Each day we are confronted with news stories detailing the landscape of privilege and bias built into the cultural institutions of our nation. The elected representatives of Flint denied its people access to clean water. The legal system fails to hold police officers who shoot unarmed Black men criminally responsible for their actions. The government of North Carolina is attempting to prevent transgender people from using the bathroom for the gender with which they identify. A flagship university in the Midwest took five days to respond to a hate crime in which two fans at a football game enacted a scene, reminiscent of the lynching of African Americans, of Trump tying a noose around Obama’s neck. Systemic inequity lies not in individual actions, but in how broader systems respond (or fail to respond) to those actions. These stories receive national attention, but there are other stories that make up the everyday lives of the oppressed in our society. Students on my campus created a Twitter hashtag #TheRealUW to expose the inequity they experience on a daily basis. And one Black student, frustrated by the culture of the university, painted the message “Racizm in the air. Don’t breathe. – God” on campus in spring 2016.
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