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The University of Wisconsin-Whitewater has been enmeshed in controversy over the last few weeks in the wake of its chancellor mistaking a photo of two white students donning beauty facial masks as blackface and falsely accusing the students of being “racist.”
The mistake prompted a nation’s scorn, but while the media’s eye has since moved on, tension remains high at the medium-sized public university in southeast Wisconsin, which enrolls roughly 12,000 students, about 80 percent of whom are white.
Since the incident – which one student activist labeled “Bloody Sunday” – the campus has hosted diversity forums at which students have accused the campus of being steeped in racism and suggested administrators are not doing enough about it.
One Black Student Union member even told peers she missed several days of school because she was too distraught by the blackface picture to attend class.