Student sit-in at Lewis & Clark College, Amy Rosenheim
By Karissa Tom
Last fall, racist slurs targeting black students at my school rocked my school community. Though black students make up a small minority of the school’s demographic, the hate-filled graffiti and the overheard jokes about “white power” left the whole student body feeling scared and threatened.
The initial reaction was shock and disbelief. At my seemingly accepting school in a politically liberal state, most people who heard about the incidents responded with, “This could never happen here!” Yet the sad truth remains that it did happen and that, when it did, my college as an institution and a community was unprepared for the consequences.
college students
University of North Dakota students protest offensive T-shirts
American Indian students at the University of North Dakota came together in mid-May to protest offensive T-shirts worn by their peers, according to the Native Sun News.
Students photographed themselves wearing T-shirts that depict an American Indian drinking from a beer bong with the words “Siouxper Drunk” emblazoned on the front. The “Fighting Sioux” logo was retired in 2012 due to impending NCAA sanctions over its controversial depiction of American Indian, according to ESPN.
“The ‘drunken Indian’ caricature is one of the worst stereotypes about Native people that there is,” said Ruth Hopkins, a writer for LastRealIndians.com.
This is the fourth in a five-part series published by our public media partners at Fronteras. Listen to the accompanying radio piece.
New Mexico School Seeks to Serve Black Students
By Elaine Baumgartel
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico often touts its tri-cultural diversity: a white minority population, a Hispanic majority and nearly two dozen Native American tribes.
But the African-American community there is teenie, almost invisible. That makes it more difficult for black students at the University of New Mexico, where four out of five African-American men don’t graduate.
The Fuller family moved their six children to Albuquerque to take advantage of New Mexico’s in-state scholarship programs. Jason Fuller left all of his high school friends behind in his hometown of Detroit, a city that’s more than three-quarters African-American. His new home is a dusty, sprawling city in the middle Rio Grande Valley, where African-Americans make up just 3 percent of the population
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