Black student wrote racist messages at Air Force prep
In late September, five black cadet candidates found racial slurs scrawled on message boards on their doors at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School. One candidate found the words “go home n--- ” written outside his room, according to the Air Force Times.
The racist messages roiled the academy in Colorado Springs, prompted the school to launch an investigation. They led its superintendent to deliver a stern speech that decried the “horrible language” and drew national attention for its eloquence.
Surrounded by 1,500 members of the school’s staff, Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria told cadets to take out their phones and videotape the speech, “so you can use it … so that we all have the moral courage together.”
“If you can’t treat someone with dignity and respect,” Silveria said, “then get out.”
The speech, which the academy posted on YouTube, went viral. It was watched nearly 1.2 million times, grabbed headlines nationwide, and was commended by the likes of former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
But on Tuesday, the school made a jolting announcement. The person responsible for the racist messages, the academy said, was, in fact, one of the cadet candidates who reported being targeted by them.
“The individual admitted responsibility and this was validated by the investigation,” academy spokesman Lt. Col. Allen Herritage said in a statement to The Associated Press, adding: “Racism has no place at the academy, in any shape or form.”
The cadet candidate accused of crafting the messages was not identified, but the Colorado Springs Gazette reported that the individual is no longer enrolled at the school. Sources also told the Gazette the cadet candidate “committed the act in a bizarre bid to get out of trouble he faced at the school for other misconduct,” the newspaper reported.
The announcement thrust the Air Force Academy Preparatory School onto a growing list of recent “hate crime hoaxes” — instances in which acts of racism or anti-Semitism were later found to be committed by someone in the targeted minority group.
On Monday, police in Riley County, Kan., revealed that a 21-year-old black man, Dauntarius Williams, admitted to defacing his car with racist graffiti as a “Halloween prank that got out of hand.” Scrawled in washable paint were racist messages telling blacks to “Go Home,” “Date your own kind” and “Die.” The incident provoked controversy and concern at nearby Kansas State University, especially after Williams spoke with the Kansas City Star, claiming to be a black student who was leaving the school because of the incident. He was not, in fact, a student.
Officials decided not to file criminal charges against Williams for filing a false report, saying it “would not be in the best interests” of citizens of the Manhattan, Kan., community, police said in a news release. When reports circulated last week about the racial slurs on the car, African American students at the nearby Kansas State University campus held a meeting.
Andrew Hammond, a journalism student at Kansas State, told the Kansas City Star Monday he was “outraged and hurt” to learn the crime was fake.
On Tuesday, Silveria, the Air Force general who gained national fame for his speech condemning the September incidents at the preparatory academy, stood by his original remarks.
“Regardless of the circumstances under which those words were written, they were written,” Silveria told the Colorado Springs Gazette in an email. “You can never over-emphasize the need for a culture of dignity and respect — and those who don’t understand those concepts, aren’t welcome here.”