The video that was published on Sunday by a group of black activists at the University of Oklahoma had nearly immediate repercussions for the white fraternity members shown in it. By Monday morning, their frat had been kicked off campus and the university’s president promised a full investigation.
But despite all that, relatively little was known publicly about who leaked the video that exposed racist behavior by the members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter.
The activist group that originally published the video was OU Unheard, which was created to address the issues of black students at the university. The video was first posted to the group’s Twitter account at 6:31 p.m. EDT.
The video showed a group of young men on a bus chanting: “You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me. There will never be a nigger at SAE.”
A subsequent tweet posted by the group a little more than an hour later, which also included a video but was directed at the university’s president, quickly went viral, piling up more than 4,600 retweets by Monday afternoon:
Racism is alive at The University of Oklahoma. @President_Boren pic.twitter.com/eAvnPD8jxA
— Unheard (@OU_Unheard) March 8, 2015
The incident was filmed on Saturday while members of the fraternity were en route to a party, according to the Tulsa World.
On Monday, a representative from OU Unheard, Chelsea Davis, told the Los Angeles Times that the video was sent to them by an anonymous source. But, she added, the person who sent the video was not the person who shot it.
A second video also surfaced online appearing to show the same chant but from a different angle.
It was unclear whether the same person shot both videos.
Regardless of who leaked it, University of Oklahoma President David Boren commended the person during a news conference on Monday afternoon announcing the fraternity would be kicked off campus and that the university would launch an investigation of the individuals involved.
“Obviously, the video was taken by certain individuals,” Boren said. “People who didn’t, I believe, agree with what was going on. Our students didn’t agree. And I’m very proud of the fact that they’ve helped expose this kind of activity so that we can know about it and so that we can take action. And then I think the only way to keep faith with our students is to take this kind of action.”
Well guess what? They’ll never be another honky at SAE either.
ThinkProgress has reported that this incident isn’t the first racist incident from this fraternity (excerpted here):
In December of 2014, SAE’s Clemson University chapter hosted a “Cripmas” party, named after the California-based “Crips” street gang.
In 2006, an SAE member at the University of Memphis quit the fraternity after two other frat members harassed him for dating a black woman.
In 2006, SAE’s Baylor University chapter hosted an “E-Dawg”-themed party that the university’s NAACP chapter labeled “insensitive.”
In 2000, SAE’s Oglethorpe University chapter was put on probation, along with chapters from three other fraternities, after an incident where African American students visiting from other schools faced racial harassment and assault
In 2009, Valdosta State University in Georgia hosted a community forum on “Heritage, Hate or Fear?” that was inspired by the university’s SAE chapter’s practice of flying a Confederate Flag on its front lawn.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/03/09/3631366/racist-chant-frat-long-history-racist-incidents/
In 2012, SAE students were acquitted in the hazing death of a black student at Cornell.
In 2014, two girls were raped at the SAE frat house at Johns Hopkins University.
Until now, there hasn’t been any repercussion for their thuggery.
That kid in the foreground has a certain young Sean Hannity look about him. Oh, wait, Hannity never went to college. My bad.
Now that one of their top football recruits has decided to go elsewhere, cynicism suggests many more students will be “outraged” by the behavior. Reminds me of Sandusky at Penn State everyone was outraged until it meant the football team was adversely affected by NCAA sanctions. This will be a case of Frat Boys being Frat Boys, until a winning football season is threatened. Now it’s a big problem.