Relax: It Was a Hoax, Not a “Hate Crime,” at Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School recently made national news, with reports of a supposed “hate crime” involving small strips of black electrical tape placed on glass-covered photographs of tenured black law professors, positioned over the professors’ faces.

The site of this “hate crime“? The main classroom building (Wasserstein Hall), where photos of all tenured professors line the first-floor hallway.

This is the same hallway in which last year, as part of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, black law students covered up the portraits of all the white law professors, with photos of black victims of police violence. (Apparently that wasn’t a “hate crime.” That was free speech.)

Relax. There was no “hate crime.” Not as that term is generally understood — a serious criminal offense, such as murder or battery, committed at least in part based on hatred toward the victim based on race, gender, sexual preference, etc. Here, no one was the victim of any physical attack or other serious crime motivated by hate.

Contrary to news reports, there was not even any “vandalism.” The tape was easily removed, and with a little Windex the glass covering the portraits of the black professors was as good as new.

Thus, contrary to news reports, the portraits were not “defaced” (pun, apparently, intended). The faces of the black professors on the portraits are fine. The black professors are fine.

In fact, they’re better than fine. After the black tape was removed, all sorts of admiring comments were written on multi-colored pieces of paper and stuck on to the portraits of the black professors. (Apparently that’s not “vandalism.” That’s free speech.) So now all the black professors know they’re loved.

And most of all, everyone can relax because there is not a shred of evidence that there is even one white racist at Harvard Law School who would do such a thing, or did this thing — which, as Heather Mac Donald has suggested, is inherently improbable. Steve Sailer, applying Occam’s Razor, wasn’t easily fooled, either. The New York Times mostly pretended to believe this tall tale.

Not everyone at Harvard Law School takes an event like this at face value. Not everyone assumes that just because some anonymous speech activity could be inferred to have been perpetrated by a white racist that it is likely, or even plausible, that a white racist must have done it.

For example, when he learned of this incident Professor Charles Ogletree, whose portrait was among those impacted, did not pronounce it a “hate crime.” Instead he said he was “waiting to learn more about the incident before making too strong of a judgement.” [sic]

Professor Ogletree was wise to be cautious. It turns out that there is overwhelming evidence, as campus security concluded shortly after the alterations to the photos were discovered, that the black tape was placed over the faces of the black professors by black law students protesting against black professors who view them as “traitors” for failing to support their protest objectives.

In other words, this is a hoax, obvious immediately to the law school administrators. Yet they dare not reference even the possibility that black protesters did this, for fear of igniting indignant protests from the hoaxers, and further turmoil at the law school over racial issues.

This blog has been put together by several law students in an attempt to pierce the atmosphere of fear and denial that envelopes speech on the Harvard Law School campus concerning race.

We are not blogging under our own names, for fear of being called racists simply for calmly summarizing the facts surrounding this incident which make obvious that it’s a hoax perpetrated by black protesters. (In this connection we confess to being, like many others on campus, “nakedly ambitious, focused, and future-oriented.”).

We will try to update this blog as circumstances warrant, but we have four initial posts.

First, so readers can fully internalize that there are black protesters at this school unhinged enough to actually stage a”hate crime” hoax, we introduce the students who served as the inspiration for the title of this blog. They are obsessed with forcing the law school to change its crest to remove any trace of the family crest of Isaac Royall, who endowed one of its professorships, and who more than two centuries ago owned blacks who had been sold into slavery by other blacks (as did George Washington and Thomas Jefferson), which of course now is anathema under the enlightened moral standards of 2015.

These students, comprising at most 1% of the student body, are buffoons. Before November 19, no one paid them attention. But now that they’ve staged a race hoax, people are interviewing them and reading their op-eds. Congratulations! For selfishly plunging the law school into panic mode just to serve their narrow, silly partisan objectives, we brand them the “Royall Asses.”

Second, we describe in chronological order exactly what we believe the Royall Asses did, and why, in carrying out this hoax.

Third, we then describe how the evidence implicating the Royall Asses was discovered. In particular we show how Facebook postings by the Royall Asses and others, plus statements by witnesses on the scene, all point the finger of blame at the Royall Asses.

Fourth and finally, while we admit that we cannot be 100% certain that the Royall Asses carried out this evil deed, we compare and contrast the plausibility of the two competing accounts of the incident, which for simplicity we will refer to as “Tape-Gate”:

(1) the possibility that the Royal Asses, who had 100% of the motive, means, and opportunity, conceived and executed Tape-Gate, without any involvement by any white racist;

versus

(2) the possibility that the Royal Asses are completely innocent, because there’s a racist white student at Harvard Law School who just happened along during a narrow, late-night window of opportunity to commit Tape-Gate and decided, on the spur of the moment, to risk ruining his or her entire life by doing something that would predictably create a publicity windfall for the Royal Asses at the exact moment it would be of maximum benefit to their cause.

In this fourth post, using some of what we’ve learned about statistics at the law school, we conclude that it’s at least 99.99% certain that the black tape was put up by the Royall Asses, as a hoax. Yet nearly all media attention is directed solely at the “white racist” scenario even though it makes almost no sense. We hope this blog is a useful corrective for that misplaced focus.