Serious Questions Surround UW-Eau Claire Hate Crime Allegation

The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire was rocked Sunday by allegations that someone wrote a vile, hateful message on a Native American student’s door. Since then, however, members of the UW-Eau Claire community have raised serious questions about the incident, questioning whether it might in fact be a hoax.

According to the UW-Madison student newspaper The Daily Cardinal, UW-Eau Claire junior Kayde Langer reported that someone wrote “Go back to the rez [reservation] red n***er” on her door. {snip}

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Langer identifies as a member of the Ojibwe tribe and said that this was not the first time she had been the victim of hateful attacks on campus.

“In the past, I’ve had other incidents, and administration a lot of the time ignores us,” she noted. “I’ve been ignored multiple times, and there’s no consequences to being racist.”

She wrote about one one of those alleged incidents in April on the UW-Eau Claire “free speech publication” The Flipside.

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“{snip} If you only knew that some of your parents were calling us red n*ggers.”

Her use of the phrase “red n***ers”–the same phrase that appeared on her door five months later — has raised suspicion. It is a very specific and very uncommon slur, and a search for it on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram reveal few actual instances of people using it. That Langer would use it in April and then see it written on her door in September is a startling coincidence.

While it could very well have been written by the student who allegedly told her that she doesn’t belong on campus because she isn’t white, the fact that it is such rarely-used phrase and appeared twice in her writing and on her door within six months lends credence to the belief among members of the UW-Eau Claire community that Langer may have written it herself.

“I have dealt with racists in my time, and heard a lot of epithets, but that one was new to me,” said one source. “Specific and offensive of course. And it turns out that she used it herself? That’s just suspicious.”

Other members of the UW-Eau Claire community pointed to other writings on The Flipside that revealed Langer’s apparently deep-seated resentment of white male treatment of Native Americans.

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-Moreover, just hours before allegedly finding a racist note on her door, Langer tweeted out a plea for her followers to send her money via PayPal to fund her 21st birthday party the following evening.

“My birthday is tomorrow and I’m a broke college student so if any of y’all are feeling generous please feel free to send a little something,” she wrote, adding a link to her PayPal account.

Members of the UW-Eau Claire community have raised questions about the timing of this, asking whether sympathy Langer garnered from the note allegedly written on her door might prompt people to give to her birthday fund.

Still other members of the UW-Eau Claire community have questioned the note itself, which appears to have been written by someone the hand with which they do not usually write. Naturally, the suspect could have used his off hand, but writing such a lengthy note with an off hand takes time, and a suspect hastily scribbling on someone else’s door would have likely wanted to do so as quickly as possible and thus would have been more likely to use his dominant hand.

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