The pledges were there to learn a tradition essential to SAE, which is often called the “Singing Fraternity” because it treasures its songbook almost as much as its True Gentleman creed. The upperclassmen began the songfest with the standards that had long defined what it means to be a member of SAE. They belted out a feisty fight song featuring the SAE motto, Phi Alpha.
I’m Phi Alpha born,
and I’m Phi Alpha bred.
And when I die,
I’ll be Phi Alpha dead.
They sang melodies for sorority serenades such as “Violets,” which members have been crooning on bended knee for generations.
Violet, Violet,
You’re the fairest flower to me.
Violet, Violet,
Emblem of fraternity.
With your perfume memories come,
Of Sigma Alpha Epsilon,
Dearest flower beneath the sun,
My Violet.
And they sang “Friends,” perhaps SAE’s defining song, its lyrics gracing all manner of celebrations, inspiring men to reach their arms around each other and express a sentimentality not usually seen among modern college students.
Friends, friends, friends,
You and I will be,
Whether in fair or in dark stormy weather,
We’ll stand or we’ll fall together,
For SAE.
After the pledges practiced the favorites, they heard muffled conversation high above them from the upperclassmen leaders on the balcony. It sounded like an argument about the song they would teach next. Then, they heard an instruction.
“Make sure you don’t sing this song outside of these walls.”
The tune, “If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands,” may have evoked their childhoods. But the lyrics reached farther back into history with raw and toxic words that flowed downward, like the currents of a polluted river from the 1950s.
There will never be a nigger in SAE,
There will never be a nigger in SAE,
You can hang him from a tree,
But he can never sign with me,
There will never be a nigger in SAE.
The song had traveled an unusual route. Members of this chapter had first heard it in 2011 at their annual Caribbean leadership cruise. It wasn’t part of the official curriculum, and it wasn’t in any SAE songbook. Members from another chapter, likely from Texas or Louisiana, had taught it to the University of Oklahoma students. No doubt, the members learned it furtively on that cruise ship, whose passengers included African American tourists, as well as black members of SAE. By the winter of 2015, the song had become part of the chapter’s underground ritual. Just about every member had heard it at least once before in a session just like this one. The chapter didn’t have a single African American member, a student whose very presence might have killed that song or perhaps driven racist students away.
The next month, SAE’s Founders Day, March 9, fell on a Monday. One of the most important dates on the fraternity’s calendar, it celebrated SAE’s birthday in 1856 at the University of Alabama. On the Saturday evening before Founders Day, members of the University of Oklahoma chapter and their guests “pre-gamed”—or loaded up on liquor—at the house before setting off for an Oklahoma City country club for their celebration. The members dressed in black tie, and their dates wore formal dresses and heels, as they boarded charter buses parked near the house. Before the event, upperclassmen told pledges to impress their dates with singing. Don’t let anyone look like a jerk when he stands up to lead the bus in song, the leaders warned. On board one of those buses, twenty-five members sitting with their dates launched into the old standards, just as they had in the dance hall the month before. Then, they added some raunchy favorites, including songs making fun of rival fraternities. After a while, the men seemed to be losing steam. A twenty-year-old sophomore named Levi Pettit stepped into the void.
Pettit, who had been a top golfer at the Highland Park High School in Dallas, was a fraternity leader, its rush chairman, and the person responsible for recruitment. Unsteady, clearly drunk, he let loose the song that was supposed to stay inside the house. One of the freshmen, Parker Rice, who had graduated from a Jesuit prep school in Dallas, stood to join him. They began lustily: “There will never be a nigger…”
Some members—it wasn’t clear how many—joined in or clapped rhythmically. Sitting toward the back of the bus, Corina Hernandez was horrified. A Mexican American student from Oklahoma State University, she was visiting her friend Garrett Parkhurst, a freshman member of SAE. They had gone to high school together, and the two had just begun to date. A high school beauty queen who now belonged to the historically white Kappa Delta sorority, Hernandez was comfortable in Greek life. But she had never heard such ugly language before, and now she felt threatened as she looked around the bus and saw only white faces. “I’m so sorry,” Parkhurst told her, again and again. It wasn’t clear how many people had joined the singing. Parkhurst hadn’t. Neither had several of his friends, who had been more focused on their dates than the singing. Still, no one said anything. No one stopped the song; no one objected. The moment passed. They put it behind them, just as they had moved on from the song in the balcony the month before. The members and their dates enjoyed a night of dancing at the country club.
