When Adrian Kwong strolled into his friend’s room recently, the first thing she spouted off was, “Asian invasion,” he said.

“One way I can tell if my friend is sober or not is if she apologizes for her racist jokes,” Kwong said. “OK, you’re my friend, I’ll put up with it, but I really shouldn’t have to.”

Kwong, a UW-Eau Claire criminal justice major and foreign exchange student from Hong Kong, sat at a table in Centennial Hall Wednesday draped in a baby blue scarf and jacket, behind a laptop cloaked in a blue case.

But a half an hour earlier he was on the first floor of the Davies Center, eyes fixed on a podium with a sign hooked around his neck, surrounded by a crowd of banner-toting Eau Claire students.

This was the rally after a march around the campus mall — called We, Too, Are UWEC — protesting “microaggression,” backhanded slivers of bias that give away greater signs of intolerance at Eau Claire, Kwong said.

A hundred-odd people, ranging from UW-Eau Claire’s chancellor, community members — even a blonde-haired child pushed in a stroller — met mid-morning on the campus mall, circling academic and administration buildings.

Maya Witte, who helped organize the march, said a note taped to a photo display of Hmong students holding signs marked with stereotypes outraged student groups across campus and sparked the rally.

The note said: “this (is) one of the most racist displays I’ve seen. It promotes assumptions that you assume others have.”
“That was the final straw,” Witte said.

Students are fed up with racist notes in dorm rooms, offensive graffiti, and how the university ignores these issues instead of owning up, she said.

“It’s just not race and ethnicity,” Witte said. “There are people who are not feeling safe on this campus because of these things and cracks people say and microaggressions people might not realize.”

Last year, while Witte was working as a resident assistant in Towers Hall, students posted four insensitive signs aimed at Hmong students in women’s bathrooms.

She said the Residence Hall Association amended its training regulations following the incident, but housing staff “shut up” the R.A. who found the signs.

“They told her to stop talking about it, they would deal with it their way,” she said. “How they dealt with it was adding new training, which isn’t adequate … trying to shush things up is what’s been happening.”

Witte went to high school at a “diverse” school in Minneapolis, she said, and she’s lived in Laos and Germany. She settled on Eau Claire after a tour guide and brochure implied the campus climate was ripe with different ethnic groups.

But after enrolling, she learned Eau Claire was whiter than advertised, she said.

“I feel like I’m more of a critical thinker now, not because of what I’ve been taught in my classes, but because of the students that I’ve met that have also gone through similar things,” Witte said.

Eau Claire freshman Alex Ignarski said there weren’t many minorities at his high school in Chippewa Falls although he visits family in Milwaukee and stays at his parent’s condo in Mexico.

He said in Murray Hall, his friends crack jokes that could be considered racist, but he doesn’t say anything offensive to minorities on campus.

“Everyone calls me Mexican, I don’t care,” Ignarski, who isn’t Mexican, said. “You wouldn’t say something racist like that (in Davies). We know it’s not the right thing to say.”

Eau Claire Chancellor Jim Schmidt spoke at the rally in Davies and trailed behind the blob of marchers on the campus mall beforehand. Dean of Students Joe Abhold held the front door of Davies open as protesters streamed inside.

“As far as we’ve come in the last several decades it’s clear we have so much work to do in the coming decade,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt said he first heard about the protest last Friday. He wasn’t part of the event’s planning process but walked alongside protesters to listen.

“This is still a societal issue,” Schmidt said. “I’m still new in Eau Claire, so I’m still getting a true sense of the community and I think it’s clear that it’s going to take much more time and much more work.”