Eagleionline

November 5th, 2006 by Jesse Stellato

October 12, 2006 was a day of victory and defeat, pride and shame. Not long after Boston College claimed its resounding 22-3 triumph over Virginia Tech, events unfolded that would soon rock the student body and administration in a way no sport ever could. Indeed, the racial animus expressed that day by students, coupled with befuddling responses by University officials, and followed, finally, by anonymous calls to “Join the White Alliance” cast a powerful and disturbing light on Boston College and on its very identity as a Catholic and Jesuit institution committed to the values of respect, peace and equality.

We will never know exactly what happened on October 12. University officials have declined to share the results of an Administrative Hearing Board convened on October 26, citing the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s recent ruling in Harvard Crimson v. Harvard College, holding that complaints held by Harvard University’s police department were not public records subject to the Massachusetts public records law, would seem to cast doubt on the possibility of obtaining incident reports from the Boston College Police Department (BCPD). Moreover, the ongoing nature of the investigation into BCPD itself makes it less likely that the Newton police will supply much pertinent information, either.

The information that follows is consequently highly anecdotal. It was collected from The Heights, The Observer and The Patriot, three of Boston College’s student-run newspapers, and from interviews conducted with undergraduate students not directly involved in the events.

The incident occurred soon after two white female undergraduates arrived in Boston College’s Roncalli Hall residence Thursday, October 12, at around 9:30 p.m. The white women were apparently making so much noise that at least one of a group of five black females asked them to stop. A verbal altercation ensued, after which one of the black women bent down to pick up a fallen earring. At this point, one of the white women kneed the black woman in the face, busting her lip and causing it to bleed. Sometime in the middle of this incident, one of the white women, who appeared to be intoxicated, said: “I fucking hate fucking niggers.”

Two or three phone calls were made to the police. One was filed by the white women, alleging that the black women were intimidating them. One was filed by the black women, alleging that they were the victims of a hate crime. A third may have been filed by a witness, who reported noise in the hallway. An incident report was generated by the police at 9:56 p.m.

When three Boston College police arrived at the scene, they took statements from the white women, but said that the black women would have to go the station to make their report. When the black women arrived at the police station, they were refused the opportunity to make a statement, and told that they should have provided their statement to the police at the scene instead. It was not until days later that the black women were allowed to make their statement to the police.

Four days later, on Monday, October 16, students held a rally at Boston College’s Quad. At the rally, Dean for Student Development Robert A. Sherwood offered the first public statement about the incident by a university official. “With a community this large, with so many different backgrounds,” he said, “there’s bound to be friction.” Vice President for Student Affairs Cheryl Presley followed Sherwood: “I wish I could tell you we’re going to do A, B, and C to alleviate racism. But all of you know that would be a lie.”

We don’t live in a utopia,” she continued, pointing out that hateful incidents are simply part of living in the real world.

She concluded by saying that members of the Boston College community can “work with each other to diminish the acts of prejudice and racism” and stressing that while the pace of combating racism may be slow,”talking is where it begins.”

Meanwhile, students at Boston College were demanding more than talk. Katrina King, A&S ‘07, who is a leader in the so-called TRUTH movement, demanded specific reform. “We are concerned about the way the University is run,” she said. “We are advocating for three things: a centralized hate crime protocol, a clear hate crime definition that goes beyond federal law, and a biannual report detailing the nature of any hate crimes on campus.”

And yet, the story does not end there. On the heels of the October 16 campus rally, other students at Boston College responded. Around midnight, between October 17 and 18, fliers were found on the main door of the CLFX lobby and connector lounge, Medeiros Hall and Shaw House. “Join the White Alliance — Forge a Superior World,” the fliers read. They also advertised a meeting the next day in Devlin Hall, a building containing lecture halls and classrooms, “to debate the merit of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.”

The racially-charged events at Boston College this October are the most recent in a series of intolerant acts that have plagued the university for more than a decade.

On Tuesday, February 21, 1989, the words “Say goodbye, nigger” were painted in white on the front door of an apartment where three black students lived. Michael Hines, the Boston College senior who reported the words, was dismissed the previous semester for failing grades, but was allowed to continue living in the dorms until Sunday. Hines had also been involved in a controversy the previous year when he wrote two letters in the college newspaper deploring racial tensions on campus.

In 1994, students found in the Quad a swastika formed by 15 bundles of the student newspaper, The Heights. College officials said the symbol was not a hate crime. Instead, they claimed that it was a protest against The Heights for running a Holocaust revisionist advertisement the preceding month. Robert A. Sherwood, then Dean of Students, declined to rule out the possibility the swastika was left by a Jewish student group.

In 1996, a Jewish professor at Boston College found a swastika scrawled on a poster on her office door. A student newspaper ran a largely fictional story shortly thereafter trivializing this act and featuring a photo of the professor bawling in feigned distress.

On April 3, 2001, The Heights printed a column by then-freshman Arar Han entitled “To the Man Who Mugged Me.” Han, who claimed she had been sexually assaulted by a black man on the T the previous semester and then pick-pocketed by another black man on the T in the spring, came to the following conclusion: “You are forcing me to again regard black men with suspicion, and by forcing this wretched reality upon me, you are wresting away my dire desire and freedom to see black men as simply human.”

On April 27, 2001, at least one student from Tufts University came to Boston College and inscribed the words “we hate niggers” and “niggers not welcome” outside students’ dorm rooms in Vanderslice Hall.

On February 11, 2006, a Boston College student and two non-BC students wrote the word “homo” on the wall in the dorm room of a male freshman living on Boston College’s Newton campus, tipped the student’s mattress over and left what The Heights described as “a jug of a liquid” on the bureau.

In the summer of 2006, “huge blue swastikas” were found on the dry-erase board in the Boston College office of the African-American Hispanic Asian and Native American (AHAHA) Leadership Council. Another was found in the adjoining Bisexual Gay Lesbian Transgender (BGLT) resource center.

Boston College now stands under a cloud of racial bigotry. Only time will tell whether all its members will step out into the sun of tolerance and universal brotherhood.

[Editor’s Note: The following comments were made anonymously on Eagleionline’s previous site. They are included here for historical purposes only, and do not necessarily represent the views of Mr. Stellato or Eagleionline.]

1. on 05 Nov 2006 at 5:51 pm Michael

   Great article, Jesse. I had no idea the main campus was such a disaster. I’d like to think that equal treatment of all races by the campus police is something we can accomplish even in the absence of a utopia. In a lot of ways, the apparent institutional indifference to these events is significantly more alarming than the events themselves. You’re always going to have a bigoted student here or there. But the administration of a major American university making idiotic comments like these? Yikes.

2. on 05 Nov 2006 at 6:09 pm Josmar

   Jesse Stellato, you’re the best. Thank you for taking the time to compile this information into a great article. I hope for greater dissemination.

3. on 08 Nov 2006 at 11:15 am monfortj

   Excellent article Jesse. Unfortunate events, but excellent article.