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The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it says was written by the student who hung a noose in the campus library last week.

The student — who remains anonymous — claims that last Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She herself then carried the noose with her to the library “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she says, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

The student says that she didn’t learn of the noose’s discovery until Friday morning. “Ashamed and embarrassed,” she called campus police and confessed. “As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by recent issues on campus,” she writes, “I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain.”

An editor’s note at the end of her statement says that the paper “has verified the author’s authenticity.”

The full text of the statement, which at this writing is only available in PDF form at the paper’s website, appears below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I guess I have to address this, since it’s coming up more and more often in comments on my coverage of the UC San Diego situation: There is NO evidence that the black shock-comedian “Jiggaboo Jones” was behind last month’s racist “Compton Cookout” at UCSD. None. Zero.

Here’s the deal.

Sometime in early-to-mid-February, the invitation to the Compton Cookout party was posted on Facebook. As word of the party got around, complaints began to mount, and on February 16 the UCSD administration condemned the event.

On February 18, nearly a week after the party and two days after the scandal broke as a national story, a black comedian who goes by the name “Jiggaboo Jones” posted a video on YouTube claiming that he had thrown the party as a DVD release event. Right-wing websites and fringe journalists leaped to endorse this “debunking” of the story, particularly after subsequent racist incidents at UCSD began to make national news, and the claim has begun to find its way into more mainstream media coverage as well.

But Jones’ story doesn’t hold water, for a long list of reasons:

• His name appears nowhere on the invitation, nor does any mention of any DVD tie-in.
• No media coverage of the party mentioned his name until after he “confessed.”
• Nobody involved with the party has since come forward to confirm his involvement.
• Despite promoting his YouTube posts with promises of video from the party, he’s produced no such video.

A photo of Jones — wearing dark glasses and a Jheri curl wig, and holding a bucket of fried chicken — accompanied the original party invitation, but that’s the only link between him and the party other than his own claims. Again, there was no mention of him in the invitation, and nobody with any known link to the party has suggested that he was involved in any way.

Every piece of evidence that exists suggests that Jones’ claim is exactly what it looks like — a creepy self-promoter’s attempt to turn a thin, random connection to an ugly news story into a few moments of seedy notoriety.

And yes, I recognize that I’ve just given him what he wants, and yes, I’m disgusted by that.

A daylong protest at the UC San Diego chancellor’s office ended inconclusively on Friday evening, as students from the university’s Black Student Union rejected the administration’s response to their demands but chose to withdraw and regroup rather than continue the occupation through the weekend.

The students had been angered by a series of incidents at the UCSD campus — a racist invitation to an off-campus “Compton Cookout” party, a broadcast on student-run television that used racial slurs to mock black student activists, and the hanging of a noose in the university library.

The BSU is set to resume its protest at ten o’clock this morning. I’ll be following the story here as it develops over the course of the day.

9:45 am California time | The UCSD has released a new statement on the campus crisis. It identifies six specific steps that the university has taken in response to the incidents, and affirms the chancellor’s “personal commitment to making diversity issues a continuing campus priority; improving the overall campus climate to welcome and respect differences; improving the compositional diversity of the campus; and developing a curriculum that reflects the multi-cultural richness of the region.”

The statement also contains the news that campus police have been consulting with both local and federal prosecutors on the noose investigation. It makes no mention of the confessed perpetrator’s alleged accomplices.

11:00 am | The Guardian, UCSD’s student newspaper, has printed a statement that it claims is from the student who hanged the noose in the library. She claims that on Tuesday, two days before the noose was found, a friend of hers fashioned it from a piece of rope she had found on the ground, “without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD.” She then carried it with her to the library, “and ended up hanging it at my desk.” It was, she said, “a mindless act and stupid mistake.” When she left the library hours later, “I simply forgot about it.”

The student says that she didn’t learn of the noose’s discovery until Friday morning. “Ashamed and embarrassed,” she called campus police and confessed. “As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by recent issues on campus,” she writes, “I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain.”

An editor’s note at the end of the statement says that the paper “has verified the author’s authenticity.”

11:30 am | Because the UCSD Guardian so far only has the student’s apology posted as part of a PDF of today’s paper, I have posted the full statement in text form in its own post.

In a speech I gave to a group of student activists yesterday, I said that part of how the culture moves from seeing campuses as quiet to seeing them as hotbeds of student protest is by simply beginning to pay attention to what’s been happening all along.

Student protest has always been a feature of American college life. There’s always something going on. Sometimes there’s more stuff going on, definitely, but there’s always something. Always quite a lot, actually. So when you start to pay attention, when you start looking, you’re bound to see stuff you weren’t expecting to see.

Which makes it hard to know how to interpret the stories that have been coming to my attention today.

Anyone who’s been following this blog recently knows about the string of racist incidents at UC San Diego over the last couple of weeks. First there was the “Compton Cookout” party invitation, urging attendees to dress and act as caricatures of black America, then there was the vile defense of that party presented on student-run campus television, and then there was the noose that was hung from a light fixture in the campus library late Thursday night.

Yesterday I heard of another bias incident on a California campus — a swastika drawn on a Jewish student’s dorm room door at UC Davis, earlier this week. This morning I learned that the LGBT center at Davis had been vandalized with anti-gay slogans. And just an hour or so ago, I found out that someone dumped a bunch of cotton balls in front of the Black Culture Center at the University of Missouri on Friday morning.

Are all of these incidents related? Probably not. Are they just coincidence? Maybe.

Maybe.

But maybe I’m just seeing them because I’m looking. Maybe this isn’t a weird coincidence at all, but just a slightly-more-disgusting-than-average week in campus hate crimes.

Or maybe it’s somewhere in between.

I don’t know.

In the same week that students at the University of California San Diego found a noose hanging in their campus library, two acts of bias-related vandalism were perpetrated at the system’s Davis campus five hundred miles north.

On Friday, university officials revealed that a two-inch swastika had been carved in the dorm-room door of a Jewish student earlier in the week. That same night, the door of the campus Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Resource Center was defaced with spray-painted anti-gay words and slogans.

The LGBT Resource Center will be holding a town hall meeting to discuss the incident on Monday at 5:30 pm.