The next morning, Sunday, a cell-phone video appeared online. It wasn’t clear who had taken the video and then posted it, but Unheard, a group of black University of Oklahoma students, distributed it on Twitter. Nine seconds long and shaky, the video showed Pettit and Rice, drunk and tuxedo-clad, leading the bus in the song. It quickly went viral, bringing national outrage to the campus of the University of Oklahoma. There were protest marches, television trucks on campus, and international news coverage. By Sunday evening, SAE’s national board, calling the video “disgusting,” voted to close the chapter and expel all members, saying its behavior wasn’t consistent with the values of the True Gentleman.
College leaders have often been criticized for tepid, slow responses in crises. Not University of Oklahoma president David Boren, who had a politician’s understanding of what had happened and the damage it could do to the university. Boren, the college’s president since 1994, was a former Oklahoma governor and senator, a powerful Democratic figure in the state and in Washington. On Monday, he said he was severing all ties with the SAE chapter. Because the university had helped finance the house and leased the land to the chapter, Boren could take even more decisive action. He shut the house and ordered all students to remove their belongings by midnight the next day. Boren said he would expel Pettit and Rice for creating a hostile environment under federal civil-rights law. “To those who have misused their free speech in such a reprehensible way, I have a message for you,” Boren said. “You are disgraceful. You have violated all that we stand for. You should not have the privilege of calling yourselves ‘Sooners.’ Real Sooners are not racist. Real Sooners are not bigots.”
Members of SAE received death threats, and some were afraid to go to classes. Vandals ran their keys along the exteriors of cars belonging to a fraternity with similar letters. The University of Oklahoma football team canceled practice, dressed in black, and took to the field, standing arm in arm, for a moment of silence.
SAE alumni had hoped their past backing of the university would temper Boren’s response to the video. But Boren went further than most college presidents who condemn a chapter’s behavior, making an extraordinary repudiation of the once-powerful fraternity. In his seventies, Boren was nearing the end of his tenure. While he held office, he didn’t see SAE returning to the University of Oklahoma.
THE RACIST SONG captured in that nine-second video has come to define SAE’s image. It has proved more damaging to its reputation than deadly alcohol poisonings, hazing rituals that include cattle prods, burning with irons, and force-feeding of cat food, or even the re-designation of the SAE acronym as “Sexual Assault Expected.” Like the footage documenting police k
illings of unarmed black suspects after traffic stops, the video revealed something raw and real about race that couldn’t be dismissed. It resonated because it reflected a truth about fraternities’ failure to confront their own histories as white-only organizations.
Such behavior flourishes in part because Greek life remains so segregated. Although fraternities generally aren’t required to disclose demographic data, studies show that traditional fraternities skew white. At Princeton University, three-fourths of the members of fraternities and sororities in 2009 were white, compared with half of the overall student body. Matthew Hughey, a sociologist now at the University of Connecticut, studied Greek life at three unnamed East Coast colleges and found rigid segregation. The few minority students who entered white fraternities confronted persistent racial stereotyping, which they tolerated because they valued the superior resources and networking opportunities of membership. On average, 4 percent of members of the historically white fraternities he studied were minorities—or roughly two in a chapter of sixty-three, according to his study, published in 2010. Hughey called the system “a form of American apartheid.”
These divisions promote intolerance. Traditional fraternities are among the most “racially isolating environments for white students,” according to a 2014 study of twenty-eight selective colleges. Ninety-seven percent of the students said their Greek organizations were predominantly white. Those who joined were less likely to have at least one close friend from another race or ethnicity. “Campus educators need to ask serious questions about whether Greek life in its current form is counterproductive to the university’s commitments to preparing students for engagement in a diverse democracy,” wrote Julie Park, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland.
An earlier study that tracked more than 2,000 University of California at Los Angeles students over four years of college came to a similar conclusion. The authors, including psychology professors from UCLA and Claremont McKenna College, found a campus where student organizations fostered racial divisions. Minority students joined minority organizations, including African American fraternities, whereas white students flocked to traditional Greek organizations. Fraternities and sororities attracted men and women with both a sense of white racial identity and opposition to affirmative action and other policies promoting diversity. Fraternities and sororities “in part function as ethnic clubs for White students” the researchers found. “Our results suggest that Greek student organizations also appear to be nurseries for the sense of White victimization.” By contrast, racial prejudice decreased with exposure to ethnically diverse roommates, friends, and romantic partners. The study proposed that colleges promote random roommate assignments or the intentional mixing of races in living arrangements—precisely the opposite of what happens at most Greek organizations. Colleges, by their own account, exist to promote the free exchange of ideas; the US Supreme Court has repeatedly hailed diversity among students as essential for the education of a workforce that will survive in a global marketplace. Yet fraternities, by custom and structure, often work to undermine racial understanding.
