Less than a day’s notice didn’t stop 150 U of T students from attending an ’emergency rally’ to end racism at the front doors of the Students’ Administrative Council office on Tuesday.

The date coincided with the campus’s activities for the the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, but the event held additional significance in light of the hit-and-run of a Muslim youth on campus last weekend-while some called the incident a hate crime, others contended that it was road rage.

Theis rally took place outside of the SAC offices at Hart House Circle, and was orchestrated both to spread student awareness of the elimination of racism, and to call upon U of T officials to formally address hate crimes.

Recent troubling incidents have included a Muslim woman shoved in the chest in a Hart House washroom by a woman who then calledproceeded to call her and all Muslims “terrorists,” and racist graffiti discovered in the second-floor men’s washroom of Hart House.

“I find this graffiti highly offensive,” said a student who saw the graffiti. “It is all the more troubling given that the graffiti appears to be recent.” The comments were promptly painted over by Hart House staff.

At the rally, Kibria called for U of T to officially condemn the worst of the recent racist incidents. “There has been no public statement about racism in light of these events,” she said. “If the administration is able to take a stance on other events that concern students, why have they neglected this?”

Kibria referred to the administration’s refusal to condemn Victoria College newspaper The Strand’s editorial featuring a cartoon some Muslims found offensive, and contrasted it with the official condemnation that was made regarding anti-Semitic flyers that were left on campus months ago.

“These are two very different issues,” said vice-provost of students David Farrar on Friday. “With 70,000 students on campus at U of T, we don’t issue press releases on every event. We [have] organized a number of other events on campus that attempted to build an environment of tolerance and understanding.”

Though the response to anti-racist events like the rally has been mainly positive, some students believe that the hit-and-run incident has been blown out of proportion, and is preventing the rest of the city from seeing the positive, tolerant community that Kibria praises.

“If the victims [of the hit-and-run] in question were women, it is equally likely that sexist remarks would have been uttered,” said political science student Kate Burke. “It seems unfair to everyone that we would group this psychopath’s actions with a pattern of racial intolerance on the U of T campus.”

Kibria maintains that the student body and the community as a whole tend to be extremely tolerant and welcoming to minorities.

“Interestingly enough, it was mostly non-Muslims and other faiths at the anti-racist events,” she said. “We have received a lot of calls from supportive non-Muslims saying that they want to learn more about the culture.”