¶ … New Campus Racism, Noel Kent describes two very different points-of-view about race a society on American college campuses and, more generally, of American society that he argues provides the model for the microcosm of the collegiate environment. Kent argues that the three decades after the Civil Rights era, the United States represents an "odd mixture of striking movement and surface change." By that he means that on one level, racism has been formally eliminated through post-Civil Rights-era legislation and official government and institutional policies; meanwhile, on an entirely different level, racism still permeates American society, particularly from the perspective of minorities, black Americans, in particular. Whereas overt discrimination and persecution in connection with race are largely vestiges of the past in the U.S., racism is still alive and well on a more subtle level throughout American society, including...

More specifically, white students tend to equate racism with color consciousness and racial equality with color blindness. However, black students, and black Americans more generally, tend to define racism much differently, such as in terms of the comparative opportunities available to members of minority races and to the persisting differential that still exists in so far as political influence and other forms of meaningful power in society. The author explains that there is a common form of racism that exists at a much lower level than the outright exclusions of the pre-Civil Rights era. For example, he describes that when contemporary black college students act in ways that are normally expected to be associated with cultural identity or pride (such…