Reply All - #46 Yik Yak Returns

Episode Date: November 15, 2015

Yik Yak is an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. In the first part of this week's show, we revisit a story we did in January, about how the app brought out a particularly vicious strain of racism at Colgate University. And in the second half of the show - The past month has seen a flood of similar stories at colleges like University of Missouri, Yale, and Georgetown. So we go beyond Colgate and talk to Jamil Smith of the Intersection podcast to try to understand Colgate in the context of these recent events.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last January, my co-host Alex Goldman reported a story about racism, harassment, and the internet set at Colgate University. This past month, we've seen a flood of similar stories at colleges like the University of Missouri, Yale, Georgetown. And so this week, we're returning to our story from last year to try to understand it in the context of everything that's happened since. So first, we're going to play Alex's story, and then after the break, we'll follow up with further reporting from this month. Alex will take it from here. Colgate University is a tiny private liberal art school, just 3,000 students, way up in the mountains in Hamilton, New York. It's the most beautiful college campus in America, according to the Princeton Review, located in the 11th friendliest town in America, according to Forbes. But not according to Melissa Melendez, who's a student at Colgate.

Like one of the first things that I saw about me was, like, it was like bash that bitch's head in. Melissa saw that comment, and much worse, on an anonymous social media app called Yikyai. Yikyak lets you see posts, or yaks, as they're called, from users within a 10-mile radius, so it's no surprise that it's really popular at college campuses. People can post anonymously on yikyak about lame frat parties or hot RAs or boring classes. But at Colgate last semester, the site also became a screen onto which the student body's ugliest, most bigoted, and violent thoughts were projected for everyone to see. And Melissa Melendez and her friends were the target of those thoughts.

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. Melissa Melendez was a senior at Colgate last semester. And as Colgate students go, she's pretty unusual. She grew up poor in the Bronx, the child of first-generation Puerto Rican parents. She attended Colgate on a scholarship. And even for a private East Coast liberal arts college, Colgate stands out as being very white. It has half the black and Latino students of your average university.

I interviewed Melissa at a studio in New York City, and she told me that she still remembers what it was like seeing the campus for the first time. Well, it was a culture shock. I've never seen so many people who look similar to each other. I don't know. I grew up with like Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, West Indians. I hang out with like people who speak different languages. And when I went up there, like a lot of people, they spoke English, they wore the same clothing. A lot of them were rich. It was nice. There wasn't like polluted. air as much as there is here, but it was weird. Melissa got the impression that as new as all of this was to her, for a lot of the students she was meeting, she was a novelty as well.

Every day they were like new, they were like, there was like a different stereotype or a different battle that I would have to like fight or correct. What kind of stereotypes did you have to correct? Oh my goodness. So people, they would be like, have you ever been shot before? Do you know J-Lo? People would ask like how many, how many baby daddies my mom has? And were they being serious or were they joking?

No, they're so serious. Like, sometimes people would reach for my hair and just like, and I'm like, what do you do? First of all, like, if your hand gets stuck in there, like, I'm not liable. Like, you can't just do that. Melissa was never quite sure what was just people being sincerely curious or being sincerely bigoted. Although some cases were way more clear cut than others. There were other people who in the classroom they would talk about welfare and they'd talk about students like myself who are on scholarship as, not deserving or not belonging.

And I think that my first year I was very angry because of it. And then after that, you know, you got to do something about it because you can't just sit around and be angry. That's how you, I don't know, get headaches and die. So instead of getting headaches and dying, Melissa found the handful of other students at Colgate who were in the same boat as her. They formed clubs, volunteered,

and became a support group for other younger minority students coming on campus. And pretty soon, they noticed something. We kept seeing all these younger kids who were not doing well, who were crying, who were asking for transfer applications, who were not getting work done,

who felt unsafe, and we were just like, we can't, it came to a point, like the four of us could not hold down all these people. Like, we were getting behind in things,

and we were constantly worrying about, you know, the younger kids. And so we were like, yeah, we have to, we can't leave them like this. I've been here for a week, and I've never felt so much, I'm sorry, but hatred.

