Footage of the University of Oklahoma’s SAE Essay Example For Students

Footage of the University of Oklahoma’s SAE Essay When footage of the University of Oklahoma’s SAE fraternity singing a disgustingly racist chant which included the phrase â€Å"there will never be a nigger in SAE† emerged a couple weeks ago, I felt many things, but surprised wasn’t one of them. The video may have been taken at a private fraternity event on a bus, but I know firsthand that pervasive racism in white Greek organizations is not a new thing. I spent four years at a mostly white college in Kentucky, where daily acts of racism occurred in front of my face. So after seeing the way that some Southern white college students act in the presence of black people, it did not surprise me at all that they’d sing a fun little song about lynching niggers when they think we can’t hear them. Transylvania University is a small college (yes, it really exists; yes, that’s really what it’s called; no, I didn’t major in bloodsucking) in Lexington, Kentucky. The school was a handful of blocks away from the better-known University of Kentucky and an hour and some change away from Louisville, where I’m from. That’s why I chose the school, in part; I was an anxious kid who wanted to start over with a new group of classmates, and nearly every high school student in Louisville enrolls in either the University of Kentucky or the University of Louisville. Transy was far enough away from home yet still close enough for regular visits, had a great academic reputation, and a really cool name. And they gave me a scholarship. I decided to commit to Transy without visiting the campus; I felt like I knew enough about it, and again, they gave me the biggest scholarship of any other school I’d been accepted to (I was also really into vampire lore at the time). But on move-in day, my already rioting heart nearly stopped beating altogether as my mother and I turned into the dorm parking lot to find a Confederate flag in every window on the second floor of one of the boys’ dorms. When I enrolled at Transylvania in 2000, there were about 1,100 students, and about 20 of them were black which, as I understand it, was a school record (Transylvania was founded in 1780). A quick Google image search of the school name yields acres and acres of smiling white faces, except for the occasional basketball player. The college itself is about two blocks of bright green grass and rich brown brick buildings punctuated with trees that explode white in the spring. The apex of the campus, the building proudly displayed in their marketing materials, is a stark white building with big, stately columns called Old Morrison. There’s no sweet way to say that Old Morrison looked like the Big House on an antebellum plantation, so I won’t try to be poetic about it. So: It looks like massa’s house, and paired with all the heavy limbed trees and the blazing pink bloomingtrees and the bluest sky you’ve ever seen in your life arching forever overhead and all the melodic country accents traveling along with you as you walk through the courtyard, it sometimes feels like you’re walking through a scene in Gone With the Wind. And we all know what that was like for black folks. (Spoiler: slaves. We were slaves. ) The back of the school, known as â€Å"back circle,† is anchored by a large oval lawn punctuated with trees here and there. Transy’s student dormitories are situated around this circle; the flow of traffic, once you enter the circle’s entrance on the right-hand side, moves right, past the two boys’ dormitories collectively known as Clay/Davis. You first come to Davis Hall, home of upperclassmen and fraternity members this is the building that housed the row of Confederate flags that greeted my mother and me. After that is Clay Hall, where Transy’s freshman boys live. Davis Hall was named for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, while Clay Hall was named after early 19th century Kentucky politician Henry Clay, who owned slaves (but magnanimously freed them after he died). Davis attended Transylvania, and Clay was once a faculty member there. Forrer Hall, the girls’ dorm, rounds the circle. (Another man with the last name of Clay Cassius, who was an abolitionist is also a Transylvania alum. There aren’t any buildings named after him. ) Here’s why there was a Confederate flag in each of those windows on the second floor in Davis Hall. The school, being as small as it was, had Greek organizations, but rather than having separate Greek housing, they had Greek floors in the dorms where all members lived. The floor with the Confederate flags in the windows was inhabited by the men of Kappa Alpha Order, known as the KAs. Every black person on campus (and those who were attuned to racial insensitivity) knew to stay away from the KAs. They were the good ol’ Southern boys, and the organization itself was founded on loaded terms like â€Å"chivalry,† â€Å"modern knighthood† (gee, why does that sound familiar? ), and the â€Å"ideal Christian gentleman. They list Confederate commander Robert E. Lee as their â€Å"spiritual founder,† which still doesn’t really make much sense to me, and though it wasn’t their official emblem, they were very, very fond of the Confederate flag. Those windows and the flags in them belonged to the KAs. When I saw the row of flags in the building I instantly told my mother that I wanted to go back home. She