In isolation, incidents of racism often appear to be outliers from the norm, anomalies, a deviation from the way people
really think and believe.
First off, the local or national news doesn't cover issues of racism around the country with any degree of thoroughness or consistency unless it's an enormous national story or if the story happened locally. Secondly, even when they do get covered, the chance of you happening to hear the story or see the tweet is small. Consequently, it's easy to assume that if you don't hear about it, it's just not happening.
So, when students at Lincoln University in rural Pennsylvania found "NIGGER" spray painted on the entrance sign of the school last week, it was only covered by local media in Pennsylvania and a few very select outlets specializing in news for African Americans. Apparently, this is the pattern for incident after incident on college campuses all across the country.
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which I am guessing that 99.9 percent of you don't read on a regular basis, has catalogued every documented and verified incident of racism on college campuses over from 2011 to 2015.
I cover issues of racism and injustice for a living, and when I viewed this catalogue of racism on college campuses, I was shocked, disturbed, and troubled about the state of America. Out of the dozens and dozens of incidents listed, I had only heard of a few of them. They are spread out all over the nation—reports coming from the north, south, east, and west. They range from racist assaults on black students to the most egregious forms of discrimination you've ever heard against prestigious African-American faculty members. Pieced together, each incident paints an ugly, painful collage of American racism in higher education.
While a degree of racism has come to be expected in certain professional or geographical segments of America, this listing of incidents serves as a rebuttal to that way of thinking. College campuses are often seen as an escape from racism. The stereotype is that racism all but disappears the more educated someone gets, but these incidents fly in the face of that.
Viewed in concert with one another, you would be hard pressed to find a more damning review of the true state of America than this.
View the full catalogue assembled by The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education here.