Institutional Racism at UNC

To Ram Village Community Director Nikkia Sheppard,

      Charges of racism, because of the heavy reactions they create, are never to be thrown around lightly. Consequently, I throw only the heaviest charges, of which I will now hurl against my own University of North Carolina, specifically the Department of Housing.
      Nearly two years have passed since I submitted my application to the Housing Department for an apartment in the newly constructed Ram Village complex. I opted to be assigned into a random dwelling with two other roommates chosen at chance as a protection against the fact that my eventual realization that I loathe their very existence would not damage a pre-established friendship.
      However, the random assignment to which I had signed up soon proved to not be random at all. That summer I received a letter detailing the three occupant apartment to which I was assigned, a modest fourth floor dwelling with a breathtaking view of the third floor balcony of the adjacent dormitory Hinton James. But what stood out in the letter were the names of the two students I was to live with, Jonathan and Jeremy Lee.
      At first I thought that I had been assigned to live with a pair of brothers, but still I found it odd that I had been "randomly" placed into a living situation with two people who shared my last name of Lee. I quickly established contact with my future roommates and discovered that they were not related at all and that I had indeed been "randomly" assigned to live with two other Lee's.
      I then began to calculate the odds that three people with the same last name would chosen at chance to live together. According to the United States Census Bureau, 0.22 percent of Americans have the last name of Lee. Applying that frequency to the number of residents in the Ram Village housing project yields that there should be only 1.634 Lee's in the entire community of 817 residents. Analyzing the data yields the startling revelation that three Lee's in the community are already a statistical anomaly (exceeding the expected calculation of one whole Lee and a dwarf Lee), and the odds that those three Lee's would be placed in the same apartment are simply astronomical. The only reasonable explanation is that the assignment was a conscience decision by the Housing Department, and was not random at all.
      Having established that the Housing Department did not comply with the random roommate assignment to which they claimed to ascribe, I will now provide my own conjecture as to why the decision was made to place three students of identical surnames in the same apartment: institutional racism.
      In America, the family name of Lee is commonly associated with people of Asian heritage, Civil War generals, and confederate vehicles named after those Civil War generals. Common sense dictates that no Civil War generals or cars were candidates for housing the year I filed my application, leaving only the supposed association of the name Lee with those of Asian ancestry the only commonality in the mind of the vindictive Housing Department tasked with assigning students to their respective apartments. Thus, the Department specifically and purposefully assigned three applicants into a residential situation based solely on ethnicity under the guise of random assignment.
      This action was reprehensible, vindictive, and illegal, and as such I demand reparations for being singled out not by the content of my character (or, for that matter, randomly) but by the color of my skin. I have not done any further research into this matter, but I can only assume that the other apartments full of Gonzalez's, Patel's, and Jackson's will join my call to end this unjust practice, compensate us for the damage incurred, and publicly apologize for your department's racist behavior.
All the best,

All the Best,

Timothy Lee