Reply All - #9 The Writing On The Wall

Episode Date: January 10, 2015

Yik Yak is a an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. At Colgate University in upstate New York, the anonymity brought out a particularly vicious strain of racism that shook the school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Yikyak. 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 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, 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 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 are you doing? 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 a campus. And pretty soon they noticed something. We kept seeing all these younger kids who were not doing well, like 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. They were this group of white guys in the back, and apparently they were, like, calling me really ghetto names, like, Haitianicla, Haitian N, 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 extremes, 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 Yikiak 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 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 Yukak? Honestly, I walk around campus sometimes and I think, who posted that terrible thing on Yikak? 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 ACC'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. 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. Their audacious, seemingly naive battle plan after the break. Welcome back to the show. When we left Colgate, the campus was dealing with racist, violent threats 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 take

back, 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, you know, 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 upfotes 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 like 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. During, 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, she, I saw her, and she's 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, pondside 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 Colgate 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 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, like, racist, like, laws, but it wasn't real. Not, like, 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 a lot. 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. Classes start on Monday. Reply all is PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. Our producers, Lena Masitesis. Editing help this week from Alex Bloomberg. Matt Lieber is a force to be reckoned with. Special thanks this week to Rachel Emily. We'll see you next week.