“In fact – and I think all of us, and pretty much everyone at OU, understands this instinctively – it’s completely unlikely that the boys meant any of it. They were getting a big kick out of being bad, politically incorrect; they were showing how much contempt they had for social conventions. They weren’t proposing to lynch anybody, and they probably weren’t even serious about keeping anyone out of their fraternity.”
Thank you, JHS. This is very well articulated. This was the equivalent of the middle-schooler who hears a joke with a word that he’s not permitted to say around his mother, and so once he gets around all his friends, tells the joke that has booger or fart or b@@bs as the punchline because he’s trying to be seen as cool.
To stave off the inevitable “oh, so this is no more offensive than a fifth-grader’s booger joke?”, of course not - it’s odious, cringe-worthy, offensive, all of those other things. It’s also not an expression of a real desire to actually go find black people and hang them from trees.
Which is why – if your goal is REALLY to effect change in people’s hearts – you’d be much better taking the boys, having them sit quietly with the black men who clean their houses / cook their meals, and have them get a deeper understanding of how offensive such unthinking words really are – and that there are real people on the other end of the n word, not just a funny-ha-ha stereotype. Expelling them isn’t going to melt any deep-down racist issues they may have had.
“Do we even know if any non-whites even applied (pledged?) to SAE at OU?”
Applying isn’t pledging. Applying isn’t even the right word. You go through rush, and if you are chosen, you then pledge. You don’t determine that, the house does.
" I heard a representative of the national chapter say that their investigations revealed that the chant - a relic from desegregation battles decades ago - only seems to have resurfaced in the past few years. "
It seems to me that whether it was something that the SAE’s of the nineteen-hundred-oughts said is actually rather irrelevant. Anyone can create a chant at any time. Does it really matter if it was an old chant resurrected or something the kid made up on the spot, perhaps aided by his friend Jack Daniels? I mean, it wasn’t such a musical or literary masterpiece.
For some fraternity chapters, that may be checkable by going to the chapter web site and looking at the photos (if there are any, since many fraternity chapter web sites are poorly maintained). But the OU ΣAE chapter’s web site seem to be gone, and a general web search for chapter photos brings up photos associated with the recent scandal, protests, etc…
I would not be surprised if there were some of both going on in many fraternities and (even more so) sororities. Well, maybe not the latter in an obvious way, but welcoming potential new members of a different race or ethnicity as the current members less than potential new members of the same race or ethnicity as the current members.
The expressed idea that a club composed of people of only one race is ipso facto proof that they discriminate on the basis of race is highly offensive to me. But protected speech, nevertheless.
A club that only allows female members, or Arabs, or Jews, is discriminating based on race and gender for sure. Should schools ban such clubs from their premises? What about churches that only allow Christians and mosques that only allow Muslims?
I’ll tell you the issue I would focus on here if I were in charge of OU - it’s the fact that the Greek system is so racially segregated. For the university to officially recognize organizations that are so segregated seems very wrong to me, and I would basically force them to change if they wanted continued recognition and support. I might threaten to disband the whole system if change didn’t happen in the next few years. They are selecting their membership on purely subjective grounds (unlike sports or talent based groups), and I don’t think the segregation is due only to income barriers or the like.
If the video shows anything at all, it shows that SAE goes out of its way to make black people feel uncomfortable. I’d force the Greek system to reduce its racial segregation if it wanted to continue to exist in any official capacity.
Also - Personally, it bothers me that people are so dismissive of the due process and first amendment issues, as well as being dismissive of fraternity and sorority members at OU being harassed and threatened. Really seems like backward thinking to me.
There’s also a third reason why fraternities at OU might not have many black members: money. Consider the SAE event. Those snotty chant leaders either reached into their closets and pulled out tuxes, or rented tuxes; they paid for the chartered bus; they paid for the formal event they were going to, presumably with food and music at a venue that costs money. Greek life costs money. Greek life is for the privileged students who can afford it, and who have the time to devote to Greek life because they don’t have 30 or 40 hour a week jobs. There aren’t that many black students at OU, and very likely few of them could afford to be in a fraternity.
