“Nigger, sand nigger, spic, Jews, I love the KKK, Obama is a nigger, I hate gays, black monkey.”

On the evening of Saturday Nov. 1, vehicles belonging to nine members of the Gustavus community were vandalized with these deplorable expressions of prejudice. Six of the nine cars belonged to Gustavus students, one was a Gustavus vehicle and two belonged to non-students. The cars were parked on and off campus. Written in paint, all of the statements were rinsed off by Safety and Security. Over a week has passed since the incident occurred and one thing is clear: the impact of these words did not wash away. They have had a powerful effect on the Gustavus community.

“We can’t ignore this,” Senior Philosophy and Gender and Women and Sexuality Studies Major Rhea Muchalla said, “That is a level of hate that hasn’t been seen on such a mass basis in a long time.”

One student, whose car was vandalized and wishes to remain anonymous, was struck by the level of intolerance reflected by the statements. “Everything on my car had racial connotations. There were very threatening symbols [like the] KKK and a swastika.”

Another student whose car was defaced, preferring not to be identified, was also startled by the vehemence of the messages. “They are not just words,” the student said, “I’ve been angry, I’ve been frustrated, I’ve been scared. … I can’t really focus on anything. It really affected me in a more powerful way than I thought it would.”

Many students were surprised such hateful messages were expressed on this campus. “I was just shocked,” Junior Political Science Major and Chair of the Student Senate Diversity Committee Chad Allen said.

The truth is this is not the first bias-related incident this campus has experienced. Since 2005, Safety and Security recorded 18 bias-related incidents, including one hate crime in the spring of 2008. “I have a hard time believing that there are people on campus that would do that,” Allen said.

The possibility that someone on this campus is responsible for the graffiti is a difficult reality to swallow. “I think it’s comforting to believe that it’s not a Gustavus student,” Allen said.

While that is a possibility, Dean of Students Hank Toutain points out that history tells us that the opposite may also be true. “We certainly know that there are incidents of a similar nature in the past that have been … perpetrated by Gusties,” Toutain said.

Director of Safety and Security Ray Thrower said his office is working with the St. Peter Police Department to investigate the matter and have not yet determined who the perpetrator is or how the vandalized cars were chosen. His office has, “been working over the past week following up on leads,” Thrower said, which he points out can be a frustrating task. “It is a matter of waiting for someone to slip.”

The vandalism alone violates Gustavus policy, but the discriminative nature of the words elevates it to what the college calls a bias-related incident. When “an expression of hostility” occurs on campus, “based on the perpetrator’s bias against a person’s or group’s actual or perceived race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, gender, age or sexual orientation,” whether or not that expression is a crime, it is classified as a bias-related incident.

“As much as I wanted to believe that I wasn’t [targeted as a member of a protected class] I believe that it wasn’t random,” the initial anonymous student quoted said. “I think that at the very least we were targeted because of our race.”

This student expressed frustration with the school’s response and his/her dissatisfaction started on Saturday, Nov. 1. “I kept asking, … ‘What are the implications of what happened?’ The officer told me, ‘It will probably show up in THE WEEKLY as a bias incident,’ and then they left. And that’s all I had to work with,” the person said.

Toutain, responsible for notifying the campus of the incident, sent an e-mail informing students that a bias-related incident had transpired. “The College will not condone nor will it tolerate hateful acts that are motivated by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, ethnicity, or disability, and seeks to respond to them promptly and seriously, and in ways that respect individual privacy,” Toutain said in his e-mail.

The anonymous student first  quoted said he/she was informed that Toutain and Thrower hoped the e-mail would help them find the perpetrator. “They were waiting for somebody to talk and that was the basis of their investigation. … They told me that it was essentially a shot in the dark,” the student said, who felt the administration should have delivered more specific information to the student body.

“They said they wouldn’t go forward on informing the community about it because it would impinge on their investigation,” the student said. “We knew the investigation could go on forever.”

