[Editor’s Note: Please see this letter from the editor for an explanation for why this piece was published without a contact.]

This summer, on July 23, I returned to my dorm room and found that hate had been carved into my world.

The whiteboard on my door had been slashed. Written on it were slurs and commands: “Tranny cunt,” “Die,” “[Country name] calls,” “Go back to your country.” The entrance to my home had been transformed into a canvas of rage, xenophobia, and transmisogyny. 

This was the second time in my first year at the College that I’d come back to my dorm to find something like this.

This hate did not begin with a marker. It started long before that. It began with silence. And silence, I have come to learn, is the most dangerous accomplice to hate.

The first time I was targeted was months earlier, in April, in a public group chat on campus where students share information about free food. A seemingly unremarkable comment about a cultural misnomer, about a beverage that was being called “chai,” sparked ferocious backlash. I wrote only a few words to correct a cultural inaccuracy. But the response was immediate and shockingly brutal.

Hundreds of messages flooded in. People twisted my words. They began calling me cruel nicknames. Memes circulated. My voice was mocked. My identity was trivialized. My culture was commodified, and when I dared to name it, I became the problem.

This wasn’t a random internet dogpile: The saddest part was that it came from my peers. The students I lived with. The students I was a teaching assistant for. The students who call themselves allies. Students who profess to care about justice, inclusion, and liberation. Students who post infographics, who speak in the language of justice and equity, until someone asks them to do the work.

Not one person said, “This isn’t okay.” Not one person intervened.

The very next night, I found new words written on my dorm door: “Trans whore,” “Chai bitch.”

The message was clear: We saw what happened. We know who you are. And you will not be safe here.

What cut even deeper than the words on my door was what happened after the first incident became public. In the days that followed, the dominant conversation online and in person was not about how to address the harm, but about me. It was devastating to see the complete inversion of responsibility. A community turned away from the person it harmed to protect its own comfort, to preserve its own innocence, and to shield its own white fragility. In doing so, the campus sent a clear message to whoever targeted me: If you do this again, you will be safe from consequences. And that they did. Because instead of confronting complicity, too many students chose the easier path — victim-blaming — over the harder work of reflection, accountability, and change.

The culture of permission

Hate rarely arrives uninvited. It waits for cues, for laughter, for nods, for silences. It watches how a community responds to “smaller” forms of harm. And when it sees that no one is willing to act, hate steps in more boldly.

I’ve come to understand this as a culture of permission.

When I was mocked in the group chat, no one said, “Enough,” or “This is wrong.” Some laughed. Some reposted. Others said nothing, not out of malice, perhaps, but out of uncertainty, fear, or a desire to stay uninvolved. But silence, whatever its motivation, is not neutral. It is permissive. It tells hate: You’re safe here.

So when someone scrawled slurs across my door, they knew they would not face consequences. They knew the student body had already shown it would look the other way. And that is exactly what happened.

The anatomy of complicity

Complicity doesn’t always look like action. Sometimes, it’s inaction; other times, the refusal to reflect, or the belief that “I didn’t do it, so it’s not my fault.”

But when you witness a peer being humiliated and say nothing, when you watch harm unfold and choose comfort over confrontation, your silence is not neutral. It reverberates. And for those being targeted, that silence is deafening.

After the group chat incident, no one who attacked me apologized. No one who joined the pile-on reached out. No one said, “We went too far.” Instead, the blame shifted. I was told that I deserved it. That I was annoying and weird. That I had brought it on myself. That I was asking for it. Even the few students who did publicly acknowledge that harm had been done, who tried to name what they saw, had their messages reported and deleted by students in the group. In a space where harm had been allowed to grow unchecked, even the smallest gesture toward accountability became too much for this campus to bear.

This is the anatomy of complicity: harm, denial, blame-shifting, and silence. And it tells us something unmistakable: Brown trans lives on this campus are still seen as expendable.

