Last week TRUTH released its first newsletter aimed at informing students, faculty, and administrators about its movement. The newsletter outlined the administration's poor response to requests of AHANA students and detailed TRUTH's requests of the administration.
The newsletter and the racial incidents of last semester do not stand alone in relation to other campuses across the country.
Racial tensions have plagued college and university campuses around the nation, with campuses from coast to coast experiencing an unusually high number of racial incidents.
Texas A&M University was rocked by a racial incident last semester, which witnessed the release of a video on YouTube portraying three students demonstrating crude racial slurs, including slave-to-master relationships while wearing blackface makeup. All three students involved in the video dropped out of the university.
The University of Texas, Austin experienced similar incidents, when pictures from a party dubbed "Ghetto Party" surfaced on Facebook. The pictures showed students wearing blackface makeup while mocking African Americans' actions.
After the party, students from both universities traded racist and offensive comments concerning the pictures on Facebook, approving of the party, and the actions that the pictures portrayed.
The Sigma Chi fraternity at Johns Hopkins University hosted a now-infamous party called "Halloween in the Hood," a party that was accused by colored students of being racially hostile. The fraternity was suspended after a university investigation which found the party to be racially threatening.
Similar racial incidents occurred at a dozen other campuses across the country over the last semester and the last several years, including the University of California, Los Angeles - where a video showed police brutality toward an Iranian-American - Auburn University, Steston University, the University of Mississippi, and Oklahoma State University.
Experts attribute this rise in racial tension to changing demographics on college campuses, as well as the rise of new technologies, from Web sites such as Facebook.com to cell-phone cameras, which can capture any incident at any time.
Experts and students around the country point out that while campuses have been diversifying over the past decades, campuses have remained segregated by ethnic groups, creating tensions among the groups.
BC's recent survey of the undergraduate student body highlighted this fact. The survey showed that 40 percent of students find it difficult to interact across different ethnic groups, a percentage that rises among black students.
Students from across the nation have also recognized this phenomenon. "The best way to describe the racial climate is mutual coexistence. Ethnic groups do tend to separate themselves for the most part," said Joy Henderson, a sophomore at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. "One of the complaints that students have here is that there is not as much racial and cultural mixing as there could be."
Robert Schmidt, a sophomore at San Francisco State University, agreed. "Most of the groups just keep their distance from one another," said Schmidt.
Racial tensions last semester were especially visible at Dartmouth College, which was affected by a series of racist incidents directed toward its American Indian population.
Dartmouth was one of the first universities to ban the use of the Indian symbol and mascot in the 1970s, a move which as exasperated the relationship between the conservative and American Indian population at the college. In an attempt to revitalize a lost tradition, certain groups on campus embarked upon racially sensitive actions, such as selling T-shirts with American Indians performing crude actions, as well as an Alumni calendar that portrayed an Indian symbol.
Tensions flared when The Dartmouth Review, an independent student newspaper at Darmouth, published a front-page illustration of an Indian performing a scalp with a caption titled "The Natives are Getting Restless" - mocking the American Indians' complaints regarding the use of Indian mascots and symbols.
The publication sparked a response from American Indian students, who held a rally, similar to the TRUTH's unity rally last semester, calling for more sensitivity toward minorities and for the end of hate and racial speech on campus.
Kevin Hudak, who was president of The Dartmouth Review at the time of the controversial publication, condemned the incident and voiced his concerns over the nature of racial tensions not only at Dartmouth but across the country.
Hudak stated that the actions of both groups on campus have radicalized the issue of treatment toward American Indians, stifling real dialogue and forcing students to choose sides rather than compromise.
"Both sides are being very emotional and violent," said Hudak. "Instead of having a dialogue, people went to the extreme, people rallied around the extreme."
Hudak discussed the tendency of groups to forgo dialogue, a tendency that has plagued campuses across the nation and fueled tensions between minorities and the rest of the student population. Hudak said this radicalization has led students and groups otherwise sympathetic to an aggrieved group's complaints to feel alienated and intimidated. "Students have a tendency to close themselves off. We can do better as college students without upping the rhetoric and potentially offending people," said Hudak.
"We are all college students, we are going to grow up soon, and if we want to make positive changes in the world, we have to be united, we can't let things like this divide us, and if it does, we have to reunite," said Hudak.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, with the cooperation of university administrations across the nation, is launching the Campaign to End Campus Racism this year to address these divisions and tensions on college campuses.
The initiative is aimed at providing students with means for reporting racial actions and stimulating dialogue between minority students and college administrations.
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