COLLEGE PARK, Md. — 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.
This 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.
“I just want to say that, if your intent was to create fear, it will have the opposite effect,” said Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke. Officials have since accused a student in the incident but have declined to release the student’s name or race.
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.
The Bucknell and Duke incidents came days after spray-painted swastikas and nooses were found at dorms on the State University of New York’s Purchase campus. A former University of Mississippi student was indicted on federal civil rights charges last week, accused of tying a noose on the statue of the university’s first black student and draping it with an old Georgia state flag that includes a Confederate battle emblem.