According to Toutain, when the school confronts an incident like this, “There are two considerations that always rise to the top. The primary concern is for the people who appear to be the targets,” Toutain said. His second priority is an investigation into what happened. “In between,” Toutain said, “there’s what you do with this as a community.”

The initial anonymous source appreciated the commitment to investigate but questions whether it is distracting the administration from responding in ways that could address core issues. “I don’t want to see anyone behind bars, but the administration is set on finding who did this and they feel that will … help the students. I don’t agree.”

This student felt that whoever wrote on the cars insulted the entire campus, and it was in the best interest of the community for everyone to receive detailed information. “The words and the hate [are] against the Gustavus community, and that hurt should be felt by everyone.”

While these individuals found Toutain’s e-mail too vague, he said he tried to notify the campus of what occurred without compromising efforts to discover a perpetrator. “I used the words that I did in view of the ongoing investigation,” Toutain said. He also considered how the perpetrator might interpret the administration’s reaction.

“I can easily imagine someone wanting nothing more than to see a reaction and to control the agenda, and I hate to do something that might be satisfying to the [perpetrator],” Toutain said. He cites one case in which a swastika was written in the snow in the Uhler Hall Courtyard in the 2005-06 school year. “I would be willing to put money down that the person was not necessarily an anti-Semite,” Toutain said, explaining there is a “fair amount of evidence suggesting” whoever was responsible wanted solely to illicit a reaction.

Muchalla recognizes both of these arguments against releasing more information, but does not find them satisfactory. “I am very dismayed at [Toutain’s] initial e-mail,” Muchalla said. “I’m sure it’s not, but it feels like a carbon copy that you cut and paste into.”

These students also question the legitimacy of Toutain’s concerns about inadvertently catering to the guilty party. Muchalla rejects the notion that someone could write these messages without prejudice motivating them. “People don’t understand that by saying, ‘Let’s not let them control the agenda, you are in fact silencing the people who have been silenced by the act,” Muchalla said.

She points out that many of the people who have witnessed discrimination of this strength are people “who have had racist, sexist or homophobic things done to them in the past,” and that releasing more information might encourage a larger population to grasp the severity of this situation.

“It’s time that everyone stands in the same water, feels the same fire and sees the same thing,” Muchalla said.

Toutain welcomes student reactions, even criticism. “I’m encouraged that there is more conversation than I’ve seen in the past,” Toutain said.

Ohle, Toutain and other college administrators have spent time meeting with students, which Toutain said provided them with an opportunity to reflect. He heard many compelling comments and concedes his e-mail may not have been an ideal response.

“It was a judgment call: in this case it was my judgment, which I know is not perfect. If I could do it again, I might do things a little differently, while trying to be as transparent as possible,” Toutain said.

The second anonymous student quoted is skeptical of whose interests the administration prioritizes. “It seems like right now [the administration] is more concerned with how this whole incident is coming off and how the college looks. … The impression I’ve been getting [is that] they have been trying to hush everything up so far.”

Toutain contends that the administration’s first priority is certainly students and said in response, “I feel comfortable saying emphatically that is not the case. Certainly there will be disagreements as to what transparency is and whether this was.”

When responding to bias-related incidents in the past, the administration hosted a series of discussion-based caucuses on campus. Ohle would like to host another campus conversation, but appreciates that students are finding other ways to approach this. He said in a campus-wide e-mail that “our student leaders have taken a very positive approach to examining how we as a community can come together when others might be trying to tear us apart.”

Some students wonder if a campus discussion is enough.  Muchalla thinks it is an important aspect, “but it can’t be the only way. … That’s what’s failed in the past; we’ve just done a community conversation. We need to come at it from all angles.”

Over the past thirteen days many student organizations and individuals, frustrated with the lack of administration response, took matters into their own hands. “I think it’s awesome that students are taking action because something as big as this shouldn’t be covered up,” the second anonymous student said.

