On March 8, a video surfaced showing members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter at the University of Oklahoma singing a racist chant. The university swiftly cut ties with the chapter, Waka Flocka Flame canceled his show on campus and news media were salivating over the series of events.
But the response is symptomatic of a racism denial problem we have — a feigned moral high ground that sensationalizes singular incidents through ritualistic public shaming.
Incidents such as this construct a “good” versus “bad” person dichotomy and frame racism as being merely interpersonal and housed within discrete, singular acts. Surely, we can’t be racist if we weren’t on that bus of SAE members, right?
The exhaustive talk surrounding the SAE chant shows that people consider such racism to be unusual. Historically white fraternities are one of the cogs that keeps the racism machinery moving, but if we are to affirm that Black lives matter, greater attention needs to be paid to material and structural injustices facing Black people.
Black people are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. The wealth gap between white households and Black households is the largest it has been since 1989. And Black people have an infant mortality rate over twice that of whites.
The killing of Michael Brown in broad daylight this past summer in Ferguson, Mo., has pinned the country into broaching the topic of its racial antagonism toward Black people. But at what point will it stop being confined to the space and time of “yesterday” or “elsewhere,” but acknowledged as foundational to the present?
The Justice Department in its scathing report of Ferguson’s police department finds that it routinely violates the rights of its Black residents. And last week it was discovered that computers of the New York Police Department were used to edit the Wikipedia pages of Black people who members of the department had slain, such as Eric Garner and Sean Bell. The department had also edited the entry for “stop-and-frisk” and sections that described its own police misconduct.
If an SAE-esque fiasco were to occur at UNC and the perpetrators were expelled, we would not be dealing with the roots of anti-Black racism, only its “spectacular” iterations — explicit verbal language caught on tape.
