Ole Miss Confronts Another Racist Incident as Ring Camera Captures Monkey Gestures Directed at Black Students

Two white students filmed making monkey gestures at a Black student's door camera at the University of Mississippi, triggering a school investigation and exposing a recurring pattern of racial hostility on a campus with deep segregation history.

A Ring doorbell camera at the University of Mississippi captured two white freshmen making chest-thumping monkey gestures and primate noises outside a Black student's apartment door. Jakiyra Metcalf uploaded the footage to TikTok on Saturday, where it has drawn nearly 13 million views and widespread condemnation. According to Metcalf's mother, Tasha Bolton, the women in the video are upstairs neighbors of her daughter and her two Black roommates.

One of the women, 18-year-old Alaina Kunes, issued an apology through a Chicago law firm, insisting her behavior was not racially motivated. "I would have never intentionally made those noises or gestures toward a person of color," Kunes said, while acknowledging "the seriousness of this situation." She reported that her family has received death threats since the video went viral. Shawnboda Mead, the university's vice-chancellor for student affairs, condemned the video Sunday, stating that "racism and actions that disparage people because of an aspect of their identity have no place in our campus community." The school has contacted the affected students to offer support and initiated an investigation. As of Tuesday, the university had not responded to inquiries about the women's enrollment status or any disciplinary action. The incident fits a documented pattern at Ole Miss. In 2014, fraternity members hung a noose around the statue of James Meredith, the university's first Black student. In 2024, white male counter-protesters directed monkey noises at a Black female protester during a pro-Palestine demonstration. Each incident follows the same arc: viral outrage, institutional condemnation, a period of silence about consequences, and eventual return to baseline. The extraction here is not primarily financial — it is experiential and institutional. Black students bear the psychic cost of attending a university where racist harassment recurs on a roughly annual cycle. The university absorbs reputational damage but faces no structural consequence that would alter incentives. The perpetrators face social and legal pressure (death threats, investigation) but the institutional response — condemn, investigate, go quiet — has not proven sufficient to deter the next incident. Kunes's defense — that her behavior was not racially motivated — strains credulity given the specificity of the gesture and its target. Making monkey noises at a Black student's doorbell camera is not an ambiguous act. The deployment of a law firm within days suggests a strategy oriented toward legal liability management, not reconciliation. The family's invocation of death threats, while potentially legitimate, also functions as a narrative pivot from perpetrator to victim. The deeper structural question is whether Ole Miss has any mechanism that actually changes behavior, or whether the investigation-and-statement cycle is itself the product — a performance of institutional concern that substitutes for institutional change. A decade of near-identical incidents suggests the latter.