Alexandra Wallace Racist Rant Sparks Debate Among UCLA Officials
LOS ANGELES — She prefaced her YouTube video by saying, "I'm not the most politically correct person."
UCLA student Alexandra Wallace quickly proved that, launching into a three-minute tirade that ridiculed Asian students for talking loudly in the library, packing her neighborhood with annoying relatives, and repeatedly calling home to Japan in a funny sounding foreign language to check on loved ones after the deadly tsunami.
The junior political science major says now she doesn't know why she did it. But figuring that out would seem to be the least of her worries.
On Tuesday, two days after the video went viral, the dean of students was looking into disciplining her, an embarrassed UCLA chancellor was calling her comments shameful, and campus police were investigating threats against her.
"The vast majority of those are more annoying than threatening, but out of an abundance of caution campus police are investigating a small number to determine whether any crime was committed," campus spokesman Phil Hampton said of the threats.
He declined to describe the messages in detail but said he wouldn't characterize them as rising to the level of death threats.
Wallace quickly took down the video, but by then it had been reposted all over the Internet and was the subject of numerous blogs, Facebook pages and parody videos. Some Internet posters were willing to accept her apology, others denounced her as racist.
Meanwhile, the junior has gone underground. She pulled her contact information from the UCLA student directory and did not respond to several e-mailed requests for comment from The Associated Press..
In a statement published in the campus newspaper, however, she apologized.
"Clearly the original video posted by me was inappropriate," Wallace told the Daily Bruin. "I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did, and if I could undo it, I would. I'd like to offer my apology to the entire UCLA campus."
Hampton said the dean of students was looking into whether Wallace's video violated UCLA's student code of conduct, although he noted that had to be balanced against her First Amendment rights to free speech.
In the video, Wallace says her complaints aren't directed at any individual and people shouldn't take offense.
Then she says, "The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year."
That would be fine, she says, if they would "use American manners."
She goes on to complain about Asians frequently talking on their cell phones while she is studying, at one point mocking them with gibberish. She suggests people calling to check on the fate of Japan's tsunami victims go outside so they won't freak people out if they get bad news.
The video sparked an immediate reaction at UCLA, where 37 percent of the school's 26,000 undergraduates are Asian, 32 percent are white, 16 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black. Many of the rest are international students, including more Asians.
The Asian Pacific Coalition of UCLA, which comprises 24 student groups, denounced the video and the angry, threatening reactions to it.
"As a community, we should respond with the grace, sensitivity and civility afforded us through the manners we learned from our parents and their parents before them," the group said in a statement calling for the school to demonstrate a commitment to diversity.
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03/15/11 07:06 PM ET Associated Press