President of the Taiwanese Student Association at UNC-Chapel Hill Yu-Chao Huang discuss the two racially charged incidents that have occurred at UNC
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Tomini students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are calling for more transparency from university leaders after what they describe as a racially motivated harassment incident on campus that happened last month. Joining us now from UNC Chapel Hill is the president of the university's Taiwanese Student Association, Yuchang Wang. Yuchang, how are you? Good. Thank you. Thank you. So what happened on the night you were, the group was holding a... Welcome party for the Taiwanese Student Association on August 29th, and what happened afterwards? Yeah, we are hosting a welcoming event for newly arriving Taiwanese students, and we are touring the campus, and as we walk through the diagonal alley at the pork place, which is the center of the campus, a group of five white men walk past us, and as they approach us, they start mocking us by mimicking the monkey light gesture, putting their face on the ground in a way that clearly feels racist towards us. Right. And did you hear from other students who, I mean, what did you hear from other students who had similar experiences? Well, we are a group of 16 Chinese students, and we are very shocked that this happened to us, and to feel a little bit unsafe afterwards, as we walk through the campus. Right. You were told, I believe, by UNC Police that they had video footage of the incident. Have you seen that? Yeah, so we report to the university on the same day as it happened, and we did not receive any updates more than two weeks, and they told us they have the security footage, and then they asked us to view those footage yesterday, and then asked us to identify those individuals and particularly, like, to see if we can recognize any one of them. Okay, and were you able to recognize any of them? Well, like, there are total strangers worse than and worse now, so I think that we should not be placed a burden for identifying the individuals to enable further investigation on the school. This should be the school to identify those individuals and take actions to prevent this from happening in the future. You mentioned it had been several weeks since university leaders got back with you. Are you satisfied with the university's leadership and the authorities' response to this incident? Yeah, so we're a little bit disappointed and sad about how the university respond to this versus the several weeks for the update, and the update they gave us is access to identify those, which should not be our jobs to do that, and the second is that the communication between this university and others feels like we are taking a lot of work to ask the university about this, which make us like the victims for this harassment, feel a lot of work on our side, and I think universities should have clear protocols and responding to these resources instead of in the future, so the students can feel safe in the future. Is it tougher for international students to know where to turn for help after incidents like this? Yes, so actually, I did not know where can I ask for help, where can I report to before the incident happened, and after the incident, some members mentioned that we have the university compliance office, we can report to them, and they will ask the UNC police for security footage, and yeah, I think for international students it's particularly hard, we are not really familiarized with the resource we have and the support we have around the campus,
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