A shockingly racist video featuring two young women– one a recent alumna and the other a student at the University of Minnesota Duluth– prompted UMD officials to send a school-wide email alert expressing their horror at its creation, posting, and spread.
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In the roughly five-minute video, the women wear blackface and talk over each other– making derogatory comments and playing off the worst stereotypes connected to minorities. They repeatedly refer to themselves as n-ggers, “claiming to be from the ‘black hood,’ needing some ‘fried (expletive deleted) chicken’, and likening themselves to looking ‘like apes right now.’”
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The school’s initial response: “We have seen the video; we abhor it. This is unacceptable behavior for anyone, and we at UMD are extremely unhappy to be associated with it in any way.”
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The Statesman, UMD’s student newspaper, identified the women and obtained apologetic statements from them about the circumstances surrounding its creation.
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As one of them wrote to the paper, “We were doing facials and it happened to have been a brown facial mask. We had to leave it on for 12 minutes. During that 12 minutes, we horribly decided to make a video that we regret and are not happy about. This was made over a year ago. I am saddened and sick to my stomach and sorry for anybody it offends. It was not mine or hers intention at all and we are embarrassed about it. We understand we cannot do anything about it now but apologize and inform people we did not paint our faces or put that on to purposely make a video.”
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The video was recently posted anonymously on YouTube under the account UMDHate. YouTube subsequently removed it for violating the site’s hate speech policy. The video embedded here contains the original, wrapped with commentary at the start and close by an individual who is angered by it.
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