The College has requested Harvard police investigate an email sent to some undergraduates urging them to stop “white genocide” and vote for Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.

The email, sent Sunday with the subject line “Fight White Genocide - Vote Trump!,” claims that “third-world non-Whites” are flooding countries like the United States, and that white people should advocate against diversity. The email concludes with a plea for recipients to vote for Trump, who, the email argues, is the only candidate capable of understanding issues facing white people.

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana said the College has called for an official Harvard University Police Department investigation into the email. As of Monday night, the College had not received any reports of incidents of bias regarding the email.

HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano did not respond to requests for comment on whether the police indeed were investigating.

The email was sent to several student leaders, including House Committee chairs and representatives of the Harvard Democrats and the Harvard Republicans.

The email was signed by Educators and Students Against White Genocide, a website that seeks to organize students to oppose diversity in America. According to the group’s website, a similar email was sent to University of West Virginia students and to the West Virginia state legislature.

In a Sept. 22 blog post on its website, the group called for students and staff with access to email addresses of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton affiliates. The post includes a photo of Harvard’s Matthews Hall, a freshman dormitory.

Students who received the email said they were largely not offended, though they were confused. The College emails of many students who received the message are publicly available on the Internet.

Susan X. Wang ’17, president of the Harvard Democrats, received the message on her College email account and immediately archived it, originally thinking the message was sent to her club email.

“It was pretty gross, but I didn’t see anything that was personally targeted to me, so I brushed it under the rug,” Wang said.


Similarly, when Anna Liu ’18 received the email, she thought it was spam. Waverley Y. He ’18 thought the email was satire. She also said the email was also sent to at least one alumnus of the College.

The Sept. 22 blog post includes a template for an email to send to different universities. The email students received followed that template and specifically referenced Harvard, reading that “Harvard professors say they're anti-racist. What they are is anti-White.”

At Harvard, a generally liberal campus, the campus largely leans toward Trump’s Democratic opponent. In a survey of the College’s Class of 2020, roughly 80 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for Hillary R. Clinton in November’s election, compared to only six percent for Trump. In addition, only 12 percent of the Harvard Republican Club members support Trump, according to a recent straw poll.

This summer, the Harvard College Republicans refused to endorse Trump’s candidacy, writing that a Trump presidency would be “a threat to the survival of the Republic,” and that the group could not support the candidate’s “vitriolic rhetoric.”

Last year, students and administrators expressed concern over a Facebook group advertising a ‘white student union’ at Harvard. The group claimed to “defend the inherent rights of White Europeans.”

—Staff writer Jalin P. Cunningham can be reached at jalin.cunningham@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @JalinCunningham.

—Staff writer Ignacio Sabate can be reached at ignacio.sabate@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @ignacio_sabate.