The recent racial profiling of Yale University student Tahj Blow by campus police this past weekend has re-ignited debates and renewed considerable attention to targeting of minority students on predominantly White campuses. He is the son of New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow. Yale University police officers briefly detained the young Mr. Blow, held him at gunpoint and forced to lie face down on the ground. He was targeted by police due to the fact that he supposedly matched the description of a robbery suspect. After realizing that they had detained a third year college chemistry major and not the actual suspect they were pursuing, police released the young man. Mr. Blow has made his intense level of anger and resentment (what parent wouldn’t be?) of the situation known in his recent column. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/opinion/charles-blow-at-yale-the-police-detained-my-son.html
If you are a non-White male, the odds are that you are much more likely to be the victim of some sort of racial or sexual harassment or racial profiling on a college or university campus. These are the findings from a recent article published earlier this month based on the findings of Harvard University’s project. The report is the result of more than 200 student survey responses from several institutions—Missouri State University; two anonymous public institutions in the South and Midwest; and a private elite university in the Northeast. http://www.oa.uottawa.ca/journals/aporia/articles/2014_10/Caplan_Ford.pdf
Reporter Jake New in a recent Inside Higher Ed article https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/08/report-details-microaggressions-campuses-students-color-and-women provides a number of statistics and examples displaying the multitude forms of intense hostility and mistreatment that students of color frequently endure. Examples of such disrespectful behavior are:
