“Symptoms Of The Same Problem”: The Key Reason Why Racism Remains Alive And Well In America
In our faltering efforts to deal with race in this country, a great deal of time is devoted to responding to symptoms rather than root causes. That may help explain why racism keeps repeating itself.
Exhibit One is the recurring cases of racism at colleges.
In February 2013, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity was suspended by Washington University in St. Louis after the fraternity’s pledges were accused of singing racial slurs to African American students.
Last November, the University of Connecticut suspended Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity after a confrontation with members of the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority in which AKAs were called racially and sexually charged epithets.
This year in March, a University of Maryland student resigned from Kappa Sigma fraternity after being suspended for sending an e-mail containing racially and sexually suggestive language about African American, Indian and Asian women.
Also this year, disciplinary action was taken against members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma who participated in a racist chant, caught on video, about lynching African Americans.
We have not seen the end of racist fraternity and sorority actions on college campuses.
That’s because the actions taken in response to these incidents by well-meaning universities were directed at symptoms. Epithets, chants and derogatory language about African Americans are indicators of an underlying problem within the offending white students, namely an antagonism against blacks based upon feelings of white superiority. With suspensions and expulsions, the college community rids itself of a particular manifestation but not the underlying problem, which is racial prejudice.
The United States has been treating evidence of racism, and not the causes, since the Civil War.
Slavery; “separate but equal”; segregated pools, buses, trains and water fountains; workplace and housing discrimination; and other forms of bias and animus have served as painful barometers of the nation’s racial health. They have been, however, treated like the pain that accompanies a broken leg. The effort was to treat or reduce the agonizing symptoms of the break rather than fix it.
The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution extended civil and legal protections to former slaves. They eased the pain, but the leg was still broken.
Anti-lynching laws scattered the lynch mobs. But the pain flared up again with beatings, bombings and assassinations.
Our nation responded to racial anguish with a variety of measures: the 1954 Brown school desegregation decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and numerous rules and regulations to address those things that caused generations of African Americans — when the shades were drawn — to groan, weep, grit their teeth and swear that their children would not experience the demeaning, disrespectful and immoral treatment that they had to endure.
However, these legal remedies, while addressing the excruciating racial pain, didn’t deal with the enduring problem: the racism itself that caused the South to secede from the Union; that led state legislatures and governors to birth Jim Crow laws; that sparked the KKK’s reign of terror; and that encouraged school districts and town zoning officials to institutionalize barriers against black citizens in housing, education and employment. And racism is still at it in the 21st century. All you have to do is look at those frat boys cited above to see that it’s going strong.
Witness, too, the enactment of laws passed since President Obama’s 2008 election to make it harder for African Americans to vote.
And then there is Dylann Roof, the alleged Charleston, S.C., assassin who takes his place among storied anti-black murderers such as James Earl Ray, who killed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; the Klansmen who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four little black girls; and Samuel H. Bowers Jr., the imperial wizard of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who with his KKK brethren murdered three civil rights workers.
Oh, yes, Roof has plenty of company; not necessarily in his homicidal rage but in his ideology. The manifesto that he purportedly wrote is replete with bigoted remarks common to right-wing talk radio and posted on Web sites.
Dylann Roof is this week’s manifestation of our racial sickness. But Roof and his ideological forbear President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America and those Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers are symptoms of the same problem. Until we get at the root cause, the problem lives on.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 26, 2015
“Are We Still Thugs When You Pay To Watch Us Play Sports?”: Deified On Campus While Being Disrespected When The Uniform Comes Off
It is difficult to imagine two more different university towns than Madison, Wisconsin, and Norman, Oklahoma. Madison has a reputation stretching back decades as liberal—even radical—territory. That ain’t Norman. This week however, both of these communities were connected by the resistance of black students—along with allies and supporters—against racism. Madison and Norman are bringing together different aspects of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and demonstrating how this struggle is now firmly implanted among the young—and among young athletes—in a manner that for now seems set in stone. In Madison, several thousand high school students marched and sat in the streets demanding answers and justice after Tony Robinson, an unarmed 19-year-old, was killed by Madison police. In addition to protests and sit-ins, high school basketball fans, players and even coaches arrived at several games wearing either all-black or shirts that read #JusticeForTony or #BlackLivesMatter.
At Oklahoma, the campus has been roiled by a leaked video of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, caught on camera chanting racist slurs. The school immediately cut all ties with the frat and university president David Boren pledged immediately that the school would become “an example to the entire country of how to deal with this issue.”
That wasn’t enought for the Oklahoma Sooners football team, who canceled their practice and, wearing all black, walked off the field to join demonstrations. It is worth noting that Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops joined his team and marched. It is also worth noting that Bob Stoops has already lost a top-rated high school recruit because of the video.
