I am the CEO of the nation’s largest civil and legal rights organization in the U.S. I am responding to the news made public today about the poor handling of a disturbing expression of hate and violence.
The sequence of events reveals weakness and a disappointing lack of commitment to racial equity by Occidental College and its leaders.
A year ago, one of your students sent texts to another classmate that said “all [A]sian people need to die,” “out of all the people on the planet[,] Asian people seem to piss me off the most,” and “they are responsible for the pandemic so they need to die for that too.” The friend, who of Asian heritage, reported the texts to college authorities in October or November in 2021. And just now months later, in February 2022, the school is finally taking action to condemn the messages by calling for anti-bias workshops because those texts have gone public. The College President emailed the campus community on February 3 saying he’d only seen the text messages the day before. He explained that private free speech laws prevented the school from taking punitive action against the student.
The school’s decision to sit on these emails and their choice to not take any action to cultivate a safe and racially inclusive environment at the campus for 3-4 months is unacceptable behavior. Ms. Nugent made the difficult move to inform school officials about these racist and violent texts. Yet, the school chose to do nothing with that knowledge.
Why wasn’t this brought to the President’s attention immediately?
Does violent and racist expression not warrant the Administration’s interest?
As a former ACLU attorney who worked on First Amendment matters, I understand the legal protections afforded all forms of verbal expression, including hate speech, that would prevent the school from taking punitive action against the offending student. However, that does not excuse the school from its failure to take any counteractive steps to support their other students.
The school missed its mark by focusing on what it could not do to the offending student, when it should have prioritized what it needed to do for the rest of the student body to protect the campus from an environment of hate and racism. What, if anything, did the school do to support Ms. Nugent, a student of Asian heritage, who received this hate message from her friend?
The texts should have been a wakeup call. As a small, liberal arts college in Los Angeles County, Occidental is not insulated from the wave of anti-Asian hate that has led to over 10,000 incidents in this country, with the largest number being reported here in Los Angeles. Asian students comprise 21% of Occidental’s student body. Immediate action should have been taken as soon as the texts were discovered.
It is the responsibility of the school to create a safe and learned environment. The fact that campus staff erased chalk messages that condemns anti-Asian hate suggests that racism may not be fully understood at the school. Students are rightfully speaking out and now is the time to uplift the voices of others to counter the hate narrative. In this moment in history where Asian Americans are being attacked and even killed across the country, Occidental’s legal responsibility to not take action against the offending student does not absolve them of their social responsibility to proactively support and protect the ENTIRE campus community, as so many other schools have done and are striving to do.
President Elam has offered some concrete steps in his February 3 and 8 emails outlining what will be done, which is a good first step. However, the question remains what will be the long-term investments the school will take once this current moment is passed to truly build an equitable learning institution?
Occidental College and all universities need to move beyond just responding to the current moment of anti-Asian hate and build a sustainable movement around racial equity. As history has taught us, the targeting and scapegoating of Asian Americans comes in waves when our country feels threatened, but the underlying racism remains constant. Institutions of higher learning have a responsibility to proactively build communities where young minds are being molded that inculcate values of racial equity, tolerance, and safety for the future.
For Occidental College, this is an important opportunity to reflect upon how its administrative leaders think about incidents like this.
I look forward to hearing the specific action steps you will take, both immediately and long-term, to strengthen racial equity at Occidental College.
Connie Chung Joe
CEO, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California
