I think that the way the students at the University of Oklahoma chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon have been treated is pretty indicative of how this country has officially become anti-racist. I don’t mean that racism isn’t alive and actually enjoying a major comeback over the last several years. I just mean that you simply can’t get away with letting your Klan Flag fly anymore. You’ll lose your professional basketball team or get expelled from college, or maybe your entire fraternity will be banned.
If you’re just kind of a young impressionable bystander watching this, you definitely internalize that being a racist isn’t acceptable at all. Whatever flies in your little social circle, that shit is not going to fly once you go out in the wider world. This fraternity incident shows how safe spaces for this kind of sentiment are disappearing. What’s more insular that a Greek brotherhood? Yet, look at what happened to them, their chapter, and the whole national fraternity just from this one drunken incident.
I don’t know about you but I am a little conflicted about it. I don’t feel like these kids are being treated unfairly or that people are overreacting, but I also think they are young and come from sheltered backgrounds. The University of Oklahoma is supposed to educate these youngsters. If the school is doing its job, it’s taking in teens who may arrive with racist attitudes and transforming them into tolerant, open-minded, young adults. If this particular fraternity is an impediment to that mission, then go ahead and ban the fraternity. But I don’t think I agree that universities should expel students for doing stupid racist shit like this. The bar should be a little higher, in my opinion. If it’s intimidating someone or it somehow denies someone an opportunity, then I think it has to be treated like a civil rights violation. But in a society with a lot of racism, universities are going to do a better job anticipating that fact and having a plan to educate their students than by just hitting every knucklehead with the shit-hammer of expulsion.
On the upside, their peers can see how these frat brothers have been branded with the Scarlet R, and that will hopefully do more than just deter them from openly expressing racist attitudes. It will hopefully help them internalize that racism is stupid and hateful.
On the downside, making an example of these kids isn’t an efficient or sufficient response that will really address the larger problem. I don’t see this as really being much of a free speech issue, but I do see it as being as least somewhat of a freedom to be a stupid kid issue. I just hope some of these kids learn what they were supposed to learn from the school in the first place and find a way to redeem themselves.
