In June 2015, I met Davis at the biennial SAE national convention, where hundreds of students and alumni gathered to chart the fraternity’s future. Held at a Newport Beach, California, resort, the proceedings were uneasy at times because of the Oklahoma video’s release three months earlier. I watched an alumnus of the University of Oklahoma chapter screen another video—in a sense, a sequel. He was the father of one of the members on the bus, and he hoped this new video would quell the accusations of racism. The video’s lighting was harsh and unforgiving, as if the students were confessing to a crime. In effect, they were. They admitted their silence when confronted with racism.
“Any type of discrimination is not OK.”
“It’s not OK to stand idly by.”
“We embarrassed ourselves and our families.”
“We should have stopped the chant before it got to the bus.”
“Our biggest failure was not stopping it from being shared.”
“The chant does not represent our values.”
“Even though I only heard the chant once before, I knew it was wrong.”
“There’s not a racist culture in our house. We regularly opened the house to African Americans.”
The video, expected to make the rounds of SAE as a cautionary tale, inspired conflicting emotions. The students sounded sincere, their shame as visible as the dark shadows under their eyes. Yet they struck some discordant notes. They had heard the song only “once before.” Wasn’t once more than enough to sing about lynching black people? What does it mean that they didn’t have “a racist culture”? They didn’t object to that song being taught at their own chapter house? What else would a “racist culture” entail in 2015? It seemed odd to have to say that “we regularly opened the house to African Americans.”
After seeing the students’ apologies, I decided to travel to Oklahoma to meet them. What I found there would surprise me.
WITH ITS TURRETS and gargoyles, the Bizzell Memorial Library stands at the center of the University of Oklahoma campus and holds the state’s largest collection of books, 5 million volumes, including Melville and Dickens first editions. For all its academic prestige, the library also represents a troubling racial history. In 1948, George McLaurin, a retired professor, applied to the university’s doctoral program in education. He was at first denied admission because he was African American. Eventually, he was accepted under court order. Still, the university insisted that he remain apart from the white students. McLaurin was forced to sit in a designated spot in the Bizzell Library, away from the regular reading room. His appeal to the Supreme Court became a central part of the reversal of the “separate but equal” doctrine in higher education.
Today, students of all races and backgrounds mingle in Bizzell Library, but their apparent ease belies the racial tensions that still exist at the university. In November 2015, eight months after SAE’s racist song became public, I met a white sophomore named Drew Rader outside the library. Rader, who had been on the bus that fateful evening, wore a faded rose-colored T-shirt emblazoned with SAE’s letters and an eight-ball, a memento from a 2014 casino night fund-raiser. No one noticed his clothing as he walked across the campus during a class change as students streamed by in Oklahoma sweatshirts.
Since the chapter had been shut down, Rader was living off campus. To sit down for a talk, he took me instead to Headington Hall, a luxurious new $75 million dorm where he and two other SAE pledges had lived freshman year. With its suites, leather furniture, and wood paneling, as well as an eighty-seat movie theater, it was built as an athletic dorm to lure football players. Under National Collegiate Athletic Association rules, half of its rooms had to house non-athletes, and Rader and his friends lucked out, living here and then winning bids (invitations to join) so they could move to the chapter house sophomore year. This dorm, with its view of the football stadium, represented the powerful nexus of fraternities and football at Oklahoma and most public universities with big-time sports. Not only did an SAE family sponsor the football team, the family of one of Rader’s pledge brothers had donated money for Headington Hall and was one of the team’s biggest boosters. Now this symbiotic relationship had broken down. The football team, composed of many African Americans, had excoriated SAE after the video. As we settled down in a conference room, team members walked by after workouts while Rader and his pledge brothers gathered to speak with me.
Rader told me about hearing the racist song shouted from the balcony of the dance hall. “I didn’t take it seriously,” Rader said. “I didn’t put any thought into it. It didn’t trigger anything in my mind as being a threat. It was taught in a joking manner. It wasn’t taught as a serious thing—like we were never going to let in a black person. That would be ridiculous.” Rader seemed blasé about what had happened. Although he considered the song offensive, it seemed to have little literal meaning to him beyond a kind of adolescent stupidity. Rader said he and his date, a member of the Delta Gamma sorority who was now his girlfriend, hadn’t heard the song on the bus.
Rader belonged to the President’s Leadership Class, an elite and diverse group of about one hundred students chosen for their academic and other accomplishments. Its members included J. D. Baker, an African American student who had been Rader’s friend since high school, where they had met at a student-government competition. In the view of the UCLA researchers, these kinds of interactions were essential for improving the racial climate on college campuses. After Rader saw the video, he texted Baker and other black friends to apologize, then met with them face-to-face. Rader remembered his black friends as understanding, but when I spoke later with Baker, he had a different recollection.
