Sept. 30, 2020 Campus Voices | Black Student Union | Breonna Taylor | BLM | RBG | Media | News | Sports 6
DALLAS WABBINGTON REPORTER Black students share stories of racism through Twitter hashtag. ollowing the country’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, the leaders of the Black Student Coalition, including Jamilah Kangudja, educational leadership graduate and Black Student Union president, gathered in June to discuss how to help the Black community and bring awareness to racism on campus. Together, the organization created the hashtag #BlackatMSUTexas to encourage Black students to come forward and tell about their experiences with racism. After BSU members released the initial statement explaining the purpose of the hashtag, many people, including students, faculty and organizations gathered on Twitter in solidarity to inform the community that racism exists on
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the MSU Texas campus. “[Racism] is something that has been happening at MSU. The stories are real,” Kangudja said. “If you look at the stories that people are telling with this hashtag, you’ll see a lot of them overlap, meaning year after year, semester after semester students are experiencing the same things.” The hashtag received immediate attention, with more than 100 tweets made up of experiences and reactions since its creation. The hashtag continues to be used by students three months later and continues as a place of admission for Black students. As one of the few minority students in a previous class of hers, mass communication junior Keza Muvunyi said she was afraid to have discussions of racial injustice and white privilege because she wasn’t sure if she was the only one who shared her perspective, so she tweeted this experience with #BlackatMSUTexas.
#BlackatM “We had a guest come speak to our class and there was one student who finally did speak up about it to say white privilege didn’t exist. [The guest] said something along the lines of ‘People just use it as an excuse to act a certain way.’ The one time someone tries to speak up, it was complete, utter nonsense,” Muvunyi said. “It was frustrating, and it was frustrating to me because if I did have something to say, I would be the only one to back myself.” Muvunyi told a story about how in her group of friends she was the only Black person, and her non-Black friend was trying to describe a Black woman, stating descriptions aside from her race. “It’s okay to say she was Black. It wasn’t a negative term or anything, but she was hesitant to say it just because I was in their presence,” Muvunyi said. “That has happened a lot, and that’s something people brush off, because it’s not a micro-aggression brushed off as much
as others. My presence made someone else uncomfortable. When they made their discomfort known, it made me uncomfortable.” Muvunyi explained that this is how people in general tend to function around minorities. She continued and said people are comfortable saying these terms when those individuals are not in their company. “They avoid those words when they are in the presence of that person, and I think that is problematic because you are afraid of calling me who I am even in the terms that are considered okay,” Muvunyi said. Business management alumni Leroy Flex was one of the more frequent participants of the hashtag; one of his stories revealed the common problem of Black individuals being asked by non-Black people for their permission to say the N-word. Flex tied this question to a deeper problem: if there is not police or authority involved, people will say what they want.
