OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — A former University of Oklahoma fraternity member caught on video leading a racist chant said Wednesday he’s deeply sorry for his role in the incident and upset and embarrassed that he failed to stop it.
Flanked by several black Oklahoma City community leaders, including pastors and civil rights activists, Levi Pettit publicly apologized following a meeting he had with civic leaders at a Baptist Church on the city’s predominantly black northeast side.
“Some have wondered why I hadn’t spoken out publicly. The truth is I have had a mix of pain, shame, sorrow and fear over the consequences of my actions,” said Pettit, whose voice quivered slightly as he spoke. “I did not want to apologize to the press or to the whole country until I first came to apologize to those most directly impacted.”
Pettit and several other members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the university were caught on video engaging in the chant that referenced lynching and used a racial slur to describe how African-Americans would never become members.
Pettit answered a few questions from reporters but declined to say who taught him the chant or where he learned it.
“The truth is what was said in that chant is disgusting … and after meeting with these people I’ve learned these words should never be repeated,” Pettit said.
State Sen. Anastasia Pittman, who coordinated Wednesday’s meeting after Pettit reached out to her, said she believes Pettit’s apology is genuine and she has forgiven him.
“I admire his courage of reaching out to me and saying: ‘I want to meet with you face to face and apologize to you directly,'” said Pittman, D-Oklahoma City. “I believe he is sincere.”
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He didn’t want to say that the chant was most likely passed down from generation to generation among SAEs at UO. Institutionalized racism, literally.
He’s “learned” these words should never be repeated? How dumb do you think we are to try and tell us you didn’t already know that a song about hanging n***ers from a tree was racist and wrong?
Oh, you’re sorry? Well, no problems, then.
Ok. That was the easy part. Step two is to become a better person. You can start by associating with African Americans and others when your reputation is not at stake.
Wouldn’t, for once, it be amazing if someone copped to the real problem, in an effort to make even a tiny bit of real change? Like if he didn’t focus on the action of singing the song, but instead say: "Now, this will sound like an excuse, but without admitting reality we can’t hope to fix things. Fact is, it’s how I was raised. Not by my parents specifically, but the culture in which we all lived. I didn’t dislike black people but we each sort of kept to ourselves, and if you were talking about a black guy you didn’t like you’d use the N-word because you knew it was disrespectful and you wanted to be disrespectful. The song was pretty awful but in the frat we sort of see it as ancient history, a funny relic. The real problem is that the guys in our frat don’t find the song shocking, because we grew up in a culture of casual racism. All the apologies in the world won’t fix that, but I’d like to apologize for my part in perpetuating racism in this country just by being a part of the problem. Maybe by saying out loud ‘Yes, America is a racist country’ we can start to change the parts that legislation didn’t fix. "
Something like that.