Dartmouth brochure from 1970s

Hate Crimes, Racial Harassment, and Dartmouth’s Toxic Campus for Students of Color

In 1996, 400 students gathered outside of Parkhurst Hall in a Rally Against Injustice after a string of hate speech incidents, including racial and homophobic slurs. There were two separate incidents in which Asian students found derogatory terms scribbled above the doors of their dorm rooms. Earlier that year, dirt was thrown at a gay pride flag hanging outside of a window and a threat to “kill homosexuals” was written above a gay pride sticker on a dorm room door. In 1995, a Black student received a letter to his campus mailbox signed “Jim Crow” and a flier advertising a speech called “Let’s Talk about Faggots” was mailed to the Dartmouth Gay and Lesbian Organization.

Twenty years later, minority and LGBTQ students face the same threats. Yik Yak, similar to Bored at Baker, is an online forum where college students post anonymously about campus life. After a Black Lives Matter protest in Fall, 2015, Dartmouth students posted racially derogatory, violent, and hateful comments on Yik Yak that trivialized the Movement, devalued the livelihood of black students, and threatened individual students by posting their initials and class years. Examples of these Yaks included: “I hope a police officer puts a bullet in your head” and “We freed you from slavery, what more do you want.”

On Dartmouth’s campus, students of color are not safe from racial harassment and violence. Nowadays, racial slurs are not written above doorways, they are yelled in fraternity basements or posted “anonymously” on Yik Yak. These incidents are not just microaggressions, they are acts of hate speech that endanger the mental, emotional, and physical health of minority students at this school. They serve as constant reminders that Dartmouth is not for non-White students.

 

Further reading:

http://thedartmouth.com/2016/02/12/activism-at-the-college-a-history-in-many-parts/

History of Protests at Dartmouth

Dartmouth students read Yik Yaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddLJuYP86eg