“Together we can bring Black back,” a young African-American female student declared in the film “Dear White People.” This line, from a satirical film that takes place on the campus of a fictional Ivy League college, has acquired a realistic spin at the University of Missouri. What the film and the developments at Mizzou have in common is a campus polluted with racism and students no longer willing to tolerate it.
The students in Missouri may have drawn some inspiration from the 2014 film, but it’s more likely their outrage stems from an accumulation of slights, insults and lack of respect from faculty, administrators and white students. We know from the reports that the campus was a hotbed of issues, including news of racial epithets being hurled at a Black student leader, of a Swastika drawn in feces on a wall and that the university had stop paying for health insurance for graduate teaching and research assistants.
But it was not until members of the university football team joined in the protests, particularly in support of graduate student Jonathan Butler, that a change occurred. Butler was on a hunger strike and promised it would continue unless the president resigned. Within 36 hours, President Tim Wolfe submitted his resignation. Later, the school’s chancellor said he would be leaving at the end of the year.
It’s been a generation since we have witnessed the power of protests and demonstrations, and it’s hard to believe that the students on campus did not gather some of their activism from nearby Ferguson and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps this outcome is the real definition of the highly charged “Ferguson effect,” posited by some law enforcement officials as a reason for limiting their policing of crime.
For several months, the students on campus have been complaining about the racism, but the administration did little to address it. Not until the threat from the football team to boycott this coming Saturday’s game against BYU and the meeting of the school’s Board of Curators did things come to a head. If the game was forfeited, the University of Missouri would have had to pay BYU $1 million. Moreover, if the team’s boycott was extended to the end of the season, it would have had an even more devastating impact on the conference and its contract with CBS, which pays the Southeastern Conference $55 million a year for television rights.
The action by the student athletes was reminiscent of the protests from the Civil Rights Movement and the economic boycotts that proved so effective in ending segregation and discrimination by businesses. Dr. Martin Luther King realized that unless businesses, companies and corporations are hit in the pocketbook, they would go on with business as usual. Rather than divining some lessons from a satirical film, the students may have delved into the history of the struggle for civil and human rights.
As much as we praise and applaud the valiant efforts of the students at Mizzou, we know that their action will not eliminate the deep-seated institutional racism and bigotry at the university. Several of the student leaders made this point and declared that this victory was just the first step in dealing with the prejudice and intolerance on a campus where African-Americans comprise only 7.2 percent of the 35,000 students.
“We just wanted to use our platform to take a stance for a fellow concerned student on an issue,” said Ian Simon, a captain of the football team. In many respects his words were very similar to those in the film and the fictional student’s charge that “together we can bring Black back.” Simon and the Tigers at Mizzou may not win another game this season, but they have scored a major victory with this action.