The Wayman Crow community woke up Wednesday morning to a racist drawing posted on a whiteboard outside a suite housing two black students in Nemerov House. The drawing included the names of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner alongside a phallic image.

The Washington University Police Department identified the perpetrator as an out-of-town visitor on Wednesday evening. Jill Friedman, vice chancellor of public affairs, confirmed that the culprit was a college-age male from Texas who was visiting a friend on campus, but he has since left St. Louis. Friedman added that WUPD has forwarded all relevant information about the act to the local prosecutor, who will determine whether to pursue charges.

Students and administrators alike responded to the drawing with condemnation, and although the perpetrator is not himself a student at Washington University, they still stressed that this issue is something that people of color regularly face on campus.

“This was offensive and unacceptable, and I cannot imagine how painful it is for the students who live in that room,” Provost Holden Thorp said. “It’s a sign that we still have a lot of work to do to create a climate that is inclusive.”

“Obviously this is an incident of hate and bias. Frankly, when I saw the message myself, I was appalled,” Rob Wild, the associate vice chancellor for students, said.

“The most important concern is to the students who were targeted by the act. We are doing our best to support those students,” Wild added.

The targeted suite in Nemerov houses four students, two of whom are black. The students discovered the drawing as they were leaving their suite for classes Wednesday morning.

“I originally found out about this when I woke up. There were a number of people in our common room, detectives and such around 10 a.m.,” sophomore Avi Bukhbinder, a resident of the suite, said. “I was pretty outraged and terrified, not so for myself but for my suitemates…[It was] just very thoughtless and insensitive.”

“I was both angered, frustrated and not that surprised with an incidence like this because we see this so often, and now it’s being brought to more public light, but it’s something we’ve been going through for a long time and it’s just frustrating to see it that it hits so close to home—it’s on my floor,” sophomore Destinee Shipley, who lives on the floor where the drawing appeared, said.

On Wednesday night, Residential Life and Wayman Crow staff organized a forum, giving students the opportunity to express their thoughts on the issue and brainstorm steps that can be taken in response. Around 40 students attended the event, where they expressed the need to create a closer community and be more open with each other.

In recent years, the University has been subject to several instances of racial insensitivity. Following an incident in Bear’s Den in February 2013, in which a fraternity pledge recited rap lyrics containing the N-word, University administration took more concrete steps to address issues of racism and bias on campus.

Entities created in response included the Mosaic Project, which dissolved after a year of coordinating projects last semester; the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, located in Olin Library; and the Bias Report and Support System, which serves as an outlet for students to report issues of insensitivity they experience or witness on campus.

The forum on Wednesday night did not include discussion of these resources, however. Thorp and Wild said that they had suggested to the targeted students that they use the BRSS, but a spokesperson for the Center for Diversity and Inclusion could not be reached for comment Wednesday night about whether a report had been filed.

While students attending the forum largely acknowledged that starting a dialogue was a good step, they were concerned with the reoccurrence of racial issues on campus and how to get the attention of others who are not personally affected by them.

“I don’t feel like [on-campus] forums had great attendance from people who wouldn’t be involved otherwise,” Bukhbinder said. “How do you get people who don’t want to hear about the stuff [to] listen? That’s a huge problem that needs to be fixed because these people are going to be around no matter what. You can’t just get rid of them.”

“I just didn’t really understand the administration’s involvement; I also didn’t really understand my peers’ feelings either,” sophomore Ryon Arrington, who lives in the targeted suite, said. “It was just more so we shouldn’t be doing these types of things instead of, ‘There’s some type of action that needs to be taken for this.’ It’s just been a lot of ‘I feel this way’ and ‘That’s not OK.’”

Arrington also expressed discontent with how administrators handle incidents of bias on campus.

“I feel like there should be a bit more of a personal aspect going on with it…It’s just like, ‘We can’t say this because of our positions’ instead of ‘We have this feeling, too. We’re people. We’re not just the titles that we hold,’ and that would be really nice for them to get across to us as students,” Arrington said.