Generally, with the exception of sororities and fraternities, campuses ban clubs that discriminate based on race, gender or religion. The Christian churches I know about welcome anyone. I’m pretty sure that a Muslim Student Association is required to, and does, welcome any student. Any student can join the OU Hillel; any student can join the OU Muslim Student Association and attend religious services at their mosque.
CF, it seems to me that this is just more of your continued resentment against anything Greek or against anyone who could afford more than you could when you were in college.
Yes, going to a formal event cost money. The hotels / restaurants / bus companies provide services to people who pay for them. I don’t think they should give away their services for free; do you? If they gave them away for free to Greeks, you’d complain about that too.
Yes, there is some cost involved in a man having a suit. College students are preparing to enter the big-grown-up world, where it’s useful for a man to have a suit. It’s not evidence of “snotty wealth” or “privilege” to have a piece of clothing beyond jeans and sneakers.
“Greek life is for the privileged students who can afford it, and who have the time to devote to Greek life because they don’t have 30 or 40 hour a week jobs.”
Even without Greek life, students who can afford things and don’t have to work will have more leisure time or more ability to enjoy outings than students who can’t afford things and have work/study jobs. How, precisely, should that “problem” be solved? Maybe at Cardinal Fang College, there should be a limit on what anyone can spend on discretionary food / clothing / entertainment? No taking your girlfriend out for a swanky dinner and tickets to a Broadway show unless pre-approved, so you don’t hurt the feelings of the student down the hall who can barely afford a movie?
It’s interesting that with all the talk about diversity, we don’t actually ever want to expose people to the diversity of SES levels. Guess what, I can drive the streets of my town and find far more privileged women than I, who have the time to devote to all kinds of personal hobbies and interests and Botox and Pilates and volunteer boards and lunches-with-girlfriends compared to me, a plain old working stiff. But I don’t spend my life being resentful of them.
Pizzagirl, I’m just stating a fact: on a lot of campuses, Greek life costs money that lower middle or working class students (which would include most black students) don’t have.
JHS: “…it’s bizarre to talk as though they were Aryan Nation as opposed to a bunch of giggly boys saying bad words and probably not even fully understanding what the lynching reference meant.” And Pizzagirl thanked you for this.
Wow is all I can say. So if they were singing a similar ditty about gassing any Jews who dared pledge SAE would you say the same thing?
Zekesima, Say a bunch of ultra-patriotic kids form a group to lobby politicians to bomb any country that harbors terrorists back to the stone age. They are pretty open about their lobbying and recuiting newer kids on campus. Of course, their position would result in a few million innocent civilians getting killed from the bombing, but they believe that it is acceptable colateral damage.
What do you think the college should do about it? By the way, this is how the neo-conservatives came into being, which 40 years down resulted in Iraq II.
I don’t see why it would matter whether there were any AA pledges. No black students pledging a fraternity does not mean they were not interested. You can’t pledge if you didn’t get a bid. It would be easy to make them feel unwelcome at rush and then just not offer them a bid if they persist.
I am not sure that the cost is as large of an issue as is sometimes claimed. Often Greek life is less expensive than living in a dorm and eating dorm food.
You know what, RondolBFlat, my issue here has not so much been about how OU handled the issue. My beef has been with Pizzagirl and others here who just dismiss talk about killing black people as just harmless silly boys having fun and getting a little out of hand . Please answer my question about whether you would think the same thing if the song had been about gassing Jews who pledged.
Zekesima, Personally I think the boys are obnoxious, privileged, out of touch, and really just a bunch of idiots. My issue is however whether they should have been expelled, and whether they have full right to be obnoxious, privileged, out of touch, and really just a bunch of idiots in their own free time. I think they do have such a right and they should not have been expelled. I would say the same if it was an issue on anti-semitism. A horrible, obnoxious thing to believe in, but something that all free citizens have a right to believe in nevertheless.
Absolutely, Zekesima. That’s exactly what I meant. If they had all been singing the Horst Wessel Song, in this context, I would have thought they were being snotty, insensitive, offensive, immature jerks. Not storm troopers. And, yes, there’s a difference. It’s comparatively easy for the former to turn into the latter, but that takes time.
And, by the way, I suspect there have been about as many Jews as Blacks as members of SAE at Oklahoma. The generation of brothers who produced that song did not likely distinguish much between them.