The University of Oklahoma chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity became the focus of outrage on Monday as a result of the online posting of a video that shows its members celebrating the chapter’s exclusion of African-American men in a song containing a racial slur and lynching reference. The video, leaked to the university’s student newspaper, prompted the fraternity’s national organization to disband the Oklahoma campus chapter and David L. Boren, the university’s president, to order the fraternity’s house on the campus immediately closed.
Among those who have watched the video is Nolan L. Cabrera, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Arizona who has conducted several studies in which he interviewed white male college students about their thoughts on race. The Chronicle interviewed him to see how the incident fits in with his findings.
Q. Based on your research, are you at all surprised by the behavior that the Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon members displayed on that bus?
A. Absolutely not. What was displayed on that bus is only what was caught. This behavior is endemic throughout the country. People say, “Well, this is only a couple of bad apples.” This is something that occurs on a very, very regular basis. They just happened to have the bad foresight to have it recorded and then uploaded on the Internet.
Q. I have heard some people link such behavior to Oklahoma’s troubled racial history, and others connect it to Greek culture. Is either suggested link valid, or are things no better outside the Greek system, or in other regions of the country?
A. You have to be a little careful about this. In terms of region, I have a lot of difficulty having those conversations because it is very frequent that people in New York and L.A. locate issues of racism in, say, the Deep South. … In many respects it is not that racism is worse in the South. It’s just that it is more out in the open. In L.A. or New York, it is a lot more hidden and underground.
In terms of Greek life, the biggest problem is that the students — and this is primarily for “housed” Greek life — are within environments where there is very little accountability. It is them amongst their peers, and it almost can become like a Lord of the Flies situation. There isn’t any accountability for diversity in recruitment, and so it becomes this major echo chamber where it is OK to say things like this on a regular basis.
What is going to happen? Is your fraternity brother going to rat you out? That is the antithesis of the way the Greek life is supposed to be structured. They are supposed to have each others’ backs. …
I am not saying every student in Greek life is saying these things. But what happens is you have a number of students who are saying these horrifically racist things, and then you have a lot of other people who are laughing along with it even if it is not necessarily their own ingrained belief system.
Q. Tell me about the research that you have done that has given you expertise in this area.
A. I have interviewed dozens and dozens and dozens of white men and have talked with them openly about issues of race. Frequently the No. 1 area that they talk about where they see race on campus is through racial joking patterns that occur in their primarily white friendship groups. Now they don’t think there is anything inherently wrong or problematic with it because it is framed as a joke.
But it only occurs in very racially isolated environments, and these are even in institutions that have high degrees of compositional diversity. It’s one of those things where if you don’t have diversity of perspectives around you, it is very easy to say, ‘Oh yeah, this is totally OK and this is totally fine behavior.’ If the young men were really being honest and really thought the behavior was totally acceptable, they would do it everywhere. But it doesn’t occur at the student union. It occurs in houses, behind closed doors.
Q. Does any of your research look specifically at fraternities?
A. None of it looks specifically at fraternities, but I have interviewed a number of people who participate in fraternities and these behaviors tend to spike within fraternities. … If you have a bunch of incoming freshmen and they go to a residence hall, they don’t have a lot of choice in terms of who they are rooming with or who is in their hall or anything like that. But the fraternity system can absolutely choose who is going be our fraternity brothers. They are one of the few organizations on campus that have the right to exclude.
Q. What about sororities and white women?
A. I don’t interview white women, and for whatever reason it hasn’t been as prevalent, but I don’t want to say that it is a nonissue either. A number of sorority women have been hosting and participating in racially themed parties. … It is a situation where if you don’t have the necessary accountability within your specific house, people just run rampant. Especially if you don’t have any diversity within your specific house, you don’t have anyone on the inside who would say, “This is probably not a good idea.”
Here at the University of Arizona we had a racially themed party last semester, and that was right after the director of Greek life specifically sent a memo to everyone in Greek life saying, Do not have these parties, just don’t do it. … It still occurs because they don’t think that there is anything wrong with it.
Q. Back to that Oklahoma incident. Do you think these students thought through how they sounded? Do you think they thought of what they were doing as clearly racist?
A. No. They obviously didn’t think through it in any meaningful way. I also don’t think they thought what they were doing is racist. In some of the research that I am doing right now, it is actually becoming increasingly popular to play around with the N-word. As long as people are using it in a joking fashion … it’s not as harmful as if I walked up to somebody and said, ‘Hey, you N-word.’ It is not as immediately hurtful. Or at least that’s sort of the rationalization that goes on.
Q. Pretty much everyone on the bus with them appears to be going along with them in singing their song. Is this a reflection of the pervasiveness of their attitudes, or of something else, like crowd psychology or some tendency of students with such attitudes to gravitate toward one another?
A. It is definitely a combination. … On the one hand I don’t want to downplay the prevalence of these attitudes. … They are everywhere. … The more we keep talking about this nonsense about a postracial society, the more we overlook that this is what is brewing just below the surface.
Having said that, I would be willing to bet that there were a number of students on that bus who did not feel comfortable with the way that the scene was going along. But yet through the peer pressure that was happening, they still participated, they smiled, they were laughing, they owned no individual responsibility for disrupting that situation. In that respect they’re complicit.
Q. Do you think these students ever would have displayed such behavior in the company of a black student? If such behavior remains hidden, how does it cause harm?
A. They never would have done this if black students were present. But really the underlying issue is not that the students used the N-word. It is the underlying attitudes and ideologies that sort of allow that to occur. … The problem is that in many respects they are viewing the world through very racist lenses. …
This informs the way that they have interpersonal interactions with people of color. Very rarely do people intend to be racist. It is more that we act racist in interpersonal interactions because we haven’t checked our unconscious biases. It could be something as simple as this is a student who believes that black people would not be as qualified to hold, say, a managerial position.
Q. What can colleges do about this? Is there any risk they will take steps that will provoke resentment and make things worse?
A. Anytime you go against the Greek system, there is always a very, very high likelihood that resentment is going to be building. Colleges and universities understand that these are very high-powered donors whose children in many respects are coming as legacies to the same institution. In many respects a lot of these incidents continue to pop up because, while institutions of higher education know that they are occurring, they are not willing to actually hold Greek life to an acceptable standard. …
Having said that, the university owes it to the entire campus to be able to do something proactively. … Just because there is pushback doesn’t necessarily mean it is counterproductive or unnecessary. In many respects the level of pushback is an indicator of how necessary those programs are.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
