SUMHC respond to 'racist' email accusations

Southampton University Men’s Hockey Club have this afternoon released a statement to the Soton Tab regarding their position on this morning’s accusations of ‘racism and anti-Semitism” in their club emails.

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To whom it may concern,

In relation to the post on the SUSU Facebook page, SUMHC would like to apologise to anyone who might have taken offence to what was said in the “SUMHC Banter” email.

As a club we find the allegation that we are in anyway racist or anti-Semitic as untrue. We have a highly diverse club, in terms of race, religion and sexual orientation, so any claims that we are discriminatory to anybody who identify as these, we believe are baseless and false.

It has never been the intention of the club to cause any offence to our members, or indeed anybody else who might read our emails. Obviously, we apologise to those people who have found it insulting or unacceptable.

In the light of what has happened, the committee will discuss action needed to ensure nothing like this happens again.

The thoughts and feelings of those beyond our club were not taken into consideration, for which we sincerely apologise.

Yours sincerely SUMHC

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The statement comes after an email was leaked to the SUSU page by a non-member at 6pm Friday evening, calling it “campus bigotry”. See our full report here.