Race-relations at Duke University hit a stumbling block following last week's announcement that allegations of hate-crimes are currently under investigation. Two incidents, involving racist slurs and death threats, have received nationwide attention and have angered many members of the Asian-American community.
Earlier last month, an email message sent to the Duke student body described an unnamed Asian-American woman who was accosted while walking home at night by a group of men who demanded that she "return the spy plane."
In the second case, following an April 1 trip to Washington D.C., Duke freshman David Lin reported returning to his dormitory to find his room in a state of disarray -- his closet door hung open, clothing and personal items thrown about the room, and a class picture book lay open with his picture crossed out and bearing the scribbled message, "Chink, it's time to leave."
The chain of events began two days earlier, when Lin claims his chemistry test was stolen and his name affixed to a fraudulent test. Later that day, Lin received a pair of expletive-laden email messages.
The first of these, sent under the heading of "blessed the virgin mary" from a public computer in a campus library under the account over666soon@hotmail.com, contained such lines as, "eat ur heart out with a [expletive] bottle of soy sauce ... we don't welcome YOUR KIND here."
The other message, entitled, "over soon HHAHAHAHAHAHA," recounted a decapitation.
Controversy has been further spiked by Lin's allegations that in an April 20 meeting, an officer with the Duke University Police Department accused him of perpetrating the hate crime himself as a cover-up for cheating on the chemistry exam.
Duke's Asian Student Association (ASA) has reacted with outrage to both the alleged crime and the university's handling of it.
"These incidents are only symptoms of a university that often times treats its Asian and Asian-American community as second class citizens," ASA President Patty Chen and Vice President Christina Hsu wrote in a letter to the editor appearing in Duke's daily newspaper, The Chronicle.
Chen and Hsu, along with nine other signatories, requested that Duke university take a number of measures aimed at providing the minority population with greater support in such situations, including demands that administrators fund events intended to increase awareness about hate crimes, raise the number of Asian-Americans on staff at the Office of Student Affairs and launch a thorough investigation of the officer who questioned Lin.
DUPD policy prohibits officers from commenting on the details of cases pending, but Detective Sara-Jane Raines told The Chronicle that she anticipates that law enforcement will continue to investigate the case through the summer months.
At an August 1999 meeting of the Minority Relations Committee, Raines said, "[The University] has a very good reporting system for hate crimes ... Because of this we have a fairly high rate of reported hate crimes."
Four hate crimes were reported at Duke during the 1998-1999 academic year.
The Lin incident comes just two months after the announcement that Duke's Asian Student Association won their bid to host next year's East Coast Asian Student Union conference. This will mark only the second time the event has come to a southern school in its 24 year existence.
