Duke University's Noose Incident

In Michigan University Hospital, someone found a spool of rope used to practice fishing knots and assumed it was a noose intended as a hate crime.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, think back to the Duke University noose incident of 2015. Basically, someone found an honest to goodness noose hanging from a tree on campus. The whole place went into lockdown, people freaked out, and tons of demonstrations took place. Well, turns out the real story was a foreign-born student wanted to make a pun and sent their friends a picture asking to "hang out".

"I told them the sequence of events whereby something that I made out of a piece of yellow cord I found, for what I considered at the time to be innocent fun, was instead taken for something so terrible. My purpose in hanging the noose was merely to take some pictures with my friends together with the noose, and then texting it to some others inviting them to come and 'hang out' with us -- because it was such a nice day outside. If there was ever a pun with unintended consequences -- this was certainly one. In addition, when I left I carelessly forgot the noose hanging on the tree for the rest of the afternoon and the evening rather than discarding it, as I should have."

Seems like an innocent mistake to me. The student even took steps to educate themselves on the topic of racial violence in the United States.

"While researching what the noose represents to the African-American community, I have found a book written by Sherrilyn Ifill, titled "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century." It is a book, which looks at the relationship between decades-old lynchings and today's racial violence. I am reading this book so that I may better understand the negative power that the noose, a symbol of lynching, has come to represent in America. I have learned a hard and valuable lesson on many fronts, including that what can be funny for one group of people may bring back very negative, unacceptable symbols of hatred to others."

I'm really not sure what more you can ask from someone. That wasn't good enough for a lot of black Duke students apparently.

"This administrative announcement and this astonishingly lax sanction for a student, whose apology letter clearly rearticulated his or her lack of understanding for the significance of the act, are three additional slaps in the faces of black students and their allies. I am profoundly disappointed in what appears to be the university’s decision to release an announcement declaring that racism was not involved in the hanging of the noose alongside such an ill-considered, audacious and problematic apology. With such a presentation, you may have delegitimized the claims of our outcries. It may appear that you have actually disregarded black students’ concerns. As it stands, you are setting a precedent that any act of racism or prejudice enacted against a minority student at Duke, no matter how serious, may be excused as long as that student’s supposed intention was rooted in a lack of proper judgment and not in racism."

This is tied to the trope within SJW circles about "Intent vs. Impact" and how the former apparently does not matter. I don't know how that can possibly be true, and this incident is an illustration of why it matters. I'd much rather have someone innocently blunder into a racially charged insult than deliberately walk into it.