I wonder who posted the video? He sent it to a Black student org and the student paper. It must be common knowledge now, at least amongst the fraternity.
That dude must have balls the size of church bells.
Good on him.
LOL.
I’m seeing this a bit differently. I mean, I agree that this will be forgotten very quickly and in a week someone on the Dope is going to say something racist and then defend it completely, but if you watch the video the frat boys weren’t ok with being recorded. if you look to the right you’ll see a girl record and the person sitting next to her tries to grab the phone. I believe her video is up somewhere and you can see the “oh shit” look on his face.
They knew the outcome of their being recording. They knew that chanting really racist shit looks bad. They still did they. They didn’t care.
They were chanting on a bus full of non-frat members. It could have been anybody on the bus.
Still takes huge gonads. The frat boys know damn well who it was
Hey, it made the news in Melbourne Aus! Maybe post-racial America can send a handbook to post-racial Australia outlining the do’s and don’ts of being post-racial.
:dubious:
I also applaud the Universities quick action.
To me the bigger question is, however, how soon can we get rid of fraternities? I know, I know someone is going to show many many examples of fraternities doing charity work, theres black fraternities, and fraternities that accept members of all races blah blah blah.
Thats great. Form a club, off campus. Need to make lifelong friends? Read Dale Carnegie.
Its 2015 and creepy rituals involving binge drinking and puking, physically and sometimes sexually abusive hazing rituals all seem to have little place in the context of a 2015 education. Lets not even get into the rapes. And theres racism, on top of that.
Colleges got rid of there flying wedge in 1905, and saved many lives. Its 2015, maybe time to weight the costs versus the few benefits of having a fraternity system on campuses.
The school I went to was once one of the biggest party schools in the 70s, then disbanded frat houses in the late 70s and early 80s, and not only survived, but thrived as a n institution.
Want to make friends and influence people? Want to better your college life? Get a hobby. If you have to join a frat to have a social life, you are a loser, IMO.
Yeah, it’s not like there is a commuinity rife with systematic institutional racism from the police and city hall. Or that it happens in even more communities. Nope, racism in America is limited to a few frat boys in Oklahoma! Thanks for clearing that up!
A reporter on CNN, spoke with a student who said they were surprised that it was SAE; they knew of other frats that were far more racist, and thought that the university should investigate more.
Good for the response from the University’s President and the fraternity coming down swiftly on this. No dithering, just a crushing blow to these idiots.
Right, the boys will have learned nothing. They will blather on about “PC”. We were shut down because of political correctness, they will say. Black people can say nigger, why can’t we?
It is so naive to say this is just a few frat boys, and not read about what’s happening in Ferguson and other places and not realize it’s still endemic in our culture, it’s just gone underground.
You know what all this does? It makes me grateful not to have been born black! How sad it that? I always knew there were huge portions of America that were still racist, but the last couple of years have really taught me that white people and black people live in totally different worlds.
And, so, I was thinking about the above, and I was reminded that at my SO’s office, there is a man who literally walks around talking about how this is “white America” and “Christian America” and everyone should remember that after all, white people founded this land.
This bothers me. No one else says anything, they just sit silently.
Here is the bothersome thing about this. My SO just happens to be ethnically Chinese. He’s not Chinese in any manner except through accident of birth. He was born here. His parents have been here since their teens and twenties. He doesn’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin. Hates Communist China. Has no interest in visiting. Etc. His parents are some nominal form of Christian.
But just because he has almond eyes, some white guy thinks it’s perfectly OK to walk around spouting this sort of smack and no other white people say anything.
It’s sooooo easy to say “Go to HR” but I don’t really believe HR will do a damn thing, and neither does he. They aren’t there for your protection.
This is just one little tiny taste of what black people have to live through every single day.
There was never a reckoning in America about the incredible brutality and oppression that black people experienced, and that the rest of America profited from. Ending slavery, and the Civil Rights movement, were great steps forward, but they weren’t a reckoning – they weren’t reparations, and they weren’t ‘Truth and Reconciliations’.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has really swayed my thinking on this over the last few years. Hugely significant parts of America’s wealth was built (and stolen) on the blood, sweat, and tears of black people, and it wasn’t just slavery. Redlining, as just one relatively recent example, amounted to a continuous wealth transfer from black areas (and black Americans) to white areas and white Americans.