But the complacency I’ve described does not live only among students. It is taught. It is modeled from the top down. When senior administrators fail to respond proactively to harm, when they delay, minimize, or reduce it to an isolated “bias incident,” they signal that silence is acceptable. Students learn, from the very people entrusted with their care, that inaction is an acceptable option when hate surfaces. We learn that acknowledgement is optional, that accountability can be deferred, and that the comfort of the majority matters more than the safety of the vulnerable. We learn that it is permissible to move through our day untouched by the pain of our peers. 

Over time, this lack of response hardens into habit. We internalize it. We begin to think: If the institution doesn’t name it, why should I? If the College treats it as an inconvenience, why should I disrupt my day to confront it? And so the pattern repeats. A harm occurs, the campus whispers, and then it moves on. What we are left with is not just individual apathy, but a culture of learned complacency, one that excuses itself by pointing upward and outward, saying, “This is how it’s always been handled here.” But silence at the top does not absolve silence at the bottom. It reinforces it, ensuring that the cycle of harm, denial, and neglect remains unbroken.

On this campus, there is no infrastructure for collective grief. There is no muscle memory for solidarity. There is no shared language for describing harm. Instead, there is avoidance. There is denial. There is desperate clinging to the illusion of innocence.

What real accountability demands

Accountability is not about finding and punishing the person who wrote the slurs. That would be too easy. Real accountability demands that we examine the ecosystem that allowed it.

Real accountability asks: Who saw the harm and said nothing? Who contributed to the escalation? Who stayed quiet out of convenience? What systems allowed this to happen multiple times?

If this campus wants to prevent harm like this from happening again, both students and the institution need to act. But real change will not happen if students treat this as someone else’s job. We are the ones shaping the culture here, and that means we have to take responsibility for it. Here’s where we start:

Public acknowledgment from both peers and administrators. When harm happens, we must not just give generic “thoughts and prayers,” but directly name the incident and affirm that it is unacceptable.

Visible, collective care in the moment — not whispered sympathy later. That means showing up for people publicly, checking in immediately, and letting the targeted person decide what support looks like.

Refusal to stay silent in our own spaces. If you see harm unfolding — in a group chat, at a party, in the dining hall — interrupt it. Delete the meme. Shut down the nickname. SAY SOMETHING!

Shared responsibility for preventing escalation. We all need to be willing to hold friends, classmates, and teammates accountable when they cross a line, and to accept accountability ourselves when we do the same.

Ongoing, visible dialogue on complicity, race, gender, power, and community, not just during orientation or heritage months. This can be through student forums, teach-ins, and peer-led workshops that happen throughout the year and are supported by the College administration.

A campus-wide re-education in allyship as action, not identity. You don’t become an ally just because you call yourself one. Allyship is standing up for others even when it’s inconvenient, risky, or uncomfortable, and every one of us needs to be a better ally to each other.

This work is not easy. It requires humility, vulnerability, and discomfort. And yet, that is the only path to transformation. We cannot wait for another student to be harmed. We cannot keep moving on like nothing happened. We cannot keep burying our failures under bureaucratic process and apathy.

To every minoritized student on campus

If you have ever been mocked, belittled, erased, or attacked on this campus, I see you. I know the exhaustion. I know the feeling of being too much and not enough at the same time. I know what it means to carry your entire identity like armor.

I want you to know: You are not alone. You are not a problem to be solved. You are not too much. You are a mirror this campus is afraid to look into.

You deserve a community that protects you. You deserve to feel safe in your home. You deserve to speak without fear of retribution.

If this has happened to you, I am so sorry. You should never have had to carry that pain in silence.

To those who remain silent

Maybe you didn’t know what to say. Maybe you froze. Maybe you told yourself it wasn’t your place. But harm doesn’t wait for your readiness. And in staying silent, you failed us. But, more than that, you failed yourselves. Because a community that cannot protect its most vulnerable members is not a community at all.

To this campus

This is your moment of truth. Will you continue to pretend that silence is neutrality? Or will you finally choose to confront the harm you have allowed to fester?

The College is not exceptional. It is not a safe haven. It is a microcosm of the world outside. And unless we are willing to interrogate the gap between what this campus says it values and how it actually behaves, we are complicit in upholding the systems we claim to resist.