Their solution was a sit-in. It began on the 22nd of September, and it lasted five days. Melissa and her friends formed a group called the Association of Critical Collegians, and they went old school and occupied the admissions building. And there, individual Colgate students shared their stories. There was a group of white guys in the back, and apparently they were, like, calling me really ghetto names, like, Haitian Igna, all this stuff.

Oh, my goodness. Students went up and shared their stories for about like six to seven hours. Wow. Yeah. I mean, if there's six to seven hours worth of stories, I mean, that's like a lot going on. Yeah. Yeah, and those are just the people who decided to go up and talk in front of hundreds of people. So, the brave souls.

You think we want to be here and tell these personal stories? Do you think we want to spend the night here instead of spending the night in my bed? We don't. Okay, none of us do. And so for you to push us to these extreme, needs to tell you something. The sit-in felt at first like a massive success to Melissa and her friends.

Some estimates that a quarter of the entire school was there. Melissa and the ACC presented the administration with a collectively agreed upon 21-point list of demands. Demands like diversity training for the staff of the financial aid office, hiring more diverse faculty, building a discussion of privilege and systemic power dynamics into the core curriculum. And the university put up a webpage that

responded to that list of demands point by point. But meanwhile, on yikyak, the sentiment was quite different and pretty disturbing. While Melissa and her friends were occupying the admissions building, there was a parallel protest going on online. Anonymous yikyak users protesting the very existence of the sit-in. Here are some yaks that Natasha Torres, one of the founders of the Association for Critical Collegents, screencapped. In honor of today, I will only hook up with a minority tonight. I love black people. My maid was always nice to me.

Stop being attention seeking and go home. Let's see. Well, then maybe leave if you don't want to deal with the realities of living in a white world. There were others, like, it's not my fault that the most noteworthy thing your people have done is convince us not to enslave you anymore. Or, white people won at life. Africa lost. Sorry we were so much better than you that we were literally able to enslave you to our will.

It's important to note that these yaks weren't just isolated racist voices shouting into the void. Instead, they were upvoted by dozens of people, meaning that other users wanted to drive these yaks to the front page of the app. Yikyak was doubling as a direct pipeline to the racist id of the Colgate student body. And Colgate is far from the only school that's grappling with this app. Anonymous abusive posting on Yikyak has become such a problem that some high schools have worked with the company to create what are called geofences, where the app just won't function within a certain radius of the school.

But Yikyak doesn't honor these requests from colleges. To try and slow Yikyak down, some colleges have tried banning it but can only limit its use from the college's network. All a student has to do is switch to their wireless provider's network, and they'll still have access. And so Colgate is stuck with something in real life that we all hate on the internet, a trolley anonymous comment section. Here's Charity White, a student at Colgate and a member of the ACC.

It's really, really annoying. and frustrating to see my peers hiding behind anonymity. How does it affect your offline life? Does it make you less trusting of people here because you think, oh, maybe this is one of those horrible racist people that I see on Yukyak? Honestly, I walk around campus sometimes and I think, who posted that terrible thing on Yukak?

Are they in my classes? Are they my friends? do I hang out with them at parties? Is that the person who said black girls are hot, just not at Colgate? After the sit-in at the campus admissions office, the Association of Critical Collegians continued to organize political actions on campus, and the ugly racist chatter on Yikyak continued to pace. And on Thursday, December 2nd, after the Thanksgiving break, everything exploded.

It was back during the protests in Ferguson when the ACC coordinated a die-in. We laid our bodies down in, the dining hall and then that's when the flag thing happened. The flag thing. For the die-in, the ACC went and got an American flag at Target, hung it upside down, and wrote Black Lives Matter on it, along with the names of people like Eric Garner and Michael Brown. And suddenly, that constant hum of anti-minority sentiment on Yikyak took aim at one person. Melissa Melendez.

I went on Yikak, and then I saw that they were talking about ACC, but they were also talking about the bitch with the flag. and that would be me. On Yikak, Melissa came to be known as Flag Girl. She was the subject of Yaks like, if someone punched Flag Girl in the face, I don't think anyone would mind. Or...

Bash that bitch's head in. So I try to brush everything off, which is a problem sometimes. But at the moment, at the time, I couldn't brush it off. Like, I was really upset. I was, like, crying. And I was like, you see, look at the world.

