We don't like to hear this, but America, like South Africa, has some issues when it comes to race.
I know that it's 2015, but if we are going to be honest with ourselves we will acknowledge that not much has changed in the hearts of many of our fellow brothers and sisters since the days that racial ignorance was more overt.
Americans like to think that we have grown beyond such things as judging others by their skin color, but news report after news report shows us that we have not. But we still like to point to others whenever they make a public pronouncement of what we are thinking privately. And when we do find the dumb culprit who dares to embarrass the rest of us, our public condemnation of them is often swift.
The latest case of racial shaming comes to us from Oklahoma.
We all know by now the story of the two frat boys on the bus who openly sang about hanging Niggers to anyone who would listen, and no one seemed to even notice or batted an eye.
The culprits have been exposed and summarily kicked out of school. (I am not even sure that the actions taken by the OU president passes constitutional muster, but we will see.) I personally take no joy in seeing that. These two frat boys represent what happens when we ignore racism and allow society to shape and mold testosterone filled bigots. Move on, there is nothing to see here.
I am not sure why we are even surprised. We are talking about a racist fraternity founded by racists in the South. And SAE is not alone. There are a lot of Sigma Alpha Epsilons on college campuses all over America.
"How could this happen in 2015? I’d say the early history of SAE is very instructive on this point. This fraternity brags on its website that it was started in 1856 in the “Deep South.” (I can’t help but think racial dog whistle when I see that term, given the SAE’s founders’ ties to the Confederacy.) And SAE was at one time was a whites only fraternity as noted in its 1903 “book of rituals” that limited membership to “members of the Caucasian race”. Keep in mind that the students on the bus were heading, per media reports, to a Founders Day event to celebrate very white men who gave us these policies.
And this is not the only racist event featuring SAE. It’s merely the first incident to attract national headlines. Just three months ago, the Clemson University chapter was suspended after white students held a “Cripmas” party (“Cripmas” being a weird and really not remotely funny combination of Crips and Christmas) where they dressed in bandannas, Tupac T-shirts and sported fake “thug” tattoos.” And an SAE chapter at Washington University in St. Louis was suspended in 2013 after members sang racial slurs to African-American students pledging the fraternity."
All par for the course as far as I am concerned. College campuses are where we train and educate our future leaders.
This is how we train them to maintain the status quo.
They just have to be more careful while training in the future.
