After racist emails, WFU keeps armed guards outside of some classrooms

Earlier this month, sociology classes were canceled outright after seven members of the department received offensive emails calling for a national purge of nonwhite people and included racist, anti-Semitic and anti-gay slurs. “We felt we were targeted,” said Soares, a professor who is chairman of the department. “I was disgusted, outraged and also fearful for my community.”
Five additional offensive emails were sent the next morning to the school’s department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the LGBTQ Center, and the Intercultural Center.

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Several of the emails shared a common theme of extolling “the standards set by well raised white men.”
The email that was sent to Soares ended with, “We need to stop all diversity programs and restore what made the West the greatest force for true progress in the history of the world. I agree with the right on one thing, that we need to purge this country of the hyper-emotional, hyperbolic, and the hyper-pigmented.”

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The members of Soares’s department who got emails “were singled out in a way that alarmed us greatly,” he said, because it suggested they might have been written by someone who had been in the building.
One of the emails was a racist attack sent to an administrative assistant, who is black and whose photo does not appear on the department’s website, he said. It seemed to Soares that “the only way this person knew to target her explicitly with the n-word and other racist things was to be aware of who she is."
There are two people who have stickers on their office doors announcing that their room is a safe space for gay, lesbian and transgender people, Soares said, and both of them got emails with anti-gay messages, including a slur as the subject line.
Maybe it was a coincidence, Soares said.
One faculty member moved classes to another building on campus, and another is teaching online, Soares said. Others have police officers stationed outside their classrooms.

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“Students have been really upset and scared,” said Mir Yarfitz, an associate professor of history. Some students immediately compared the language used in some of the emails to rhetoric from the August shooting in El Paso, when a gunman killed 22 people and wounded 24 others.
The students’ message was, “We’re not overreacting — this is a real threat. We don’t know how to deal with this situation,” he said.
Yarfitz was at an informal gathering of students who feel marginalized on campus who were talking about the emails and their fears that places they had considered safe — such as the Intercultural Center and the LGBTQ Center — could be targets for violence.
They were talking emotionally about how it feels to be a student here, he said, at a place that doesn’t always feel welcoming to all. “This makes them feel even more unsafe."

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One of Soares’s classes this spring documented the 1860 sale of a group of enslaved people by the university’s treasurer to benefit Wake Forest, and the sociology department organized a commemorative event on campus in May.
Dean Franco, an English professor who has been at the university for about 18 years, said every year it seems there’s a racist incident or discovery of something unsavory from the past. “Last year was the first time that students so strongly reacted and so strongly held the administration accountable,” he said.
It felt like a turning point, Franco said.

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PhDeac said:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educ...y-keeps-armed-guards-outside-some-classrooms/











Do the rest of us a favor. When you hear a member of our community say things like the pathetic person who wrote those emails, call them out.

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palmab03 said:

Yeah I’m surprised this hasn’t been traced yet. It’s gotta be some nutjob student

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palmab03 said:

Yeah I’m surprised this hasn’t been traced yet. It’s gotta be some nutjob student

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palmab03 said:

Dicks........off

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PhDeac said:

It takes effort to change a university made for southern white guys to a national university with a diverse student population.

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BiffTannen said:

On the other hand, holding students at gunpoint might be a good way to get them to attend Ph's Sociology classes.

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BiffTannen said:

BiffTannen has been given 1 (one) point.

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socaldeac said:

30 percent of wake, current freshman class is not white. I believe I read this somewhere in admissions release.

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