When University of Wisconsin–Madison freshman Launa Owens reported that someone slipped a racist note underneath her dorm room door last month, one of the first things university officials did was explore the possibility that Owens created the note herself.
That’s according to Owens, who accuses the university of being more concerned with the prospect of the incident being a hoax than with the well-being of any potential victims.
“When these types of things occur on campus, there is always a push that it didn’t happen and it was a hoax,” Owens told Diverse via social media. “The first response is to always question [if] it’s legit, not to see if they are OK and what could be done to help them.”
Owens says she was “harassed” by a UW staffer who wanted to take fingerprints of “everyone who touched the note (and by that time many people touched it) to make sure that we weren’t lying.”
“I asked her why she would think that, and [she] said that there could be a possibility and wanted to make sure because she didn’t want more damage happening to the university,” Owens said. “I left out of frustration because she was more concerned about the University than what had happened.”
The incident purportedly involved a note that stated: “You fuck with Bucky. You fuck with us. Fuck you nigger bitch.” Owens has said she believed the note was in response to a recent protest in which she and other students were photographed holding a banner that portrayed the school’s mascot — Bucky Badger — as a Ku Klux Klansman.
While Owens — who withdrew for the semester — complains that she was wrongly viewed as a potential suspect in the incident, a review of recent events shows there is good cause for university officials to explore the hoax scenario when it comes to investigating allegations of racism.
