Monday, February 15, during a Black History Month event at 5:30 p.m. titled “Cinematic Realism and Racist Propaganda,” the zoom was hacked. According to an investigation by the UW Information Technology Office, individuals from states along the East Coast and other countries inserted racist and inappropriate comments and images into the chat.
“Around 31 minutes into the seminar, so around 6:01 pm, is when the first attack happened,” Jaida Cooper, a student who was present during the seminar, said. “They showed an image while one of the guest speakers, Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, was speaking and you could hear and see his face for a reaction.”
Cooper said that derogatory comments were being made, and it took her saying, “as a black person, I am begging you to disable the comments” for the chat to be disabled completely.
“First and foremost, I am an Afro-Indigenous woman. As a black woman who had to sit through that and not say a word, it’s shocking,” Cooper said. “What upset me the most is the people who did this were too much of cowards to show their faces.”
This zoom was the third of a series for many other scheduled events for the month in regard to Black History Month.
“We were going to go over a movie and look at it through an economic and social lens of the Black Wall Street atrocities,” Janessa Miller-Gallegos, a UW student who was present during the event, said. “About 30 minutes in while taking notes in my room, the first picture popped up and I just kind of froze and didn’t realize what was going on.”
Miller-Gallegos said the Zoom chat was open for discussion and became flooded with vulgar racial slurs. On top of this, one of the hackers began chanting “N-word lives matter.”
“He was chanting that for about 45 seconds. Then, my teacher said ‘This is the world we live in. I just want you to understand that this is why we have things like this, so we can talk about it,’” Miller-Gallegos said. “I could not pay attention after. I couldn’t do anything after. I was just in shock and shaking.”
“VPNs do exist, and they were most likely a UW student,” Cooper said. “People aren’t stupid. I want change from this institution and that’s what I’m working on. We pay to come here as people of color, we deserve to be protected.”
“You can imagine how distressed we were to learn yesterday that participants in a Monday evening Zoom discussion that is part of UW’s Black History Month activities were subjected to racial epithets and other highly offensive, inappropriate comments and images by an individual or individuals intent upon disrupting the session,” President Seidel, the Board of Trustees and Senior Leadership said in a group email to students and employees on Wednesday, February 17.
I am saddened and angered that anyone would invade a constructive educational moment with such vile sentiments of hate, and adamantly condemn these atrocious actions. The degenerates who committed this act should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for their faceless cowardice and reprehensible behavior,” Governor Gordon said in a press release.
