One Student’s Secret Racist Posts Unsettle a Small Liberal-Arts College

Dacoslett, Creative Commons via Wikimedia

A student at Davidson College appears to have posted anti-Semitic and other racist messages, leaving the liberal-arts college reeling at the revelation.

The suggestion was made on Wednesday night on the Twitter account of the Carolina Workers Collective, which posted a series of tweets that it said linked the racist and anti-Semitic content posted from a Twitter account to Martha Gerdes, a student and teaching assistant in the North Carolina college’s German department. (The workers-collective account declined a request for comment from The Chronicle. A Facebook message to Gerdes and calls to her family were unsuccessful in eliciting a response.)

DOX ALERT: We have proof that a sickeningly violent Nazi Twitter poster femanon__ is actually a student at @DavidsonCollege named Martha Gerdes.

— Carolina Workers Collective (@WorkersCarolina) November 8, 2018

The workers-collective account went on to accuse another Davidson student of posting racially charged content, though the evidence cited seemed less strong than that for the original posts.

The news comes at a time when high-profile incidents of anti-Semitic and racist activity have been seared in the national consciousness. In October a shooter killed 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. And the Anti-Defamation League, which fights anti-Semitism, has said that reports of white-supremacist propaganda on American college campuses have increased by 77 percent in the 2017-18 academic year over the previous year. The racist posts also recall Charlottesville, Va., where just over a year ago, hundreds of torch-bearing white supremacists marched on the University of Virginia’s campus.

In Charlottesville the hate was on display for all to see. What’s unsettling for many at Davidson is the suspicion that unknown white supremacists lurk among them. And Davidson has roughly 1,800 students, making it smaller than many high schools in the nearby city of Charlotte, N.C.

Late Wednesday night the institution scrambled to allay the fears of an anxious and paranoid campus. The institution’s Twitter account posted a message condemning “bigotry and racism as antithetical to our values and our mission,” without naming anyone.

Carol E. Quillen, Davidson’s president, stressed in an email that “there are no threats to campus.” She continued: “Clearly racism, bigotry, and anti-Semitism are antithetical to everything Davidson stands for and to the community we strive to be.” In the evening she sent out another email, stating that the two students mentioned in the recent spate of social-media posts were not on the campus.

Jay Pfeifer, a campus spokesman, didn’t answer The Chronicle’s questions about the students involved.

The Carolina Workers Collective said it had been able to match photos from Gerdes’s Facebook and Instagram accounts to the same ones on the Twitter account that posted the racist content. (That content included images and messages favorable to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi party. One read: “I actually don’t give a shit about Jews getting shot up except insofar as it’s going to make it a lot harder for a lot of white people to just exist.”)

The group used information from the Twitter account to identify its operator as a Davidson College student. She also said on that account that she would be teaching German and joining the sailing club at the institution.

The German department’s website confirms that a Martha Gerdes held a teaching role in the program. And the president of Davidson’s sailing club, Alex Sizemore, wrote in an email to The Chronicle that Gerdes had been part of the group but has been removed.

He added that Gerdes mostly kept to herself and was “perfectly amicable to all of the other sailors on the team.” There was nothing to suggest she was posting content that was sympathetic to Nazis or the Klan, he wrote.

The workers collective also revealed through its sleuthing that Gerdes was part of the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps at the college. In a response on Twitter, the Army ROTC said that it was aware of a situation involving a Martha Gerdes, and that it was “looking into this and will take action as appropriate. These messages conveyed in the tweets don’t represent the values of Army ROTC or the U.S. Army.”

Ashley Frye, 21, is one of the Davidson students who has tweeted about the unmasking since Wednesday night. Frye, who is in the Arab-studies department, said she was unsettled and worried that one of her peers apparently holds racist views. But she is also frustrated with the college administration for not communicating with students more clearly. She wants to know what will be done, and if Gerdes will be expelled.

“The students know so much, but the college has said nothing about it,” Frye said.

Anxiety pervades the campus. News of their classmate’s toxic messages spread quickly among the college’s students. Frye said it seemed to be in all of her group messages.

“This is all happening under our noses, and no one knew,” Frye said. “Everyone is kind of distrustful right now.”

Aman Madan, 21, president of the college’s South Asian Student Association, wrote via Twitter direct messages that many of his friends “are not only uncomfortable but are scared to be on campus.” And in the early-morning hours of Thursday he wrote an email to his group saying he was disappointed that one of his classmates held racist views, though he wasn’t surprised.

“But we shouldn’t have to live with this, and we shouldn’t have to be OK with this,” he wrote. “I may not be surprised, but that does not mean that I am not scared. It does not mean that I am not angry.”

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.