The Illusion of Inclusion: Is The Technician Racist? Debates About Multiculturalism and Post-Racialism 1991-1992

On September 25, 1992, over 250 African-American students gathered in the Brickyard on Campus to burn copies of the student newspaper, the Technician, and call for more sensitive coverage of African-American issues on campus.[1]  These students’ activism eventually led to the establishment of The Nubian Message, an independent African-American paper to address issues of racism and multiculturalism on campus.  Yet what articles in the Technician aroused these students’ anger?  What debates about race made so many African American students on campus feel they needed a separate media space to represent their voice?

This exhibit explores various opinion columns and articles that ran in the Technician in the two years leading up to the demonstration on campus.  These articles shed light on a lively and contentious debate on campus about the meanings of race in a period considered by many to be “post-racial.”  For many columnists writing in the early 1990s, the racial struggles of the Civil Rights Movement had already been consigned to distant memory.  Racial equality was a foregone conclusion and any continued feelings of inequality reflected personal beliefs and not continued realities of indirect racism that kept African Americans in a subordinate economic, social, and political position.[2]  Faced with increased hostility to special programming aimed specifically to advance African American civil rights on campus, African-American students responded in a myriad of ways that reflected deep divisions within the African-American student body about how to achieve true racial equality.  Some students accepted the myth of “post-racialism,” while others tried to engage their detractors in a conversation about continued structures of racism that perpetuated a largely-invisible white privilege.  These conversations in the student newspaper became more incendiary over time and led to active protests on campus in the fall of 1992.  The protests finally led to Tony Williamson creating the Nubian Message as a safe media space.

The ultimate establishment of the Nubian Message reflected many of the difficulties of advancing civil rights in a supposedly post-racial context and highlights the vicious debates that characterized the “culture wars” of the 1990s.  While the Nubian Message created a separate and safe space for African-American students to explore issues of their own identity, the establishment of the paper also curtailed the development of a real, if problematic, dialogue about race within the larger campus community in the pages of The Technician.