Student uprisings were as much a response to negative experiences with their peers and administrators as they were expressions of frustration with the cultural incompetence of their teachers. It is also essential that professors recognize how they, often unknowingly and inadvertently, say and do racist things to students of color in the classroom. It is important for faculty members to understand that students were protesting racism.

Similarly, news coverage of protests at Yale University concentrated less on students’ frustrations with the university’s climate of racial exclusion and more on e-mails about potentially offensive Halloween costumes and perceived threats to free speech. For example, instead of deeply exploring the experiences that ignited demonstrations among students at the University of Missouri, journalists wrote mostly about the football team’s threat to cancel its game against Brigham Young University, the potential financial implications of the team’s activism, and the eventual resignations of the system president and the chancellor of the university’s flagship campus. Most media attention disproportionately focused on the popularity of the protests as opposed to the actual issues underlying campus unrest. Last year, at dozens of colleges and universities across the United States, students protested institutional unresponsiveness to pervasive issues of racial inequity.

Zimbabwe president speech about racism