To see, like, 70 or 80 people like something. that says I deserve to die, I think that it was disheartening. Disheartening, and for Melissa, terrifying. These were minority students on a mostly wide campus protesting the targeting and murder of minorities, and suddenly they themselves were being targeted, anonymously. After the threats, the core members of the ACC began traveling in groups. They felt unsafe, unable to focus at school, exhausted.

Several of the ACC members already lived together, but many more began crashing at the house. partly out of solidarity and partly out of safety in numbers. But Melissa continued to feel threatened. And it came to a head the next day. Melissa and her friends had seen some talk on Yikyak that some students were going to show up at the dining hall with the right-side-up American flags to protest the ACCC's protest. Melissa and her friend said,

We'll show up too and protest your protest of our protest. College. Anyway, when they arrived, they didn't find any protesters. They just found two members of campus safety. And those campus safety officers were videotaping them. And so I was like, okay, are you surveying us or are you protecting us? And he said both. And then he was like, I used to support you.

I used to support the ACC and I went to your other demonstrations. He's like, but this, I don't support. And so that's, and he's the head of, like, he's in charge of campus security. So to see him say, like, I don't support you. I'm surveying you. I was like, oh, I see what's happening. I'm actually not safe. Like, because I, the people who I would assume are there for me were not.

Like, who's there for me? Like, who's there to support me? Like, I was exhausted. I am angry. I am sad. And on top of that, I don't know who to trust. And I'm in the middle of nowhere. And I don't have my family here.

And this bubble is toxic. And so I think, like, I was, like, I was giving up. That weekend, Melissa and her friends went to meet with the dean of the college. They told the dean how unsafe they felt. And the dean gave them a bunch of options. She invited Melissa and her friends to stay at her house. She offered to stay herself at the house where all of the ACC was crashing. She also offered to have campus safety check up on them.

And she said if you really feel unsafe, you can leave and finish up the semester off campus. Barbara Brooks, Colgate's Director of Public Relations and Marketing, said that the intent was to take the student's concerns as seriously as possible. But that's not the way Melissa heard it. When the option of we can leave came up, we understand. We understood what that meant. We were like, you brought this up because someone wants us to leave. Like, we're the problem. And so to make everyone happy, you don't want to be here.

We don't want you here. You can go. Barbara Brooks said she couldn't speak to Melissa's characterization, but she says that the school took all of this very seriously. Colgate contacted both the local and state police and asked the Madison County District Attorney's Office to determine whether a grand jury subpoena could be used to compel Yikyak to disclose information about some of its worst yack.

independent of the police investigation, the school and its lawyers sent separate requests for identifying information to Yikyak. But both the requests to the district attorney and to Yikyak were denied. The school won't make the number public, but I was told by multiple sources that over a dozen students ended up leaving Colgate for the semester after the option was made available. Some went back home, and Melissa and eight of our friends just moved to a different town, some ways away from campus. A group of students moving off campus because they didn't feel safe, that has a lot of students moving off campus because they didn't feel safe, that had a profound effect on the Colgate faculty. And some professors decided that they had to do something, fight back. And it was clear where the battleground was.

It was on Yikyak. Associate Professor of Biology, Jeff Holm, came up with an idea to at least temporarily counteract the negativity on Yikyak, something he called the Yikyak takeback, essentially attacking all the bubbling bigotry with relentless, utterly mundane cheeriness and civility. Wish students well on the finals, joke about how hard you were going to make the final exam,

broadcast out some congratulations to students that were finishing their theses and things like that. It was a little like sending Ned Flanders to post on 4chan. The only rule he gave faculty was that they had to sign their names to their yaks, which sent a small but powerful message. We're here and we see you. I asked another biology professor, Eddie Watkins, if he could share a post with me.

So I posted a couple things. And one of the things that had the most upvotes was a posting I made about a student that same day that told me he got into a great medical school. He's applied to several medical schools and he got into the one he really wanted to get into. And that one received at this point 237 upvotes. That was a very positive thing.