told me, of course, that wasn’t an option, and so I dealt with it as best I could. I went to class, tried to be open and sociable, and vented to my handful of black friends when we were alone. Promoting the Erie Canal EssayKAs at the University of Alabama issued a formal apology to the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority after their Old South parade in which they were decked out in full uniforms â€Å"happened† to pause in front of an anniversary event they were having. Kappa Alpha issued a national ban on the donning of the Confederate uniforms the following year. But, like the moving of the flags from the windows, nothing really changed at Transy. I still felt unsafe and unwelcome. Could’ve had something to do with the huge portrait of Jefferson Davis hanging in the lobby of the hall that the KAs called home. My friend’s dorm room door. Tracy Clayton The boys’ dorms may have been named after both Davis and Clay, but Davis received the most fanfare. A 9-foot statue of Davis hung in the lobby of his namesake residence hall, and a huge bust of him lived in the campus library. In April 2001 (April also happens to be â€Å"Confederate History Month† in the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia and in spots of other Southern states), someone vandalized the door of a black male friend of mine by scrawling â€Å"nigger† on it in black marker. My friends and I hurried over to take pictures of the graffiti before the administration painted over it, which we knew they would do quickly. Newspapers reported that someone scratched another slur into the same door later, but I don’t remember that. The incident spurred another round of â€Å"important conversations† on campus that typically lead nowhere, but this time did lead to the removal of the portrait of Jefferson Davis, which I definitely saw as a good-faith effort to at least pretend to care about whether or not students of color felt safe and welcome on campus. I hoped that we were finally chipping away at what really was a modern-day Confederate fort housing men who actually thought of themselves as Confederate soldiers, who flew the stars and bars and faced the south to sing â€Å"Dixie. † Then-university president Charles Shearer said of the incident and the portrait, â€Å"If you have African-American students who live in that hall I can understand how that would make them feel. † His understanding apparently ran out four months later when the portrait was rehung in a different part of campus (â€Å"A portrait of Confederate president Jefferson Davis has risen again at Transylvania University,† reported the Associated Press), its removal now positioned not as an attempt to ease worried brown hearts and minds as it was before, but as a preplanned maintenance removal. The same article contained praise for Shearer’s decision to rehang the picture from the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a nod to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. And so Davis Hall remained Davis Hall, home to Confederate sympathizers of all ages. I often wrote articles for the school paper complaining about the racial climate on campus (the newspaper staff was amazing and allowed me to run some pretty sharp-tongued pieces), and at least one was ripped out and taped to a wall in Davis with the words â€Å"A FINE EXAMPLE OF IGNORANCE† scrawled across it with a marker that looked a lot like the one used on my friend’s door. The day before my graduation day, I walked about the lawn of Old Morrison, strewn with lawn chairs placed for the commencement ceremony. We’d already gotten our seating assignments and I wanted to check mine out. Mine was near some scaffolding on the side of the stage, and hanging loosely from the scaffolding, within eyeshot, was a tiny black noose. I don’t know if someone put it there knowing that I would see it. But it sure felt like it. I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that everybody living in the dorm or on campus was racially insensitive and addicted to Confederate insignia I met some truly wonderful and beautiful people of all races at Transy. Nor am I positing that members of KA were the only racially insensitive people on campus. But I do mean to paint a picture of why that SAE video, while jarring, did not surprise me. For a black girl fighting to get an education in the South, fraternities were an early introduction to privilege. I learned then that certain people could essentially do and say what they wanted with little more than a slap on the wrist or a moved portrait as punishment. White fraternities seem to attract the most privileged of already privileged men and boys, and they become breeding grounds for all the â€Å"isms† that white exclusiveness can create sexism, classism, racism. And their offenses are often explained away as mistakes. Someone wrote â€Å"nigger† on a black kid’s door? A prank gone wrong. A girl is raped at a frat party? Boys will be boys. A group of white frat boys sings a song about hanging niggers on a bus? Everyone makes mistakes. This week, as I clicked through my alma mater’s website to jog my memory to write this essay, I noticed that all references to Jefferson Davis seem to have been quietly removed, even from the short list of notable alumni that ends the brief telling of Transy’s history. Davis is slated to be torn down and rebuilt soon. I wonder if they’ll quietly drop his name from that too.