This past Tuesday, members and officers of BSU gathered for their second weekly meeting. Despite the profound discussions that occurred during the meeting, there was one glaring characteristic: only two members showed up.

“I feel like a lot of people are afraid to join BSU because I think people are kind of dreading the whole race talk, you know, because racism is the elephant in the room, you know, and people don’t want to talk about it,” junior and BSU Vice President Adanna Okere said. “They want to avoid it.”

The club plans on hanging up flyers soon on top of sending out text messages to members to hopefully get the word out about BSU and what they are about.

What started out as a less-than-desirable meeting soon took a turn for the better. The meeting started out with the two attendees taking a quiz on black history to examine how much they really knew on the topic.

“I enjoyed it, like, it made me realize how much that I didn’t know about my own history and now that’s my new goal, you know, to learn more and educate myself more on my history so that I know where I come from and my background,” junior and Vice President of BSU, Adanna Okere said.

“The purpose was to really open their eyes to how much of their history that they don’t know and how important it is that they do know, like, their history and where they came from,” Jamera Ewing, senior and President of BSU, said. “How can you educate others if you don’t know the history yourself?”

But, after what was meant to just be a simple, short and fun quiz, the meeting took a detour. The club began to discuss topics like racial discrimination, shootings/police attacking blacks, white privilege and the stereotypes surrounding African Americans. Okere, who aspires to be a black activist, felt like African Americans should take a stand and organize into a political organization to help spread awareness on these racial issues.

“This summer I started to become more aware of how society really is and I started to become interested because, of course, I’m black; I’m on my side,” Okere said. “And I just, I don’t know. I just became really passionate about black rights… and like [Ewing] said, white privilege is real. You know, black people are still racially profiled. Black people are denied housing rights, you know, and I feel like we need to do something about it because I feel like even though we do riot and we do make noise, not only are they going to label us as barbarians but they’re also going to be like, ‘Oh, they’re wrecking they’re whole community.’”

These were among the many different comments and opinions made last Tuesday that caused the meeting to last for at least an hour longer than planned.