A black woman studying at Nottingham Trent University was forced to hide in her halls of residence bedroom while two male students chanted racist abuse on the other side of her door.
Nottingham Police have been treating the incident as a hate crime and arrested two 18-year old men on suspicion of racially aggravated public order offences. The two men, and a woman of the same age, who was interviewed in connection with the investigation have since been released under investigation.
Rufaro Chisango, who is the only black woman on her floor, tweeted a video in which you can hear two voices coming from outside her room shouting things like ‘we hate blacks’ and ‘fuck the blacks’ amid other indistinct chanting.
‘yoo I’m fuming, the way people in the same uni halls as me are chanting “we hate the blacks” outside my bedroom door’, Chisango tweeted with the video. ‘Words cannot describe how sad this make me feel, in this 2018 people think this is still acceptable’
Chisango explained that the incident happened on Monday night and after having reported it to reception, she was told that it would be dealt with the following morning although by Wednesday night, when she tweeted about what had happened, nothing had been done.
'I've written a statement and have sent it to the uni and I'm waiting for a response', she wrote. 'but I want to highlight how serious this is and if I had broken their table or anything they would have dealt with it straight away but not this'.
Unsurprisingly, the video picked up significant traction on social media and caught the attention of Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy and musician MNEK among hundreds of thousands of rewteeters and commenters on Twitter.
Later on on Wednesday evening, the official Nottingham Trent University Twitter account responded to Chisango to let her know that they were 'investigating this as a matter of urgency'. They said: 'We are taking this very seriously and do not tolerate behaviour like this'.
The university's latest statement was published on Twitter in which they said: 'We are shocked and appalled by this video. This behaviour will not be tolerated at NTU. We value being a diverse global community, with staff and students from across the world. We are in regular contact with our student who made the complaint and are providing support'.
'The suspected perpetrators have been suspended immediately and a thorough investigation is in progress. We are also cooperating fully with the police, who have launched a criminal investigation and have made arrests.
'It's clear that there have been delays in dealing with this incident, and that is completely unacceptable. We will work with our accommodation partner to review our processes to ensure this never happens again'.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.