“You had the opportunity to show leadership on that bus,” Baker recalled telling him. “If you had stood up on that bus, everything would have been different. Everything would have been different for your fraternity. Everything would have been different for the entire university.”
Still, Baker, a member of the Black Students Association, was far less shocked about the video than the rest of the country. The child of a firefighter and a cosmetologist, he had grown up in a suburb of Oklahoma City and had heard that kind of language before. As one of four African American members of Lambda Chi Alpha, a historically white fraternity with a two-hundred-student chapter, he was open to friendships with white students. It wasn’t always easy. Baker was often subjected to stereotyping. He wore black glasses and favored cardigans and neat jeans, so his fraternity brothers often called him an “Oreo.” “‘You act white, but you’re black,’” they told him. Most of the time, he just laughed it off.
Given Baker’s ability to live in both worlds, it was easy to imagine how his friendship with Rader could have deepened throughout college in a way that might have helped Rader take a stand against the song. Instead, the two students came away with nearly opposite lessons. Baker focused on his friend’s failure to show leadership and stand up for racial tolerance, while Rader nursed a grievance.
In Rader’s view, the university had punished fraternity members excessively, while another privileged group on campus, student athletes, received preferential treatment. Rader noted the lax discipline of star Oklahoma Sooners football player Joe Mixon, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to a misdemeanor charge after punching a female student in the face and fracturing her jaw and cheekbone. The running back, who is African American, was suspended for a year. He returned for the 2015 season and became a top National Football League prospect, though the controversy over the assault continued to dog him. “It seems like there was a double standard,” Rader told me. An aspiring lawyer, Rader wrote a paper for his English class that compared Mixon’s punishment with the expulsion of his two fraternity brothers for singing the offensive song. Rader argued that President Boren had violated the students’ constitutional rights to free speech, a position that a number of legal scholars had taken after the episode. In his view, the university gave an athlete a pass because of his financial value to the university. “When Jo
e Mixon can be forgiven after brutally assaulting a female, and other students can be expelled for saying unsavory words, there is clearly a problem,” Rader wrote. His professor gave him an A. “Personally, I thought it was an overreaction,” Rader said of the uproar over the video.
Rader’s reasoning typified much of what I heard after fraternities faced censure for their members’ behavior. Defenders will often highlight the transgressions of another group, such as athletes, and suggest that in comparison, they are being unfairly punished. In Mixon’s case, the comparison implied that a black student had been excused for violence, whereas white students had been expelled for mere words. It also selected another privileged group, star athletes, and suggested white fraternities should be treated with the same leniency. Boren, the University of Oklahoma president, told me he had also shown compassion to the two SAE students by allowing them to withdraw before being expelled, so they could start over at another college. “People want to say you’re soft on African Americans but you’re tough on whites,” Boren said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Apart from the debate over punishment, Rader felt Pettit and Rice were taking a fall, when they were no more responsible than anyone else. Rader considered Rice a close friend; Pettit’s aunt and Rader’s mother had been college classmates. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Rader said of the two expelled students. “It made it sound like they were the only two singing.”
Two other SAE members, Garrett Parkhurst and Sam Albert, grew up with Rader in Elk City, Oklahoma, population 12,000. They all played on the high school tennis team. Parkhurst was the student who had apologized to his Mexican American date on the bus. Although he hadn’t said anything at the dance hall, Parkhurst said he understood the gravity of the song. He thought it would have come up at the next chapter meeting if the video hadn’t surfaced. “I knew immediately this was a terrible thing, and it wasn’t going to end well,” Parkhurst told me.
Sam Albert was a year older and hadn’t been on the bus that night. He could barely keep his emotions in check when he described his shame at what happened. His father, who owns a store that sells outdoor clothing and cowboy boots, had been treasurer of the chapter. Albert first visited the house when he was seven years old; his father had showed him the room he had lived in as a student. “I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Albert said. “I looked up to him so much.”
Albert had a special perspective. His great-grandparents were immigrants who had fled Lebanon in the 1900s. He grew up hearing stories about how the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross on his family’s Kansas lawn in the 1930s. Just like his younger friends, Albert, who was now a junior, had heard the song in the dance hall when he was a pledge. “I’m not in a place to do something about it,” he recalled thinking at the time. “I’m a freshman, and they probably don’t like me and wouldn’t listen to me. Once I’m an upperclassman I’m going to step up and say something when I have some power and people know who I am. This has got to stop.” He heard about the video at a church breakfast and called his parents. “I was so embarrassed,” he said. Albert’s account demonstrated how the hierarchical structure of fraternities—especially pledging—can strip recruits of their moral compass. Just as they don’t step in when witnessing violent hazing, they remain silent when confronted with racism. I found Albert’s account especially affecting because he understood he had abandoned his family’s values to win acceptance from his peers.
