On April 15, Vivian, a Boston College student, suffered at the hands of racist speech. A BC student of Asian descent, she went to Roggie's Brew and Grille in Cleveland Circle with her three roommates; there, they were verbally harassed by one of the employees. The employee in question began to yell, "Chinatown in the house!" loud enough for all of the customers in the restaurant to hear. According to Vivian, he repeated the comment multiple times while making eye contact with the girls. Vivian complained about the comments to the person who was taking her order, but felt that she did not get an appropriate response since she never received an apology from the employee.
Vivian then brought the incident to the attention of the Office of the Dean for Student Development, which promptly contacted the manager of Roggie's, John Rogaris, and told him what happened.
"He was astonished to hear about the incident," said interim Dean of ODSD Dean Paul Chebator. Rogaris told Chebator that he was unaware of what had happened and sent this response to him: "I held a meeting yesterday with my staff. I made it clear that Roggie's has a ZERO TOLERANCE toward this type of behavior. The individuals involved, whether it may have been in a joking manner or not, have been suspended."
"We try our best to look out for students' best interests in situations like this, but there is nothing more we can do," said Chebator. "Since Roggie's is a private company, all we could do was bring it to the attention of the manager. His response was appropriate, and we couldn't have asked him to do more than that."
Chebator went on to explain that if a student in such a situation wished to file a civil rights violation complaint, ODSD would help.
"This is very important to us because we have so many students here at BC that go to that establishment, and they deserve to be treated respectfully," said Richard Jefferson, the executive director of the Office of Institutional Diversity. "We are trying to facilitate a meaningful response to this event by increasing the amount of communication with students and student groups. This is going to require the work of everybody in the University." He added that he hopes to work directly with Roggie's to help create a proper response.
Stella Chin, also of the OID, said that a meeting was held on Wednesday with the Asian Pacific Islander Employees of BC, in which they discussed the incident and decided to come to some sort of resolution for it.
"We will continue to monitor this particular case, but we hope to prevent future incidents concerning discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc," said Chin. According to Chin, the OID has not spoken to anyone at Roggie's, but she did say that Rogaris issued an apology to the student who was harassed.
Chin stated that in addition to being in touch with the AHANA Leadership Council, the OID organized a meeting that will be held today with students to offer them with support, not only in light of this particular incident but also because of the recent Virginia Tech shootings.
Given that the shooter at Virginia Tech was Asian, Chin said that there have been incidents of backlash all across the nation.
"We have to be proactive," said Chin. "Because of the employee group we have here at BC, we have an awareness about these sorts of issues, but we need to form a cohesive group on campus that includes students, employees, and faculty."
Jefferson, however, said that the office has no specific plan of action for the future. "Each incident must be responded to separately," said Jefferson. Nevertheless, he said that he hopes students will come to the OID for support in regards to such incidents.
"We will do everything necessary to see that these things are handled appropriately in the future," said Jefferson. "This kind of treatment is not appropriate for anyone inside or outside this campus." ?
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