   Wait… wait… but white students at North Carolina State University were upset too!
   Yes indeed they were.
   You have to understand, we no longer live in a society of racial hierarchy. Even people who wrongly believe in the superiority of one race over another… even those people have to interact with people of other groups who have equal-status with them, or authority over them.
   As importantly, white students at NCSU are not all of one mind about race. So yeah, some simpleton writes racial graffiti, but that does not reflect the opinion of the whole campus. Among all of the students there are different racial, moral codes, and interpersonal relationships.  No surprise then that racial graffiti is taken as an attack on students of all racial and religious stripes because it shows that there is intolerance and hate on the campus. Who wants to live in a place like that? How can a person go home and proclaim their pride in being a student at a place that is so hateful? It was all that that in this case of racial graffiti, had awakened a sleeping giant.
   These are college students with classes to go too, reading and projects to do, papers to write, exams to take. In the midst of that life, these young people wanted to speak out against intolerance. Yet, they refused to use their busy lives as an excuse for not working for change on their campus. And as students from a number of racial and ethnic backgrounds developing a coalition, Wake Up! is part of a great American tradition of protest to improve the nation.
   Intergroup coalitions have always been part of the social change movements that mattered. One example from the civil rights movement SCOPE (Summer Community Organizing and Political Education) a project sponsored by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) in the summer of 1964. More recently is the example in NYC when people from many different groups showed up with colorful umbrellas so that gay and lesbian couples would not have to face anti-gay and lesbian protests.
   At the end of last semester (Spring 2011), I won a faculty award for my work on diversity on our campus. Nothing pleased me more than to be in the company of a racial, ethnic and gender mix of people who also won awards for their diversity work on our campus.
   So yes, when offensive racial and anti-gay graffiti was found in our “Free-Expression†tunnel, white students were upset too. Not only that, but with black, Arab, Hindu and Puerto Rican students as equal partners, white students started organizing themselves to stop the foolishness. That is how the interracial, interethnic student advocacy group “Wake Up! It’s Serious: A Campaign for Change†was born.
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