Persistent Social Issues:

As Larry Houpe and Adedayo A. Banwo’s editorials demonstrate, the persistent discrimination faced by African-Americans in the twenty-first century was not entirely novel and often represented another manifestation of old forms of racial prejudice. In Banwo’s editorial on racial profiling and police tactics, he wonders whether African-American men will just need to “get used” to their status as criminal suspects as his grandfather did under Jim Crow. In the eyes of the Message’s staff, these manifestations of racial prejudice proved especially potent because they often went ignored by many Americans of all races.

Despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement in providing equal rights for African-Americans as consumers, Message columnist Larry Houpe argued that racial discrimination remained prevalent in “predatory lending” and buying automobiles. In the case of the former, Houpe cites his experience working “for one of the largest real estate law firms in Raleigh” to assert that until recently “it wasn’t illegal for mortgage companies and lenders to charge higher interest rates to certain groups.” Next, Houpe’s second example addresses a “20/20” report that car dealerships, especially those of the luxury variety, often discriminated against African-American car buyers. Overall, Houpe provides this article as a means of informing “our young brothers and sisters [who] will be graduating this year,” of the methods by which “many industries… have found ways to discriminate against minorities.”

With discussions of a “cultural tax” and “discrete discrimination” that African-Americans faced in the American workplace, The Nubian Message sought to advise other black students about the difficulties they would face after graduation. Furthermore, these columns also served as cautionary tales to a broader, multiracial audience about the way that racial discrimination functioned in more subtle, but equally insidious ways when compared to the Jim Crow era. In doing so, The Nubian Message’s content on these subjects demonstrated the importance of issues beyond the campus of N.C. State to the paper’s staff. As a result, the Message sought to link the need for African-American engagement in social and political issues in the world after college with a rejection of apathy toward campus issues.