The players, in addition, held an impromptu press conference saying that they wanted to use this opportunity to also speak about their own grievances about how they are treated on campus. On Thursday, Sooners Quarterback Trevor Knight issued a statement on behalf of the team. People should read it in its entirety because it is a powerful piece of work. The money quote in my mind is:
As a team, our goal first and foremost is to raise awareness of racism and discrimination on college campuses nationwide…. But before we can change the nation, we make it our mission to change our campus. We seek to accomplish this goal by stepping out of the spotlight and integrating the student-athlete experience and the student experience. As student athletes of all races, classes and creeds, we hope to show the university and the community that we are defined by more than the numbers on our jerseys, and that we are human beings that desire to get to know our classmates as we all attempt to end the culture of exclusivity on this campus. Secondary to accomplishing these goals, we also seek disciplinary action for those responsible.
The simultaneous real-time demonstrations for #BlackLivesMatter in these two seemingly polar opposite places of Madison and Norman speak glaringly to the fact that what they have in common is greater than what separates them. Both are state schools with small percentages of black students. Madison, with more than 40,000 students, has a black population of 2.3 percent, and OU, with an enrollment of about 30,000, has a black population of about 5 percent. Both schools field football teams that are nationally ranked, financially lucrative and highly dependent on black talent. This also means that on both campuses sports might be the most integrated public space. Several players at Oklahoma, as sports writer Aaron Leibowitz pointed out, have taken to social media to spell out the ways so-called “student athletes” can be deified on campus while being disrespected when the uniform comes off.
Both the stories out of Madison and Norman brought to mind a sign held up by University of Maryland wide receiver Deon Long when attending a Black Lives Matter rally on campus that read, “Are we still thugs when you pay to watch us play sports?” The answer for too many seems to be yes. We learned this week that the cities of Madison and Norman had more in common than college life and big time football. Here is hoping that as the Oklahoma football team confronts how it is going to “step out of the spotlight” and “raise awareness of racism,” its vision includes Tony Robinson and the growing list of unarmed black women and men felled by police violence.
By: Dave Zirin, The Nation, March 13, 2015
“The Dangling Corpses”: The Real Lynchings In SAE’s Oklahoma Backyard
The fraternity of blacks lynched in Oklahoma has 50 known members, including a man named Ben Dickerson who was spirited away from the jail in Norman just ahead of a mob, only to be seized and hanged a few miles away.
“That was fortunate,” a Norman newspaper said of the 1911 incident. “We would have had a lynching right under the shadow of the state university.”
This being the same University of Oklahoma where members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon were recently filmed on a party bus chanting a racist ditty that included the lines “There will never be a n—-r SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me.”
One of the students who have since been expelled has said in a statement that “the song was taught to us.”
The obvious questions are: Who taught it to them, and where did those people learn it?
A Reddit posting suggests that the song was also being sung at SAE’s University of Texas chapter at least two months ago.
A photo taken of an SAE house on another Oklahoma campus shows that one of the members had a confederate flag hanging in his room for passers-by to see, as if the romanticism over the fraternity’s roots in the Antebellum South could be separated from the accompanying evils of slavery and racism.
The song they all should have been taught is one written by the son of an undersheriff said to have been part of a mob that lynched a black woman and her son from an Oklahoma bridge.
The woman was 35-year-old Laura Nelson, who was with her husband, 14-year-old son, and toddler daughter in their cabin outside Paden when a four-man posse arrived in search of a stolen cow on the night of May 4, 1911.
The lawmen found the butchered remnants of one, and the husband, Austin Nelson, later admitted that he had stolen the cow because his kids were hungry.
What happened next remains in some dispute. The most likely scenario is that one of the lawmen moved to disable a shotgun that was hanging on the wall. The teenage son, L.D. Nelson, would later say he thought the lawman intended to kill his father with the shotgun.
The son grabbed another weapon, a rifle. His mother stepped in to wrest it from him and it discharged. The bullet passed through the first lawman’s pant leg and chanced to fatally wound a 35-year-old deputy sheriff named George Loney.
The father was immediately arrested and charged with the theft of “a domestic animal, to wit one cow.” He pleaded guilty and was sent to state prison on a three-year term that might very well have saved his life.
The mother and the son were arrested the day after the shooting and charged with murder. They were denied bail and consigned to the county jail pending arraignment on May 25.
The lawyers for Laura Nelson and her son would later suggest that an intervening preliminary hearing had called into doubt whether the prosecution had enough corroborating evidence to make a prima facie case.
In another Oklahoma case, in Idabel, local white guys had remedied a weak prosecution performance in a preliminary hearing against a black man named Oscar Martin by simply staging a lynching right then and there in the courtroom.
In the Laura Nelson case, local white guys decided to take more pre-emptive action.
Late on the night of May 24, a mob stormed the jail. Laura Nelson had been allowed to care for her young daughter, Carrie, and the mother is said to have been clutching the girl as she and her son were gagged and dragged away.
