A video posted on the public University of Michigan campus-area Snapchat story early Wednesday morning appears to show an unidentified man urinating on the Block ‘M’ in the Diag, and on the “Black Lives Matter” writing spray-painted around it.
LSA senior Hoai An Pham shared the video on Facebook around noon on Wednesday, encouraging her audience to identify the man if they knew him.
“9 hours ago, this white male decided to go up to the M on the Diag and urinate on the Black Lives Matter words that are around it and then posted it on snapchat. Those words were put there in response to the racist hate crimes on campus,” she wrote. “Tell me again that we live in a post racial world. Please share widely.”
University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security spokeswoman Diane Brown said DPSS officers are currently investigating the incident.
Also included in the post was a picture posted on the public campus Snapchat story of a protest in the Diag, though it was posted to Snapchat at a different time of day. The picture’s caption reads, “Every time I look up I run into another protest. Like wtf.” It is not clear if the photo and video were posted by the same person, or if the person who posted either the photo or the video is a student at the University.
The incident follows a flurry of protests over the past week at the University in response to a series of racist incidents, such as the anti-Latino writing found on the Rock days before school started, or the racial slurs that were written on students’ name tags in West Quad Residence Hall weeks later. Most notably, Rackham student Dana Greene kneeled at the Block ‘M’ in the Diag for 21 hours –– the same spot at which the unidentified man appeared to urinate.
Nadine Jawad, Central Student Government vice president, also weighed in on the incident in a Facebook post, saying she was disgusted regardless of the man’s intentions.
“Not that all previous incidents haven’t had me popped off, but this one is literally disgusting me. I don’t care if this students (sic) intention was to urinate on the chalk or not,” she wrote. “Every day students of color fight to make it here, to claim their place. I say this as a person of a marginalized identity, and honestly just as a human, this is privilege and disrespect in its plainest forms and someone needs to call this out and find him.”