A UMass Boston senior says two teenagers in a car shouted racial slurs at her and her mother on a Dorchester street last Thursday night. She posted a video to TikTok. Boston College High School, whose campus sits on that street, says it has opened an internal investigation.
The question everyone asks first is whether this is a hate crime. In Massachusetts the answer is almost always no, and the reason is worth understanding, because it explains why so many incidents like this end with a school investigation rather than a courtroom.
No one has been charged. The teenagers have not been publicly identified, and the school has not said whether they are its students.
What happened
Carly Nguyen told Boston 25 News she was in the passenger seat of her mother’s car, leaving the UMass Boston campus on Dominic J. Bianculli Boulevard, when two boys who appeared to be teenagers shouted at them from another car and made obscene gestures. “These two guys down here yelled the ‘N word’ with a hard ‘r’ and the ‘C’ slur to me and my mom as we were leaving campus,” she said. “Unprovoked and all, they just yelled at us for no reason. We didn’t even say anything.”
One detail matters more than it appears to. Nguyen said she began recording after the language was used. The slurs are not audible on the video. Boston 25 blurred the teenagers’ faces and their license plate because they have not been charged.
BC High said it is “aware of the TikTok videos alleging use of racist language by students and immediately launched an internal investigation.” It called the alleged behavior “entirely unacceptable” and said it “fundamentally contradicts our mission as a Jesuit, Catholic institution.”
Massachusetts has no hate speech crime
This is the part most people get wrong. Massachusetts does not criminalize racist speech. It criminalizes conduct, and then punishes that conduct more severely when it is motivated by bias. The bias is an enhancement, not the offense.
Look at the two statutes people reach for.
G.L. c. 265, § 39 is the statute usually meant by “hate crime.” It reaches “whoever commits an assault or a battery upon a person or damages the real or personal property of a person with the intent to intimidate such person because of such person’s race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.” The penalty is up to two and a half years in a house of correction and a $5,000 fine. Read the front of that sentence: there has to be an assault, a battery or property damage first. Words shouted from a passing car are none of those.
G.L. c. 265, § 37 is the criminal civil rights statute. It reaches a person who, “by force or threat of force,” willfully injures, intimidates or interferes with someone’s exercise of a right secured by the constitution or laws. Up to a year, or up to ten years if bodily injury results. Again, look at the front: force or threat of force. A slur is neither, unless it carries a threat with it.
The First Amendment is what puts those words at the front of both statutes. There is no hate speech exception to it. What the Constitution does allow states to punish is a true threat, and the Supreme Court drew that line in Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343 (2003), holding that a state may ban cross burning carried out with intent to intimidate, because the act communicates a threat of violence. Shouting a slur and driving away communicates contempt. Under current law that is a different thing, and it is protected.
The statute that actually fits, and it is a civil one
The Massachusetts Civil Rights Act is where a case like this has a real path, and almost nobody mentions it.
G.L. c. 12, § 11H lets the Attorney General sue when any person, “whether or not acting under color of law, interfere by threats, intimidation or coercion” with someone’s exercise of rights secured by the state or federal constitution or laws. Section 11I then gives the same claim to the person harmed: any person whose rights “has been interfered with, or attempted to be interfered with,” may bring a civil action “in his own name and on his own behalf” for injunctive relief and “compensatory money damages.” A plaintiff who wins is entitled to “the costs of the litigation and reasonable attorneys’ fees.”
Two features make that provision different from the criminal statutes. It does not require force, only threats, intimidation or coercion. And it does not require a prosecutor to act, because the victim can file it herself, with fee shifting if she prevails.
It is not a free pass either. The Supreme Judicial Court has held that the threats, intimidation or coercion element is a real one and does not collapse into any unwelcome conduct; see Bally v. Northeastern University, 403 Mass. 713 (1989). A single shouted slur from a moving car, with nothing more, would be a hard § 11I case. Slurs plus following someone, plus blocking a car, plus a gesture suggesting violence, is a different case entirely. The facts in the middle are where these claims are actually litigated.
Why the school, and not the state, is doing the investigating
BC High is a private school, and that changes which rules apply.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reaches recipients of federal financial assistance. That is the hook behind the federal civil rights investigations of public districts we have covered, including the Nauset racial harassment case. G.L. c. 76, § 5, the state nondiscrimination statute for schools, governs public schools. Neither is the natural tool for a private Jesuit high school, and a street in Dorchester is not a school program in any event.
