Media, Race, and Politics:

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, The Nubian Message staff continued to assert that traditional, racially integrated media sources at NC State and the United States failed African-Americans on a number of different fronts.

As will be discussed in the section on collective memory, Nubian Message writers often took issue with the media’s portrayals of African-American history as well as contemporary racial politics. In the editorials of Myshalae Jamerson, “What the Media Doesn’t Tell You About MLK,” and Harold Pettigrew, “Our Forgotten Kings, from 1999, both claim that contemporary remembrances of the Civil Rights Movement over-emphasize the biography and individual leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. As a result, the writers argued that this approach ignored the importance of collective struggle in the black freedom movement. Moreover, in the realm of contemporary politics, the Darkchild column critiqued the media focus on President Bill Clinton’s “baby mama drama” and subsequent “public witch trial” as a diversion for the economic prosperity and social progress achieved by African-Americans under his watch.

Meanwhile, on campus The Nubian Message continued to point out what the paper’s staff saw as the shortcomings of N.C. State’s traditional campus newspaper, the Technician. For example, in September 2000, the “Darkchild” mystery columnist critiqued an article in the Technician that examined the academic performance of Greek-letter organizations at N.C. State although it excluded traditionally-African American fraternities and sororities. The editorial denounced the “one-sided slant” of the paper for implicitly accepting the idea that “traditional black, Greek-letter organizations do not rank high enough in importance” for the Technician. As a result, writers for the Message continued to produce similar content to expose the subtle racism that they believed traditional media sources left ignored.