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Colorblind Notion Aside, Colleges Grapple With Racial Tension
By
TANZINA VEGAFEB. 24, 2014
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At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the Black Student Union organized a protest on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A new wave of activism has risen on college
campuses in response to racist episodes and a general feeling of isolation among black students. The Michigan group spearheaded a popular social media campaign and has received inquiries from black student groups nationwide who want to pursue similar efforts.
Allison Farrand/The Michigan Daily
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A brochure for the University of Michigan features a vision of multicultural harmony,
with a group of students from different racial backgrounds sitting on a verdant lawn, smiling and conversing.
The scene at the undergraduate library one night last week was quite different, as hundreds of students
and faculty members gathered for a 12-hour “speak out” to address racial tensions brought to the fore by a party that had been planned for November and then canceled amid protests. The fraternity hosting the party, whose members are mostly Asian and white,
had invited “rappers, twerkers, gangsters” and others “back to da hood again.”
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Beyond the immediate provocation of the party, a sharp decline in black undergraduate enrollment —
to 4.6 percent of the student body in 2013 from 6.2 percent in 2009 — and a general feeling of isolation among black students on campus have prompted a new wave of student activism, including a social media campaign called “Being Black at the University of
Michigan” (or, on Twitter, #BBUM). Members of the university’s Black Student Union have petitioned campus administrators to, among other things, increase enrollment of black students to 10 percent.
Similar episodes and tensions have unsettled colleges including
Arizona State;
the University of California, Los Angeles; the
University of Mississippi; and
Dartmouth.
In the news media and in popular culture, the notion persists that millennials — born after the overt
racial debates and divisions that shaped their parents’ lives — are growing up in a colorblind society in which interracial friendships and marriages are commonplace and racism is largely a relic.
But interviews with dozens of students, professors and administrators at the University of Michigan
and elsewhere indicate that the reality is far more complicated, and that racial tensions are playing out in new ways among young adults.
Some experts say the concept of being “postracial” can mean replicating some of the divisions and
insensitivity of the past, perhaps more from ignorance than from animus. Others find offensive the idea of a society that strips away deeply personal beliefs surrounding self-identification.
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“There’s this preconceived notion that our generation is postracial, but there’s these incidents that
happen constantly that disprove that point,” said Zach Fields, a business major here, who is white. He attributed many high-profile incidents — including a number of fraternity parties nationwide that have used racist symbols, including watermelons and gang
signs — to ignorance.
“I feel like they don’t mean to be so offensive,” Mr. Fields, 20, said of the party organizers. “It’s
not a conscious racism. It’s subconscious.”
Tyrell Collier, 21, the speaker of the Black Student Union, who is majoring in sociology and Afro-American
and African studies, said racial tensions on campus had been mounting for months.
“There was a very tense climate brewing all semester, and I think the party was just the peak,” he
said. Mr. Collier added that his group, which spearheaded the popular social media campaign, had received inquiries from other black student groups around the country looking to use similar tactics.
“We’re clearly not postracial,” said Tiya A. Miles, chairwoman of the department of Afro-American
and African studies. “Sometimes I wonder if having a black president lets people feel like that gives them cover. It absolves people of being prejudiced.”
The number of complaints related to race and ethnicity filed against colleges and universities rose
to 860 in 2013 from 555 in 2009, according to the Office for Civil Rights at the federal Education Department. Some experts believe that the increase reflects, at least in part, the role of social media in creating and then publicizing episodes.
Students nationwide responded to a reporter’s request on Facebook and Twitter for stories about racial
issues on college campuses. The experiences they described ranged from overt racism to more subtle forms of insensitivity.
Charles Tkacik, a freshman at Johnson & Wales University in North Miami, Fla., who is white, said
in an email that while public demonstrations of racism were rare at his university, “there is a deep layer of contempt and hatred among a percentage of students toward other races.”
“Some students believe certain races to be ‘dirty, noisy and rude,’ ” Mr. Tkacik wrote.
Jordan Taylor, a black student at the State University of New York at New Paltz, shared a photo of
a “colored only” sign that had been placed on a water fountain in his freshman year.
A black student at Princeton said a racial epithet was once scrawled on his dorm room door. A Korean-American
student at the University of Minnesota described being asked by her classmates if she “did massage” or “wore a kimono at home.”
Race is very much an open issue at the University of Michigan. In 2006, Michigan residents voted in
favor of Proposition 2, which prohibited affirmative action based on race or ethnicity in admissions and hiring at public institutions. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the measure this year. These issues are playing out when the minority population
is growing nationwide but shrinking on some college campuses.
“I think there is no question that Prop 2 has made it much more challenging for us,” Martha E. Pollack,
the university provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said of the affirmative action vote. “It was difficult to be the kind of community that we wanted to be even when we could use affirmative action.”
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