Some of those knucklehead frat boys will be elected officials in a few years (assuming this video doesn’t follow them into politics.) Major state universities are breeding grounds for the leaders of state governments, and fraternities are heavy concentrations of those people.
That is not to say that every American is some bro yelling about niggers on a party bus, of course, but I can assure you that there are any number of Oklahomans quietly muttering to themselves about how the boys were right, and even more asking what the big deal is.
- Former knucklehead frat boy
I’m surprised he’s so open about it. My wife is white and she’ll tell me about the white guy who’ll go up and talk to her about how lazy minorities are and how they refuse to do anything to help themselves, blah blah blah.
They stop once she tells them about her Black husband.
:dubious: Look, once you talk about getting rid of fraternities, that will open the way to talk about getting rid of sororities. That is a fundamental existential threat to the space-time fabric of the Porniverse.
According to James Loewen’s book Sundown Towns, kids raised in such towns can be strikingly open and naïve about expressing racist views, telling racist jokes, and not caring who hears them. He citers several examples in his book. The behavior captured on that Frat bus looks exactly the same.
the University of Oklahoma is in Norman, Oklahoma. According to Loewen’s website, Norman was once a Sundown Town (although it no longer is). One report even claims that it had the classic “Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town” signs warning blacks to be out of town until 1965:
Even if the students were not originally from Norman, there are quite a few former sundown towns in Oklahoma:
And even after such towns 'open up" to non-whites, traces of the culture still remain.
It’s not fair to blast HR’s ineffectiveness without at least giving them a chance to address an issue.
Can’t disagree with that, but that’s quite a different spin than the one you put in your OP. And one need only look at the response this video got to see that, in many ways, things have changed. Frankly, we’re never going to end racism on the personal level, which is what we’re seeing here. If that is the bar to ending AA, then you might as well carve it in stone. Rather, the type of racism we need to eliminate post haste is what we see in the justice system (incarceration of disproportionate numbers of black men, racial bias in policing a la Ferguson PD, etc.).
The frat boys are toast (could be that they will pay for this for the rest of their lives). The Laws and Police Departments are still with us.
Make love to a fucking cactus.
And the “funny” thing is that your idea of growing a spine is to not dare to disagree with the general consensus on this MB. Got it.
Well, if you understood the “spin” in the OP as anything other than intentional hyperbole—something that i thought would have been given away by the opening sentence—then i’m afraid you’ve sort of missed the point. I posted what i thought were clearly hyperbolic statements in order to make a serious point about the persistence of racial prejudice. For the record, in case you missed it in my last post, i don’t believe that the validity of affirmative action (or of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Voting Rights Act, for that matter) actually have any connection with the frat boy incident.
I agree with you about law enforcement and the justice system. I also agree that the response to the incident described in the OP demonstrates that things have changed. I would never deny that. I think that there have been massive and important steps forward in race relations in America over the past decades.
But while these frat boys might indeed be toast, how many others like them are there in positions of power and authority in American companies and government and law enforcement at all levels of society? I’ll bet there are plenty who feel quite similarly, but who aren’t clueless enough to sing songs about niggers in public spaces. It might not be fair to point to this incident and make a claim that it generalizes to America as a whole, but i would argue that, like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, this represents the visible face of a phenomenon that is much larger than many Americans would like to admit.
And we can’t disconnect it from the institutional problems of law enforcement and the justice system, precisely because our institutions sometimes reflect the worst parts of our society just as easily as they reflect the best.
I’ve posted this before but Matt Taibbi’s visit to a Tea Party meeting, and interview of Tea Party intellectual Ron, demonstrates how their objections to Obama have nothing to do with race:
[QUOTE=Matt Taibbi, published in Rolling Stone]
… Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. “He exaggerates too much,” Ron says. “He’s not honest.”
“OK,” I say. “What does he exaggerate about?”
“Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother,” he says.
I ask him how this is an exaggeration.
“Well, he was saying . . .” he begins. “As if that qualifies him to . . .”
Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.
“Look, you either are or you aren’t,” she says.
“And he aren’t,” Ron says, nodding with relief.
[/QUOTE]