Racist, sexist and ugly, yes. But is it a hate crime?
"Rape all Asian bitches and dump them," read graffiti scrawled with black marker on classroom walls in History Corner and the Center for East Asian Studies on March 14 and 15, during Dead Week. "Nuke Arabs." "Nuke Niggers." "This is a whites only classroom." "White man rules." And so on.
It was the 29th "threatening incident" logged this academic year by assistant dean of students Tommy Woon, who since 1997 has been developing a protocol to deal with intolerance on campus. Within a few days of the graffiti's appearance, University president John Hennessy and vice provost for campus relations LaDoris Cordell, JD '74, circulated an e-mail note to department chairs and administrators, urging anyone who found similar slurs to notify the campus police. Hennessy -- wearing a white ribbon of solidarity distributed by the Stanford Student Diversity Coalition -- told the Faculty Senate on April 19 that the police thought the scrawls were the work of a single individual and that they had advised against publicizing the incidents widely, in an effort to avoid a "copycat effect."
Outside the Law School lecture hall where the Senate meets, several dozen students gathered to protest what they described as the University's "delayed and inadequate response" to the graffiti. And earlier that day, 150 students had handed out flyers in White Plaza that called on the University to "work with students to establish a stronger schoolwide protocol for dealing with hate crimes."
That's not the term assistant professor of communication Laura Leets would use, however. She says the graffiti is protected by the First Amendment. "Do I think it should be? Yes. Do I think Stanford has a problem with hate crime? No. To be a crime, there must be behavior -- like firebombing a synagogue or beating somebody up."
Leets notes that hate speech does cause injury, however, and says that must be widely acknowledged. "The recipients of the hate messages are saying, 'Don't blow this off -- listen to us,'" she says. "And I think what the administration needs to do is validate the feelings of students who were harmed and reassure them that someone does care."
Last fall, Leets designed an online "Act of Intolerance" survey to gauge responses to hate speech and ask for constructive ways to deal with it. When the graffiti was discovered on campus, she posted her survey -- along with photographs of the writing -- on the web. She soon received more than 400 responses. She is still analyzing those replies, but says an initial reading suggests there's "a problem of miscommunication, where students and the administration are talking past each other."
Leets's prescription: campus discourse that considers questions like "How do we respond?" and "What can we do to right this wrong?" "Doing that," she says, "will make us all stronger."