But, you know, something positive that's happening on campus. As a way to counteract racism, this seems totally ridiculous. The faculty were violating one of the cardinal rules of the internet. Kindness never works. But to see these older professors making cheesy dad jokes and offering good-natured and unironic congratulations to people and getting way more upvotes than the racist stuff, it had a surprisingly strong effect on the students.

I love it. I love it. I thought it was so cute. Because I knew why they were doing it. Like they were making a statement. And I liked how a lot of them signed their names. I thought that was powerful. They were like, you know, screw being anonymous.

Like, this was Professor Thompson. All the students I spoke to echoed this sentiment. Professor Eddie Watkins noticed the effect as well. At some point during the day around lunch, I went up to the coop, the union, student union, for lunch. And I ran into a young woman who had been a very important member, the ACC movement. And she really struggled this semester. And, you know, I saw her and she burst into tears. And she said, you have no idea what this means to us.

We felt so alone. And so that, you know, I think, you know, it seemed like a silly thing we were doing, but it really impacted some of these people. I mean, she was greatly moved by that. And it just, you know, it was a great way that, I mean, we're so helpless in some ways against this. The takeback helped, but it didn't make the problem go away. I visited Colgate on the last day of the semester to do some interviews, and I tried yikyak out for myself.

And even then, in the dwindling hours before the break, I was seeing yaks about how users hoped the ACC would dissolve. how awful its members were, how happy they were that the ACC had been driven off campus. Despite those yaks, the students who left Colgate are all returning this spring. Melissa graduated last semester, but actually she'll be going back too, not as a student, but as an employee of the college. She's choosing to return to the leafy ponside campus where a lot of young people agree that her head should be bashed in. Partly because she needs a job, but also because she feels like if she goes back, she'll make it harder for Coleside campus. to forget that it still has a problem with race.

And as for Yikyak, look, at this point we know that a piece of technology can't make people better or worse. Google isn't making us stupider. Facebook isn't making us lonelier. All technology can do is give us new options for how to behave. Melissa thinks Yik Yikyaks offered a lousy option to Colgate kids. Say whatever you want, no matter how hateful, and say it publicly and anonymously. But when I gave her a call back on campus, she had one positive thing to say about the app. Before Yikyak showed up, Colgate was a place where Melissa saw people express racist ideas all the time, but no one admitted they were racist or that their friends were.

I think that before people just felt crazy. And by people, I mean, like, people like me. Like, I was like, I feel this way. I feel uncomfortable. People say these things, but I don't have any proof that this exists. And so, like, it seems like people can just brush it off. Well, that's not a big deal. Someone put their fingers in here.

That's not a big deal. But, like, with Yikyak, because the Yikyak post were so explicitly racist, and violent, it forced a conversation on this campus that a lot of people were trying to avoid having. So before you went to Colgate and you lived in the Bronx with a bunch of people from many different backgrounds who spoke multiple languages, did you imagine that there was like a world out there that existed that was like this, where there were people who were like just crazy racist? Was that something that you even thought about before you went to Colgate? Not really. Like I knew that there were racist, like, laws, but it wasn't real.

It didn't feel as real for me because everyone around me looked like different. And so I didn't feel that. But when I went to Colgate and I saw, like, there were a lot of rich people, a lot of white people. A lot of, like, I never experienced that in my life. And I didn't think that place was like this existed. Everybody at Colgate now knows the terrible things people say to each other when they're alone in a room with just the people who agree with them. and they'll have to reckon with something ugly and deep-rooted that they used to just be able to pretend didn't exist.

Coming up after the break, what's happened since, both at Colgate and in the rest of the country? Welcome back to the show. So a year later, what's changed to Colgate? Well, most of the students you heard from have graduated. They've moved on. But the group they found it, the Association of Critical Collegians, that still exists, and it's still organizing protests,

trying to make Colgate a more inclusive place to live. This fall, the group expanded its platform to include sexual assault issues. They organized a big protest, calling for better resources for survivors of sexual assault and an improved process for filing grievances. And the same thing that happened last year happened again. People anonymously went on yikyak and accused survivors of lying about their sexual assaults, using the survivors' full names. The outcry that we saw at Colgate against this kind of everyday harassment,

Now we're seeing versions of it all over the country. At Yale, the fight started over stereotypically racist Halloween costumes. At Georgetown, it was over two prominent campus buildings bearing the names of slaveholding former presidents of the university. And then there's the University of Missouri. On September 12th, student government president Peyton Head wrote on Facebook about multiple occasions when people had shouted racial slurs at him on campus.

