BOISE -- Students at Boise State University are calling some fliers offensive and racist.
The literature first surfaced last week on World AIDS Day. It tells people how not to catch AIDS by suggesting no sex with bisexuals or people who inject drugs. But the language that has students most concerned is about African Americans.
Senior Jalara Walker, an African-American, came to BSU from California. She's loved her time on campus, but that changed last week after she found several fliers in a class.
"I really thought that stuff like this was over," Walker said.
The fliers read: "Don't Catch AIDS!" at the top. At the bottom they say: "Blacks are walking STD factories” and “once u go black we don't want u back.”
Walker said she laughed at first, thinking it absurd, but then left class to report it to the dean's office.
"It just makes me uncomfortably aware that I shouldn't be here. That's what I feel like. I don't want to go back to school," Walker said.
She says the dean's office told her they knew of the fliers. Now, a week later she says BSU has taken little action.
“I don't feel that it was made as big of a deal as it should've been because it is a big deal," said Walker.
Other students we talked to agree.
"The school should maybe address it in some way, say something about - let the students know, ‘Hey, we are not for this,’" BSU senior Sean Wakeley said.
BSU's spokesman refused to go on camera. In a statement sent to our newsroom, he said an open police and administrative investigation is taking place and that the university tries to provide a culture of civility and success.
Dwight Murphy saw a woman last week stuffing newspapers at a campus newsstand with those fliers.
"She didn't look anymore out of place than any student here," Murphy said.
As the advertising manager for "The Arbiter", the student paper, Murphy told her she could not do that.
"She didn't say much other than, ‘Oh, oh,’ kind of hesitated and everything and walked away," said Murphy.
He didn't know what her handouts said, but as soon as he found out he called police.
“I would personally love it if they could figure out who did it and catch them," Wakeley said.
"I'm half-Hispanic. What if someone said something like that was against me? It's really disgusting," BSU junior Katherine Peterson said.
"I don't want to sit in a classroom and think that people don't want me to be there or people think any less of me because I'm black," Walker said.
The president of the Black Student Alliance says the flier is insulting to the entire campus, not just black students. Out of BSU's nearly 19,000 students, 361 are black.
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