A variety of things have already occured. On Monday, Nov. 10, Student Senate released a statement denouncing hateful acts. On Tuesday evening students gathered to hang peaceful poetry in the campus center. On Wednesday, students distributed information in the residential halls and the social justice theatre troupe I AM WE ARE performed.

Abdul Suleyman, junior accounting major and co-president of the Diversity Leadership Council, has advocated for student organizations to cooperate and support dialogue about the bias-related incident. He helped coodinate the Gusties for Gusties rally, held on Thursday, Nov. 13. “All of the groups under the Diversity Leadership Council wanted to come together, united [in] … that we won’t tolerate hatred here on our campus,” Suleyman said.

The first anonymous source predicted that at the rally, “People will be able to see the hate … and they will be uncomfortable with it. … People will be mad. People will say this is a stupid idea. And that’s fine. People should be uncomfortable with it … People should be mad, and then they should realize that [their feelings] were felt times a million by the people whose cars were [targeted].”

Muchalla views the student reaction as a positive step towards confronting issues of hate and intolerance on campus. “There [were] some strong leaders that said, … ‘I am going to tell everyone right away; you are not going to forget this; you are not going to let this be swept under the rug; no you are not going to conduct an investigation in silence, while we sit in silence twiddling our thumbs and [hoping] that something happens,’” she said.

“It’s pretty empowering … for someone else who isn’t from [a protected] class to say, ‘I want to speak up for someone else,’” said Toutain about the student response. He believes that it is one thing for people in the targeted groups to express their anger and frustration about being discriminated against and quite another for a variety of groups to get involved.

After reflecting on what the school can learn from this process, Allen believes that a crisis-response team should be formed. It would handle all cases of bias-related incidents and hate crimes on campus. Because there is not a specific person or group that has been specifically appointed, he feels that an appointed response team would serve as a galvanizing force in coordinating a unified reaction.

“Groups all do their own thing, but they aren’t all necessarily on the same page,” Allen said. “If you have some sort of coalition … of students who were trained to deal with this … and who are ready to respond to it, it might be more effective than all these scattered responses.”

As events continue to make the campus think critically about the implications of what it means that nine cars were vandalized with hateful grafitti, there are different views on how students can react most effectively.

“One of the biggest challenges … student groups face is the question of how do you go against something that you feel so strongly about while not creating hate right back towards [the initial actions] and intolerance towards those people? It’s a fine line to walk and I believe the student leaders are refocusing all that anger and turning it into something really positive and effective,” Student Senate Co-President and Senior Dance Major Shawn Grygo said.

Grygo believes that conversations are most beneficial when they encourage all students to participate and express a range of thoughts. “If we really want to stop the hate acts, we have to open up conversations where everyone can speak no matter what they think,” Grygo said.

Sophomore Phil Cleary echoes her point. “People that really have radical views, like the ones shown on the cars, are probably using the only medium of expression they feel safe using,” he said.

“I think they used it as a last resort for expression,” Cleary said, “I do not endorse anything that happenedm, [but] I have come to think that some of the responses we have given to [the perpetrators] may be dangerous.” Cleary fears that intolerance of unpopular views may lead individuals to express themselves in more hazardous ways. “People try to squander the beliefs of people instead of their chosen means of acting out,” Cleary said, emphasizing it is abhorrent that people feel this way, but unacceptable for them to express it through vandalism.

Despite the inherent challenges in addressing these issues, the initial anonymous student quoted reminds the campus that everyone has a responsibility to act rather than remain passive bystanders. Regardless of the differing approaches people believe the community should use to address the issues of bias and hate, the anonymous source said remaining uninvolved is the worst thing an individual can do.

“The person who doesn’t do anything at all is a supporter of the hate and the malice that the person on campus felt, by letting it be somebody else’s problem. This isn’t just about me. It isn’t just about Gustavus. This is about people who feel hatred and the atrocities that are occurring around the world [as a result of hatred]. … We need to learn that we can’t just sit back and watch things happen.”