Other Oklahoma mobs had been known to shoot as well as hang their victims. They sometimes lowered a victim before he was dead and burned him alive.
“When he was nearly dead, his body was taken down and a fire kindled under it,” a newspaper wrote of the 1906 lynching near Norman of a man named John Fullhood. “The fire soon consumed his body and all that was left was a pile of bones. A hole was dug and all the ashes and bones were gathered up and buried.”
The mob that carried off Laura Nelson and her son is said to have raped her, but it otherwise stuck with just a pair of hemp ropes. Mother and son—she with her arms hanging loose, he with hands bound—were found dangling dead from a bridge the next morning by a black youngster who happened by with, of all things, a cow.
The mother is said to have set little Carrie down by the foot of the bridge as she was being hustled to her execution. A neighbor apparently found the child and took her home.
As word spread, white people came to get a look. A photo of the crowd on the bridge shows numerous kids among those gawking at the dangling corpses.
The more prominent members of the lynch mob are said to have included Charles Guthrie, a real estate broker and local pol who was also an undersheriff at some point. He continued on with his life and had a son he named Woody the following year.
Woody Guthrie grew up to become America’s preeminent troubadour of social justice. He would suggest that part of what formed him was the shock of seeing a postcard reproduction of that photo of the lynching in which his father seems to have played a role. A song the younger Guthrie wrote about the lynching goes in part:
“You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don’t kill my baby and my son.”
Another song that Woody Guthrie wrote is the one that the boys of SAE should have been taught, along with so much more about fundamental fairness and justice.
The SAE boys showed that they are pretty good at learning lyrics, so they should not have any trouble with these:
“This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.”
By: Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, March 12, 2015
“Ties To The Confederacy”: Racist Oklahoma Frat Founded By Racists
Every now and then I read a news story online that evokes such a strong visceral reaction that I actually feel like breaking my computer. Monday morning was one of those days.
I’m talking about the video that I’m sure many of you have seen by now of the racist white University of Oklahoma students—most of whom were members of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE)—gleefully singing in unison these despicably racist words:
“There will never be a nigger SAE. There will never be a nigger SAE . You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me. There will never be a nigger SAE.”
Watching these white students—clad in tuxedos and cocktail dresses—sing these lyrics with such joy and gusto made it feel like it was a scene from a movie about cartoonish racism from an era gone by. But this video didn’t depict an incident that occurred decades ago. It happened on Sunday.
Yes, I know the students will say—as will their defenders—that they were just joking around. Bullshit. In today’s America, you know that singing about “niggers” being lynched is absolutely, unequivocally wrong. There’s no gray area.
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.
But SAE is far from the only fraternity engaged in such racially insensitive activities. The critically acclaimed 2014 film, Dear White People, concluded by giving us a litany of similar racially insensitive events held by white college students in recent years. We are talking “thug parties” and “Crips and Bloods”-themed parties organized by white students where they dressed as the worst examples of the black community.
In this climate, we can’t be surprised to see that a few months ago at Oklahoma State University, a black sorority became the target of a slew of racist remarks on an anonymous app.
These incidents generally result in the students being punished on some level. As most are aware, the president of Oklahoma University David Boren, a former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator, announced Monday morning that “effective immediately, all ties and affiliations between this University and the local SAE are hereby severed.” He closed the fraternity house effective Monday and condemned the students involved in the harshest terms.
That’s truly commendable. But it’s very likely that incidents like this and racial tensions will increase until we have an honest conversation about the underlying factors fostering racism. And it seems the time for this discussion can’t wait much longer. A recent poll released in connection with the 5oth anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma found that four in 10 American believe that racial relations have become worse during Barack Obama’s presidency.
So why aren’t we having this conversation? To be candid, the obstacle is coming from many in the white community. While black people are eager to have this much-needed discussion, most (not all) white people are not.
And that’s not just my opinion; It’s exactly what white and black people have been telling pollsters. For example, a 2013 Pew poll taken after the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin found that 78 percent of blacks said the incident raised important issues about race that need to be addressed. However, only 28 percent of whites agreed.
And in 2014, after the grand jury refused to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, we saw similar numbers, with 80 percent of blacks saying the case raised important issue about race while only 37 percent of whites agreed. In fact, 47 percent of whites responded that they thought race was getting too much attention.
Why do so many whites feel this way? Well, as I have witnessed firsthand, many white people think that any discussion about race is really an accusation. Consequently, they reflexively recoil when the issue is raised and become defensive.
Of course, there are some—mostly on far right—who truly believe that racism doesn’t exist. It’s unlikely anyone can reach those people.
But the hope is that for the others, an environment can be created on both a local and national level to have a brutally candid conversation on underlying factors and perceptions that are causing this tension. I’m not sure what will make white people comfortable enough to have this discussion. But I do know that we need to find a way.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2015
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