The Evergreen Affair: A Social Justice Society

In 2017, the Evergreen State College gained national attention for a series of student protests and demonstrations centered on racial issues and social justice. Student protestors filmed and streamed over eighteen hours of demonstrations, meetings, and confrontations, and due to the relatively recent ubiquity of streaming-capable smartphones, as well as the generation raised in the context of such technology, this offers a unique source of information. Utilizing computer-assisted qualitative coding, this study endeavors to understand the fundamental beliefs and moral considerations that underpinned the Evergreen affair. In the final analysis, I argue that the Evergreen affair was the manifestation of a coherent social system implicated by a thick system of belief, characterized by victimhood morality and ethnocentric ideas, which ultimately resulted in a racially hierarchical social order.