My freshman year of college, I wanted nothing more than to join a Panhellenic sorority. I had never considered rushing before coming to LSU ­— no one in my immediate family had ever joined a Greek organization, and my high school friends were far too focused on academics to consider participating in Greek life.
When I broached the topic with my mother, she looked at me with pity in her eyes. She tried to hide her true expression — a mix of incredulity, frustration and sympathy — behind a smile, but she failed miserably.
She told me a harsh truth, one that I have tried my best to deny ever since: White people will never fully accept me into their spaces because they think they’re better than me. Their whole lives, society has told them they are superior to black people. While they may not even consciously harbor racist feelings, racism is still part of their subconscious worldview.
“They might be nice to you to your face, but when they’re alone …” my mother told me as her sentence trailed off.
My mother’s words ran through my head as I watched the University of Oklahoma chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon loudly and proudly chant about the lack of diversity in their fraternity.
“So this is what happens when they’re alone,” I thought to myself, their racist song playing over and over again on loop.
“There will never be a n—– SAE,” the well-dressed young men sang proudly, smiles plastered across their faces. “There will never be a n—– SAE,” they repeated. “You can hang ‘em from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me. There will never be a n—– SAE.”
Multiple videos of this chant have surfaced, all filmed by the young women who were on dates with these men. In a few videos, the men are urging their dates to stop filming, their tones implying that they understand the gravity of what would happen were a video of this chant to surface.
These men knew what they were saying was wrong and could have huge ramifications if it were to get out.
They just didn’t care enough to stop chanting.
Scarier than the words they say is the rehearsed way they say it, the laughter on their faces as they roll their tongues over the “hard r” at the end of the racial slur, the sense of brotherhood that connects each of the young men as they add their voices to the chant.
It’s scary that these men thought they were so untouchable, so beyond reproach, that they could get away with singing this song. Their confidence suggests this is not the first time they’ve done this chant in public, and they have never faced backlash for it before.
They boldly display their white privilege, flaunting the fact that they are given more opportunities in life than any black person would be. They are so proud to exist in a segregated world that they sing about it at the top of their lungs.
Although not all white people go around chanting racial slurs, they have all been inundated with racist ideals since their childhoods. But something about belonging to a Greek organization — joining a group of predominantly white, well-off people and instantly being told that you are better than everyone else because of your inclusion in that highly exclusive group — seems to bring out the worst in our generation.
Repeated instances of racism within the white Greek community continually remind me of how naive I was when I first entered college.
I’m glad SAE has been shut down at Oklahoma and that the administration has taken a hard stand against their students using inflammatory language. The OU community has rallied to protest this happening in one of their campus organizations, standing up for black students and showing SAE that their views will not be tolerated. Twitter has gotten the hashtag #SAEHatesMe to trend, giving a voice to people who those men would rather have silenced.
But I’m still not satisfied. Deep down, I know that shutting down one racist fraternity does not solve the obvious problem of racism in the Greek community.
I am so grateful to my mother for being honest with me when I told her I wanted to join a “white” sorority. I cannot imagine belonging to a community that contains people who think it would be funny to lynch me.
Every campus and every chapter may be different, but time and again Greek organizations show up in the news for things like this — actions that display an absurd amount of ignorance, total dismissal of minority communities and blatant disregard for what is socially acceptable.
Logan Anderson is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Houston, Texas. You can reach her on Twitter @LoganD_Anderson.