Then reports arose of a person wearing a KKK-style outfit near the Afrikan Heritage House; that person turned out to be a female student wearing a blanket. The FBI has been investigating the incident.
One of the two students, Dylan Bleier, is apparently a big fan of President Obama’s. Bleier put together a voter registration drive for Obama in 2008. He founded and was president of the Ithaca High School for Obama club, and joined the Oberlin College Democrats, as well as the Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism. The group was designed to target institutional racism. Bleier also tweeted frequently about racial issues – his Twitter account labels him as “atheist/pacifist/environmentalist/libertarian socialist/consequentialist” — including President Obama’s controversial comments on George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin: “Zimmerman is just the tip of the iceberg, a single highly visible symptom of the racist system that is ‘succeeding’ in the US.”
After the incident, Bleier told campus police, “I’m doing it as a joke to see the college overreact to it as they have with the other racial postings that have been posted on campus.”