By Cadence Chua
On the night of 1 November, at around 10 to 11 pm, slurs were heard being shouted in the dorms, specifically in the building furthest away from campus. A video of the incident was taken by Antamar Thiam, a first-year student, who circulated it to the AUC group chats. In the video, the sentence “I hate n****s” was heard shouted from afar.
Second-year students Natalie Hankins (Sciences major) and Laura Herberg Fernandez (Social Sciences major), also the Communications Officer of the Student Council (StuCo), were heading back to the dorms when they witnessed the incident: “I noticed four guys hanging out through a window, and there was obviously a party, gathering, or something. But I didn’t think much of it because that happens.” A few moments later, Hankins and Fernandez heard numerous people in the apartment screaming the N-word outside of their window, one after the other.
According to Hankins and Fernandez, the perpetrators, Fernandez explained, encouraged each other to “come on, do it again, do it,” resulting in one of the people screaming “Sieg Heil” while doing the Nazi salute. They described the incident as happening very quickly, in under five minutes.
The pair told The Herring that their initial reaction was one of anger: “They were egging each other on and that they obviously thought it was fun,” Hankins explained. “It’s AUC, a majority white place, and obviously there’s gonna be bigots, but the bravery to do that was just what shocked me,” she added.
Merilyn de Vree, a first-year student, was also a witness to the incident and heard the group in the apartment: “It was very disturbing… [AUC] has such an international group, I don’t see why you would do this in your right mind.”
When asked about what should be done, Hankins had strong opinions: “They should be publicly shamed, and I would love for them to leave AUC and never show their face again,” she states. “We can’t just let this happen; people should know that people are yelling these things… the school needs to talk about it,” Fernandez said.
They added that they informed the Resident Assistants (RAs) of the incident immediately. “It’s important that we tell them there isn’t any space because it is literally against the rules to use hate speech. They shouldn’t feel safe enough to do that in their dorms when they’re drunk and think they have no repercussions,” says Fernandez.
De Vree said that she hopes to see an information session about it organised by the school: “If they can, track down the people who did it and be really strict with their rules”. De Vree was angry: “This is obviously not okay. If you tolerate something like this, what else will you tolerate?”
Other incidents of hate speech have also happened in the past few months at the AUC dorms. In October, a student, who requested to remain anonymous, Anne came home to see “Goodbye, f****t” written in her native language in chalk on her door. She said that some of the messages on other doors in her string were nice, but some were more offensive, in particular, her door.
“I felt very scared and powerless,” Anne explained. She strongly believed that this phrase was for her directly and not an accident. Anne also thought that these were not new sentiments in the AUC student body: “Bigoted, racist, and homophobic things have been said in some AUC group chats, as well as on social media [already].”
Once Anne started talking about it with other students, more stories came out about similar incidents. “The school hasn’t taken any action,” she says. She suggested that this was more of a dorm issue than that of AUC: “I don’t know to what extent AUC could do something about it, because at the end of the day, the dorms are separate, I feel like it should be more of a DUWO issue than AUC.”
When asked about what students could do, Fernandez stated that StuCo wants to take action: “StuCo wants people to report [incidents like this one], because then you can actually see it’s a problem”.
In the Netherlands, articles 137c and d of the Dutch penal code expressly prohibit making offensive comments about a group of people, or inciting hatred, discrimination, or violence. If a person is charged and found guilty under these laws, they may be punished by either a fine or up to a year of imprisonment.
Officially, AUC maintains a strict policy of intolerance regarding harassment and discrimination of any kind. According to their website, students who have encountered such incidents are encouraged to submit a report either anonymously or with their contact details.
If you feel affected by the incidents and would like to reach out to someone, you may reach out to the Student Life Officers (SLOs) or Peer Support. If you would like to report incidents of harassment or discrimination so that institutional action can be taken, information can be found at the bottom of this page.
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