Overt Racism: Coverage
Rejecting the idea that America had become a "post-racial" society, The Nubian Message covered prominent instances of racism and inequality on NC State’s campus during the 1990s. Early articles were largely directed at campus administrators, who the paper saw as purposefully excluding the interests of NC State’s black community in favor of NC State's white community. Several examples will illustrate how The Nubian Message early on served as the campus whistleblower in instances of racism.
In an editorial published in the October 14, 1993 issue, newspaper staff collectively expressed their disappointment that NC State had not yet hired an African American head coach for any campus athletic team, even though the school depended upon dozens of African Americans as student-athletes. Provocatively, staff members compared this situation to American slavery, where millions of African Americans were subjected to physical and mental abuse at the hands of powerful white slaveholders. African American student-athletes were the slaves and white head coaches were the slaveholders in this analogy.
Another article from the January 27, 1994 issue of the paper described a campus incident involving racist graffiti on the walls of the Free Expression tunnel. The graffiti called an upcoming African American cultural event a “jigaboo jam”; jigaboo is a disparaging name for an African American person. Rene Scott, the Nubian Message staff member who covered the incident, denounced the slur as “a blatant, racist remark that does not fit” an educational environment. Referring to “the Dream,” or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope for racial equality in America, Scott questioned the ability of black and white people to coexist when white people still “attempt oppression and hatred by any means necessary.”