He wrote, quote, This is my reality. Is it weird? that I think I have the right to feel safe here too? If you see violence like this and you don't say anything, you, yes you, are a part of the problem. By the end of October, after students felt the administration had done nothing to address his concerns, there were protests and some clashes with the police in the administration at the homecoming parade.

On November 2nd, a graduate student named Jonathan Butler declared a hunger strike in protest of the lacklustre response to racial incidents on campus, saying he would only end a strike when the last night. The president of the University of Missouri system, Tim Wolfe, was gone. Students started confronting Wolf on campus, sometimes on tape. What do you think systematic depression is? Systematic depression is because you don't believe that you have the equal opportunity of your success. Students protest and demand change all the time, and they rarely get their way.

And this is probably how it would have played out in Missouri, too. But then on November 8th, the football team got involved. In a tweet posted by Missouri's Legion of Black Collegians, more than two dozen football players have joined the calls for the University System's president to resign. The players said they will not be part of any practice or game until he does so. According to USA Today, the University of Missouri's athletic program brought in $83.7 million in revenue last year, and football is a huge part of that revenue. The national press picked up the story.

The protests were looking like a serious financial, and reputational liability to the school. And within three days of the football team striking in solidarity, the president and the chancellor of the university had resigned. As these protests were going on and resignations were taking place, students were turning to Yikyak to say awful things. This morning, students at the University of Missouri on edge after a series of alarming and anonymous post on social media overnight,

sparking fears for their safety. One Yikyak user writing, I'm going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot, Every black person I see. Last week, two students from nearby colleges, 19-year-old Charles Staddlemire and 19-year-old Hunter Park, were arrested for posting threats on the site. Threats like, we're waiting for you at the campus parking lots. We will kill you. The day after those threats were posted, the University of Missouri was a ghost town.

Yikyak won't comment for our story, but the company posted a letter written by one of its founders, which says, among other things, that racist posts violate Yikyak. terms of use, and that, quote, this sort of misbehavior is not what Yicayak is to be used for, period. So as all of this has unfolded, I've been reading this one writer, Jamil Smith. He's a senior editor at the New Republic, and he's been writing about what these protests mean in terms of how we witness racism in America. Jamil came into the studio and told me that he sees similarities, but also some key differences between what's happening at Missouri and his own college experience.

So back in 1993, he was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was living in the W.E.B. De Bois College House, a dorm where most of the students were black. We were all studying for midterms. It's like late October and hanging out in my room and phone rings. And, you know, first question out of the guy's mouth is, is this the nigger dorm? Whoa. And I said, excuse me?

And he said, is this the nigger dorm? Recounting that visceral experience of being called a nigger, is I'm 40 years old and it happened when I was 18 and I still think about it regularly. I mean, when that happened to me at our dorm, I mean, it was later followed with a bomb threat, by the way, that put us all out of the building at one in the morning. Had we not gotten a bomb threat, I think it may have been a situation where a lot of people would not have believed us. I would have said, you know, in class the next day to a friend or to, you know, university administrator, hey, you know, we had a bunch of calls last night at the Du Bois College house that told us that we were the nigger dorm and all this stuff was said to us.

And, you know, did anyone record it? Well, no, because we don't have phones that we can record stuff on in 1993. And, you know, we don't have any kind of mechanism to do that. Oh, well, I mean, what do you want us to do about? The students didn't protest, and Jamil wrestled with his experience privately. And then publicly. His first op-ed for the school was about this incident, and he credits it with kick-starting his career as a writer. And today, he spent over two decades having big public conversations about race.

