Prior to Saturday night’s homecoming football game, a “Black Lives Matter” banner was unfurled next to the UTEP student section just as the national anthem began to play. A group of UTEP students, along with local organization Radical Soup, chose this game as a chance to protest against recent injustices against people of color in the United States.
Gabriel Solis of Radical Soup said that the entire purpose of the protest was in response to a history of oppression in America and that protest is the logical next step.
“I studied history at UTEP and for me, if you take a brief survey of American history you’ll see that it is founded on conquest and white supremacy—it has a very, very racist past.