What governs BC High’s relationship with its students is its enrollment agreement and handbook. That is a contract. Massachusetts courts reviewing private school and private university discipline ask essentially whether the institution substantially followed its own published procedures and acted in good faith, not whether it gave the constitutional due process a public school owes.
Three consequences follow, and they cut in different directions:
- The school’s reach is broader than people assume. A private school handbook that claims authority over off-campus conduct reflecting on the school community generally allows discipline for exactly this, on a public street, at night, in a private car.
- Its process is narrower. There is no statutory hearing right, no state appeal, and the standard of proof is whatever the handbook says it is.
- It has no investigative power. No subpoenas, no compelled statements. If the students deny it, the school is working from a video that does not contain the words.
The evidence problem nobody is talking about
Nguyen began recording after the slurs were spoken. That is an ordinary human reaction and a significant evidentiary fact.
The recording establishes that two people in a car were at that place at that time and what they did on camera. It does not establish the words, because the words are not on it. The evidence of the words is Nguyen’s account and her mother’s. That is not nothing. Testimony is evidence, and two witnesses who heard the same thing is the ordinary way these cases are proved. But it means any proceeding, school or legal, turns on credibility rather than on the video everyone has watched.
Was it legal to record them, and to post them
The recording. Massachusetts has one of the strictest wiretap laws in the country, and people routinely misstate it. G.L. c. 272, § 99 defines an unlawful interception as recording “secretly.” Openly holding up a phone and filming people in public is not a secret recording, and the First Circuit confirmed in Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (2011), that there is a constitutional right to film in public. The statute’s teeth, as in Commonwealth v. Hyde, 434 Mass. 594 (2001), come down on concealed recording. Open filming of strangers on a street is not the problem.
The posting. Massachusetts has no standalone doxxing crime. The nearest statute is criminal harassment, G.L. c. 265, § 43A, which requires “a knowing pattern of conduct or series of acts over a period of time directed at a specific person.” A single video, posted once, is not a pattern. A harassment prevention order under c. 258E likewise requires three acts.
The real exposure is civil and it is defamation. Publishing a face and a license plate is an identification. If the identification is wrong, the person who posted it has published a false statement of serious misconduct about an identifiable person. That is why Boston 25 blurred what Nguyen did not.
What realistically happens next
School discipline, if the students are identified and the school credits the account. Boston police could investigate, but on the facts reported there is no offense that fits. The most likely legal development, if there is one, is not a prosecution but a demand letter under § 11I, and that depends on facts not yet public: whether anything was said that amounted to a threat, and whether the cars interacted in a way the report has not described.
Is yelling a racial slur a crime in Massachusetts?
Standing alone, no. The state’s hate crime statute, G.L. c. 265, § 39, requires an assault, a battery or property damage committed with intent to intimidate because of race or another protected characteristic. The criminal civil rights statute, G.L. c. 265, § 37, requires force or a threat of force.
Then what can the victim do?
The Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, G.L. c. 12, § 11I, lets a person sue in her own name for interference with her rights by threats, intimidation or coercion, and awards attorney fees to a plaintiff who prevails. It does not require force and does not depend on a prosecutor bringing charges.
Can a private school discipline students for something that happened off campus?
Generally yes, if its handbook claims that authority. A private school’s relationship with its students is contractual, so the handbook, rather than a statute, sets both the reach of its discipline and the process it owes.
Does Title VI apply to BC High?
Title VI reaches recipients of federal financial assistance. It is the tool used against public districts. It is not the natural fit for a private school, and the conduct alleged here happened on a public street rather than in a school program.
Was it legal to film them without asking?
Yes. G.L. c. 272, § 99 prohibits recording “secretly.” Filming openly in public is not a secret interception, and there is a recognized right to record in public.
Can she be sued for posting their faces?
There is no Massachusetts doxxing crime, and criminal harassment requires a pattern of acts rather than one post. The exposure is civil: identifying someone publicly as having done something serious is defamation if the identification turns out to be wrong.
Account of the incident, the quotations from Carly Nguyen and BC High’s statement from Boston 25 News, September 21 and 22, 2026. Statutory text read at malegislature.gov: G.L. c. 265, §§ 37, 39 and 43A; c. 12, §§ 11H and 11I; c. 272, § 99. Citations verified: Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343 (2003); Bally v. Northeastern University, 403 Mass. 713 (1989); Glik v. Cunniffe, 655 F.3d 78 (1st Cir. 2011); Commonwealth v. Hyde, 434 Mass. 594 (2001). No one has been charged with any offense, the teenagers have not been publicly identified, and BC High has not said whether they are its students. The alleged slurs are not audible on the recording. General information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice.