Black students around US complain of casual, everyday racism

BOSTON -- It's not always the slurs and the other out-and-out acts of racism. It's the casual, everyday slights and insensitivities.

Sheryce Holloway is tired of white people at Virginia Commonwealth University asking whether they can touch her hair or whether she knows the latest dance move.

At Chicago's Loyola University, Dominick Hall said groups of white men stop talking when he walks by, and people grip their bags a little tighter.

And Katiana Roc said a white student a few seats away from her at West Virginia University got up and moved to the other side of the classroom.

As thousands of students took part in walkouts and rallies on college campuses across the country -- including Southeast Missouri State University -- on Thursday in a show of solidarity with protesters at the University of Missouri, many young black people spoke of a subtle and pervasive brand of racism that doesn't make headlines but nevertheless can have a corrosive effect.

There's even a word on campuses for that kind of low-grade insensitivity toward minorities: microaggression.

"It's more the daily microaggressions than the large situations," said Akosua Opokua-Achampong, a sophomore at Boston College. "Those also hurt."

When Opokua-Achampong tells other students she's from New Jersey, some ask where she's really from.

"When you're not white, you can't just be American," she said. She was born in the U.S. to parents from Ghana.

Janay Williams, a senior at the University of California Los Angeles, said she is the only black person in her biology class and routinely is among the last picked for group assignments.

"Students don't want to be in the same group as you with a group project, because they're afraid you're not going to do your share," she said.

Jioni A. Lewis, a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee, said research has shown the stresses of being a minority, on top of the usual pressures of adjusting to college, can cause some students to leave school.

Stories like that aren't new, students said. But many said the revolt at Missouri -- and the Black Lives Matter movement that was set in motion by the shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri -- have driven them to talk about it and confront it.

On social media, students are sharing their personal experiences with racism, using the hashtag "BlackOnCampus."