As we spoke, another student, Jack Counts III, joined the group. At the California SAE convention, his father, a chapter alumnus, had screened the film of Counts and other students apologizing. Like Rader, Counts belonged to the President’s Leadership Class. Counts recalled that he and other pledges on the dance floor had noted the bad timing when older students taught the song from the balcony: “People were saying, ‘This is bad. It was close to Martin Luther King’s birthday. This is something we shouldn’t be doing.’” Yet Counts said he felt powerless as a pledge and expressed the same feelings of inferiority that can lead students to accept hazing. “I didn’t know a lot of upperclassmen,” he said. “I mostly got in because my dad was an SAE. You don’t want to say something. You want to stay out of it. Now, if I were in this situation again, I hope I’d step up and say something.”
Counts said he realized it was hard to explain everyone’s silence and that anything he might say now would ring hollow. After the episode, members had met with a Southern Methodist University professor named Maria Dixon Hall, who had publicly expressed sympathy for the white students in the aftermath of the video. Hall, who is African American, had opposed the expulsion of the two members. She chalked up the incident to the immaturity of adolescent boys unduly shaped by the culture around them. “Since we know we all have said things behind closed doors that would have us vilified if they ever saw the light of day, how about we cut these boys a little slack,” she wrote in a piece for a religious website. Young white men are prone to suffer what she called “a full blown cardiac arrest of racism. Rather than give them a defibrillator of God’s grace and challenging them to see the worth of all—we pull the plug and do a dance on their graves.” In her session with SAE members, Dixon said she knew how difficult it was to stand up to right a wrong, to stop a fight or a crime in progress. She urged them to learn from their silence. Counts’s father told me he saw members crying at the meeting.
Some African American community leaders were also forgiving. In a news conference, black civil-rights figures and pastors in Oklahoma appeared with Pettit, who had led the chant. “All the apologies in the world won’t change what I have done, so I will spend the rest of my life trying to be the person who heals and brings people of all races together,” Pettit said. Rice issued a written apology: “I admit it likely was fueled by alcohol consumed at the house before the bus trip, but that’s not an excuse. Yes, the song was taught to us, but that too doesn’t work as an explanation… My goal for the long-term is to be a man who has the heart and the courage to reject racism wherever I see or experience it in the future.”
The other SAE members told me the video didn’t reflect the racial climate at the chapter. Counts said SAE had been recruiting an African American student before the video became public. They recalled that many African American members of the football team had been regulars at their parties. “We had the entire starting defensive line at the house,” Parkhurst said. “I wish they had stood up for us. It hurts a little bit.” Sterling Shepard, a star wide receiver for Oklahoma who has since joined the New York Giants, had been friends with white fraternity members, and Counts’s father told me the fraternity had extended Shepard a bid, which he had declined. Shepard, who is African American, and Counts had graduated from the same Oklahoma City private school, Heritage Hall. “Football and basketball players had been friends with people in the house, and they didn’t do anything to defend guys in the house,” Counts said.
Given the content of the video, that would have been a lot to ask. Shepard’s comment on Twitter had been muted: “It’s sad that it’s 2015 and stuff like this is still happening.” Another high-profile player had been particularly horrified because he knew members; if anything, the betrayal felt more personal. After the video, Erik Striker, a linebacker and team captain, texted his mother and called her in tears. He then unleashed a video on Snapchat that went viral, attacking white fraternities for “telling us racism doesn’t exist,” chanting the song in private and, in public, “shaking our hand, giving us hugs and telling us you love us.”
The football players had been shocked in part because they expected better. I could see why. The members I met seemed open-minded and reflective. They had friendships that crossed racial lines. Given the right role models, they might well have learned to stand up for different values. The fraternity had let them down.
THE DAY AFTER I met with the students, I visited Counts’s father, Jack Counts Jr., whose loyalty to SAE has been a defining aspect of his life. Counts greeted me at
his photography company, Candid Color Systems, in a nondescript office park in Oklahoma City. The idea for his company, whose bread and butter is photographing fraternity and sorority members, graduations, and sports, began when he was an Oklahoma SAE and made extra money photographing sorority women at pajama parties for 75 cents apiece. In preparation for our meeting, Counts had laid out generations of SAE memorabilia in velvet-covered scrapbooks adorned with gold crests. Counts, who is in his late sixties, flipped through a yearbook and found a picture of his grandfather, a student senate president who had been one of the first presidents of the Oklahoma chapter. His son would have been the fourth generation at the chapter.
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