Black freshmen students at American University claim they’ve been targeted in a racist banana attack.
via NY Daily News:
One student said someone chucked a banana through her dorm room door last week, hitting her in the head. On the same night, another student living on the same floor found a rotten fruit placed at her door.
“I wouldn’t let people drive me out, but it’s kind of sad that this kind of thing still happens,” Neah Gray, the student who found a banana sitting in front of her dorm door, told the Washington Post.
The Washington D.C. school is investigating the Sept. 8 incident, and officials say they have connected two white male freshmen to the attack.
Neither suspect has been identified, and the school released no further details on the investigation.
University officials held a town hall meeting Friday to listen to student concerns over the racist attack.
“We understand that members of our community feel hurt by an incident that happened in a residence hall and separate allegations of racially biased behavior,” the school said in a statement. “We’re working with student leaders and others in the community concerned about this.”
But black students at the private university said there has long been racial tension on the campus. American University’s Black Student Alliance brought up several previous instances of on-campus racism in a Friday statement condemning the banana incidents.
Posts on the anonymous social app Yik Yak have been especially vitriolic, the group said.
“One post called for a slave auction of black students,” the statement read.“Another called for black students to ‘go back to Africa!’”
About 13,000 people — 7,200 undergraduates, 3,600 graduate students, 1,500 law students and 800 students studying abroad — attend the Methodist university.
About 58% of the student body is white and 7% is black, according to Princeton Review.
It’s unfortunate incidents like this are taking place in 2016.
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