These were terrorist acts, meant to silence and intimidate
Over the past several years black students at Mizzou were repeatedly called racist names to their faces, the grounds of the school's Black Culture Center were covered with cotton balls, the center was the target of arson threats, a black professor was spat at and called names by a white man flying a confederate flag from his truck, and a dormitory wall was decorated with feces in the shape of a swastika.
What it feels like to be black at Mizzou
“If we aren’t scoring touchdowns, the university does not care about us,” said Jorden Giger, a first-year graduate student at Mizzou who stayed home from classes Wednesday. “We are either despised or tokenized and treated as property.”
B-But Obama
Our technology has improved and our haircuts have changed, but racism is as ugly as ever in modern America. While our black president nears the end of his second term, we’re wrong to think his election was even a small hint at racial progress. More than 65 million people voted for President Obama in 2012, but we’re fooling ourselves if we think casual racists or white supremacists were in that number.
It's the white, male dominated media.
In many communities that historically have been marginalized and unfairly portrayed by the media, there’s good reason why people do not trust journalists. There’s a tendency in news media to criminalize black people’s pain and resistance to racial oppression. We saw it in coverage of Ferguson and Baltimore, when news stations provided more coverage of broken windows in their communities than of black pain.
The unfair portrayal of black people in the news media is well documented. In one study analyzing news coverage by 26 local television stations, black people were rarely portrayed unless they had committed a crime. A 2015 University of Houstonstudy found that this imbalanced coverage may lead viewers to develop racial bias against black people because it often over-represents them in crime rates.
