Social media and wide usage of sharable video have stoked the issue
By Kimberly Hefling and Jesse J. Holland
Associated Press
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — Kayla Tarrant loves the University of Maryland. But the campus tour guide says a racist email and photo attributed to her schoolmates makes her reluctant to encourage other black students to enroll “in a place where you feel unsafe and no one cares about you.”
“We’re literally begging people to care about our issues,” Tarrant said, with tears in her eyes, to applause from about 100 students — blacks, Hispanics, Asians and a few whites — gathered to discuss the racial climate at the predominantly white, 27,000-student campus.
Conversations like the recent one at Maryland’s Nyumburu Cultural Center are taking place nationwide as racist incidents continue to pop up at colleges and universities, even though students are becoming increasingly vocal in protesting racism and administrators are taking swift, zero-tolerance action against it.
Last week alone, Bucknell University expelled three students for making racist comments during a March 20 campus radio broadcast. At Duke University, a noose was found hanging from a tree.
This is happening against a backdrop of promise when it comes to race relations, with campuses enrolling record numbers of black and Hispanic millennials. The current college generation — young people who came of age under the nation’s first black president — is said to have more accepting racial attitudes, but putting an end to racism among them has proved elusive.
Social media have stoked the issue, with top administrators at Kansas State, the University of Northern Iowa and the University of Missouri urging students to stop posting anonymous racist speech on apps.
The wide usage of sharable video has also been a factor. In February, students at the University of Oklahoma were caught on video singing a chant that included references to lynching and used a racial slur to describe how the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity would never accept black members.
“We had an epidemic of racism all across our country,” University of Oklahoma President David Boren, who banned the fraternity from campus, said in a news conference. “Ferguson, Missouri, might be the best-known case, but it’s all across our country every day, every week.”
Even before the Oklahoma incident, a little more than half — 51 percent — of college and university presidents in an Inside Higher Ed poll conducted this year by Gallup rated race relations on college campuses as “fair.”
The Pew Research Center work has found that millennials are more likely than older generations to say society should make every possible effort to improve the position of blacks and other minorities. They are also more likely to support interracial marriage and have friends of other races. Such data also shows divides. Little more than half of white and black millennials in one Pew survey said all, most or some of their friends are black or white, respectively.
And among millennials age 18-24, a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute/Georgetown University poll found 56 percent of white millennials said the government has paid too much attention to the problems of minorities over the past few decades.
About a quarter of black respondents and 37 percent of Hispanics agreed.
University administrators say they are addressing students’ concerns and point to holding open forums, creating a multicultural student advisory group to advise the college president and educating Greek members about topics such as “multicultural competency.”