And he's glad that Yicayak didn't exist when he was in college. I mean, frankly, I think it's a dangerous application in a lot of respects, not just because it, you know, encourages this kind of violent speech. But also, it helps emboldened those who are courageous only when they're online. And what I mean by that is, you know, there's a lot of folks who are just, you know, anonymity of the internet has helped them, you know, embrace their true nature. And I think that it's helped radicalize a lot of people who normally may be encouraged to keep those emotions in check. It also creates a space where you can find a lot of people who are sympathetic to your milder views and help sort of. ramp those views up. Boster a sense of community, so to speak, amongst the, amongst the bigoted. The idea that these people are able to build community online and understand that there are just as many cowards that are just like them and that they're not alone, it is not a healthy thing for a university environment.

And to some level, I don't think Yukiak wants to become synonymous with anonymous racial threats. And frankly, that's what it's being, that's what's happening. You know, the immediacy of Yikyak is what's so frightening. These people are, you know, nakedly racist, and we're able to see it, and they're on this campus. And people know that racism lives here. Jamil is no fan of Yikyak. But he sees a potential flip side. Yeah, the app might facilitate racist conversations.

But it also makes those conversations visible to everyone. And so in this way, Yikyak becomes something like a racist paper of record, providing evidence of racist acts, even at a national level. And as we heard in the Colgate story, evidence is more important than you might think when talking about racism in the U.S. Look at Missouri. Part of what spurred the protests was a spasica that was smeared in feces on the wall of a dorm bathroom. But the critics of the protest refused to believe it even existed. It wasn't until the police department finally released the police report and photos of the bathroom that they backed off. There are a lot of people I think that don't even understand what racism is.

they understand racism as a Ku Klux Klan member with a white hood, you know, burning a cross or police spraying black processors with a fire hose in the 60s. They understand the iconography of racism. They understand what it quote unquote looks like because they've been taught that in school. But they don't understand what racism looks like today. And the sooner we can help them recognize it, whether in a yikik post or, you know, in a swastika painted on a, you know, dorm wall, I think the better off we're going to be. I mean, I think to a lot of Americans who don't understand what racism looks like in the 21st century, the things that are happening at Missouri, things that are happening at Yale and Georgetown, and a number of other schools are

incredibly illuminating. And Jamil says that he sees a substantial effect from these protests. Powerful people and institutions are starting to acknowledge even more nuanced aspects of racism in the U.S. For example, at Georgetown. Students protested buildings named for former school presidents that sold slaves. And it took just a few days for administrators to agree to change the names. The Georgetown buildings have been temporarily renamed Freedom Hall and Remembrance Hall. And even in the monotonous drudgery of the presidential race,

Jamil saw something surprisingly heartening. Saturday night, Hillary Clinton was asked about the Missouri protests during the Democratic debate. And I do appreciate the way young people are standing up and speaking out. Obviously, and not only did she give credence to the protests, which, which, you know,

frankly, they needed. You know, there's too many people out here saying that they're protesting over nothing and getting an administrator fired just because he's white. So it matters to see, still, unfortunately,

a white leader validating black pain. But also, what she did was that she put the onus upon white people listening and watching to be a part of the struggle, to be a part of the solution. Every single one of our children deserves the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. And that's what we need to be doing to the best of our ability in our country. Over to Kevin Kern, what Jamil says ultimately, the thing that's driving this national conversation, it's not the presidential debates, it's not university presidents.

It's this new generation of students. they seem different than his generation. You know, these are the students that we've been waiting for, whatever the status quo has been. You know, they're not just going to go through their collegiate experience anymore when they see Black Lives Matter and these other protesters on the news making real change on a national level. Why should they accept it on the microcosmic level on their campus?

And also, frankly, I think maybe we just have to face the fact that these students might be a little bit more organized, a little bit more radical, and a little bit more daring than we were. And that's why I say that these were the students we've been waiting for. Jamil Smith is a senior editor at the New Republic and the host of the podcast intersection, which covers race, gender, and identity.

You can find both at New Republic.com. Reply all is PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinamenni, Fia Bennon, and Lena Missitesis. Our editor is Peter Clowny, production assistance from Kalila Holt. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Special thanks this week to Rachel Drucker

and the Association of Critical Collegians. Matt Lieber is a conversation so engrossing. The only thing that snaps you out of it is the sun coming up. Our theme music is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash reply all.

Our website is replyall.d diamonds. Thanks for listening.