You know what’s more exhausting? Working and studying.

BOSTON (AP) — It’s not always the slurs and the other out-and-out acts of racism. It’s the casual, everyday slights and insensitivities.

Sheryce Holloway is tired of white people at Virginia Commonwealth University asking if they can touch her hair or if she knows the latest dance move. At Chicago’s Loyola University, Dominick Hall says groups of white guys stop talking when he walks by, and people grip their bags a little tighter. And Katiana Roc says a white student a few seats away from her at West Virginia University got up and moved to the other side of the classroom.

As thousands of students took part in walkouts and rallies on college campuses across the country Thursday in a show of solidarity with protesters at the University of Missouri, many young black people spoke of a subtle and pervasive brand of racism that doesn’t make headlines but can nevertheless have a corrosive effect.

There’s even a word on campuses for that kind of low-grade insensitivity toward minorities: microaggression.

“It’s more the daily microaggressions than the large situations,” said Akosua Opokua-Achampong, a sophomore at Boston College. […]

Holloway, the Virginia Commonwealth student, said she used to try to ignore subtler instances of racism. But she has decided not to keep quiet anymore.

“It’s hard when it’s something you see every day,” she said. “It’s exhausting. It’s fatiguing and, you know, we’re frustrated.”