Racism at UCF . . My Experience with Racial and Physical Harassment at UCF and the Administration’s Response
Over the past several months, I experienced and witnessed racism, physical aggression, and bullying on the UCF RWC basketball courts. I reported it because I wanted the behavior to stop and be documented and addressed properly but Instead, I felt ignored and repeatedly dismissed. My original email went unanswered for about a week and some days. I had to follow up multiple times just to receive a response, and even then my main question about whether I could record for my own safety and documentation was repeatedly and blatantly ignored until I directly pointed out that they were ignoring my question.
In my opinion, UCF’s approach protects the privacy of racist students and physically violent students more than it protects the students who are victims of such behavior and I STRONGLY disagree with that approach. I believe this type of behavior SHOULD, without a shadow of a doubt, be recorded and publicized. I believe racism, physical harassment, and verbal harassment should be exposed, documented, and addressed publicly instead of being handled in a way that makes it harder to identify repeat offenders. If people know their actions can be documented and reported with evidence, I believe it would discourage this behavior on a larger scale and help protect other students from becoming victims of this terrible behavior.
Reporting the issue placed more of a burden on me than on the racist and violent people causing the problems. Options offered to me was to have staff follow me around or assign someone to play with me. Those options made me extremely uncomfortable because I felt like I was the one who had to change how I used the RWC because of other people’s antagonistic behavior.
I’ve attached screenshots of some of the emails . . I edited out my name, the names of UCF employees, profile pictures, initials, and other identifying information for privacy reasons. I also added labels to make it clear who is talking between me and UCF administration. I didn’t add every screenshot of the emails because there were too many to include in one post. Many of the emails were repetitive because I had to repeatedly follow up after my question about recording was ignored, and in the end I STILL was not provided the link to whatever policy prohibits me from recording bullying and harassment at the RWC. Some screenshots may seem to jump from one topic to another because I left out repetitive emails but no important context was intentionally omitted.