Tuesday morning, an unidentified individual (or group of individuals) spray painted the words “White Guilt” in black and white letters onto the High Street wall of Dwight Hall, Yale’s center for community service and social justice groups. While there are currently no suspects, authorities have stated that they do not believe the defacement was the work of a Yale student.

Regardless, if the graffiti artist’s intention was to evoke anger from the Yale community, they’ve failed miserably, because the response to the political scrawl has been tepid – at best.

The Yale Daily News reports:

But in a break with past response to similar incidents of graffiti, this time around, the phrase has caused little more than a ripple.

[…] “It does not appear that among the students there is a high level of alarm,” [Kirk Hooks] said. “It is not something that we want to immediately respond to until we have a better grasp of what is behind it.”

Interviews with over a dozen students Wednesday evening corroborated Hooks’s analysis. Many students interviewed said they saw the incident as mild compared to what happened last year, in large part because the message left no indication as to the intentions of the culprit.

For the uninitiated, the words “White Guilt” merely express the collective guilt shared by Caucasians over the mistreatment of African-Americans. Therefore, they are not intrinsically offensive.

In this instance at Yale, it is unclear whether or not the vandal meant it as an attack on the community – or if they were simply bored one night.