Student Body President Rusty Mau joined three other student leaders from universities across the country to discuss racism on college campuses on CNN’s State of the Union program Sunday morning. 

Moderated by CNN anchor Dana Bash, the panel featured Mau; Elliot Spillers, Student Government president-elect at the University of Alabama; Julia Watson, undergraduate student body president at Northwestern University; and Jalen Ross, president of the University of Virginia Student Council. 

The panel addressed a commonly held belief that the United States’ younger generation is living in a post-racial society, particularly on college campuses, citing the video of fraternity brothers in the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon singing racist chants as evidence against it. 

“I think a critical challenge to overcoming racism in America is acknowledging that it is a problem,” Mau said. 

Part of acknowledging that problem, Mau said, includes recognizing the implicit biases and pre-existing privileges that each student and person has, often without ever realizing they are present at all. 

The fact that so many people have an idea that the U.S. is post-racial is both good and bad news, according to Ross, Virginia’s student council president. 

The good news, Ross said, is that it is possible to think that at all—as what happened in Oklahoma is not happening on every bus all the time. The bad news, however, is that not seeing these things happen constantly allows people to ignore the subtler biases that are present in everyday life. 

“Colorblindness is still blindness,” Ross said. 

As an example, Ross cited that in today’s society, a resume with a black-sounding name is 50 percent less likely to be responded to than a resume with a white-sounding name for candidates with equal skills. 

“I think we are a little distracted by the big things you can see,” Ross said. “You can point to that bus in Oklahoma, but the everyday things that we actually have to work on, we can work on that.”

Watson, the undergraduate student body president at Northwestern, said talking about these subtle biases and getting people to acknowledge them is important for racial progress on college campuses. 

Northwestern is working on implementing a social inequalities distribution requirement within its academic system, which will be specifically focused on U.S. inequalities, Watson said. 

The panel discussed social media and its direct influence on how racism permeates into college culture, particularly within the popular new anonymous social media app Yik Yak, which functions like a nameless Twitter, showing users messages from other users near them. 

“The veil of anonymity allows students with those opinions to voice them,” Mau said. 

NC State has had its own problems with the app. There have been several instances where blatantly racist statements directed at students appeared in the app’s feed because it became popular at the university.

Most notably, the statements appeared in regards to anti-police brutality protests in D.H. Hill Library following the Ferguson shooting and the recent election of Khari Cyrus, a senior studying biological sciences and an African-American student, as next year’s student body president. 

Cyrus said it is sad there are still students at NC State hiding behind a mask of anonymity where they know that they are not going to be associated with their comments.

“People say that they would never say that in person or out in public, but even when you have people hiding behind social media and saying these things, I still think it’s a problem,” Cyrus said. 

Although his experience with racism at the university has not been blatant, such as what happened in Oklahoma, Cyrus said subtle comments and jokes with racist roots have not disappeared from NC State. 

“It is a blatant form of racism in my eyes, just the idea that some comments and some stereotypes are a thing to joke about and bring up in public situations,” Cyrus said. “I think for me personally and for other members of my community, it’s something that we have to struggle with and try and address about our time here at NC State.”

As the future student body president, Cyrus said it is going to be a challenge to address these subtle biases in everyday life. 

“Having those confrontational experiences where you tell people, ‘It’s not OK for you to say this around me’ or ‘It’s not OK for you to act this way’—I think that’s the next steps we should be taking as a student body to combat this,” Cyrus said. 

Combating these instances at NC State is something Cyrus plans to work on with his administration during his term as student body president.

“We’ve obviously come a long ways in regards to race relations here at NC State, and just in the general population, but I think there is still a long ways to go,” Cyrus said. 

Staff Writer Ian Grice contributed reporting to this story.