In the most extreme cases, these racial divisions provoke violence. A 2014 study of FBI hate-crime statistics from 349 colleges concluded that campuses with large populations of historically white fraternities are more likely to report verbal and physical assaults involving bias against blacks and other underrepresented groups. “The presence of fraternities is associated with a campus climate that is more dangerous for minority group members,” concluded the sociologists Nella Van Dyke at the University of California at Merced and Griff Tester, now at Central Washington University. “A large Greek system may be both a contributor and a product of a campus culture marked by in-group/out-group animosity.”
SAE itself could be considered ground zero for this kind of animosity. Immediately after the video became public, news accounts could find many previous episodes that pointed to a tolerance of racist behavior at SAE. In 1982, the University of Cincinnati chapter held a Martin Luther King “trash party,” where guests were asked to bring items such as a Ku Klux Klan hood, fried chicken, and a canceled welfare check. An SAE chapter at Texas A&M in 1992 had a “Jungle Fever” party featuring blackface, grass skirts, and “slave hunts.” In December 2014, the SAE chapter at Clemson University threw a “Cripmas party,” one of many “ghetto”-themed parties at historically white fraternities that have angered black students. At Oklahoma State University, until the bus video became public, SAE had long held a “Plantation Ball” to commemorate the fraternity’s founding. These theme parties suggest a broad acceptance of offensive attitudes.
In other cases, fraternity members targeted individual black students. In 1990, a drunk member of the Kansas University chapter of SAE harassed a black sophomore who was delivering pizzas to the house. He allegedly pushed her down the stairs and called her a “nigger bitch.” After campus protests, the member, who resigned from SAE, was charged with disorderly conduct and battery and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. In 2006, an African American graduate of the University of Memphis said she attended an SAE party with her white SAE boyfriend, where they were both called “fucking niggers.” Her boyfriend quit the fraternity after the chapter told him only to date white women, according to her account. This episode attracted far less attention than the video in Oklahoma because it lacked visual documentation. But it sounded most similar in its echo of what many would have thought a bygone era.
Even after the Oklahoma video surfaced and SAE members across the country pledged to fight racism, accusations mounted. Eight months later, an African American student from Columbia University said she was turned away from a Halloween party at Yale’s SAE chapter after she was told it was “white girls only.” The chapter, noting it had black members, denied her account, and Yale said its own investigation found no evidence of systematic discrimination against minorities at the party. Still, the episode became part of a broad debate that dominated the news about insensitivity toward minorities on the Yale campus, political correctness, and free speech. At the same time as the SAE controversy, a lecturer in early childhood education, who oversaw one of Yale’s residence halls with her husband, a Yale professor, sent an e-mail questioning administrators’ advice about avoiding culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. After a firestorm, the couple resigned from their positions.
While the facts of the SAE situation at Yale may have been muddy, two other episodes appeared more clear-cut. In February 2016, two white SAE members at the University of Texas at Austin were charged with public intoxication and deadly conduct and expelled from the chapter after they allegedly threw glass bottles and yelled, “Fuck you, nigger,” at a black student. Later that year, the University of Wisconsin at Madison suspended its SAE chapter after a black member said he had been subjected to eighteen months of harassment, including being called racial epithets. (He also reported that members used homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs.) In one case, he said, a white member at a Halloween party addressed him with a racial slur and choked him until other members intervened. Members seemed to enjoy making racially insensitive statements, according to the black student’s account. They would often use a racial or homophobic slur, then try to absolve themselves by saying: “No offense.” The Wisconsin case reflected the blurring of the line between “politically incorrect” behavior and racism that the 2016 presidential campaign revealed.
SAE was by no means alone in this kind of behavior. Consider just two episodes from 2014. That year, three members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon chapter at the University of Mississippi plotted to tie a noose around the neck of a statue of James Meredith, the school’s first black student. At Lehigh University, Sigma Chi members spray-painted racial slurs and threw eggs at a multicultural residence hall. Yet these cases obscure a more nuanced picture of the racial reality of historically white fraternities, which have accepted some minority members and instituted programs promoting diversity. In fact, two years before the Oklahoma
incident, the SAE national organization surveyed its chapters about their racial composition—strong evidence of the fraternity’s concern. SAE found that 3 percent of its members were African Americans, a cohort that makes up 14 percent of the four-year college population. SAE had signed up far more Latino and Asian American members. Overall, about 20 percent were members of minority groups, which compose 38 percent of the college population. These figures showed SAE had plenty of work to do, as did many liberal arts colleges with similar demographics. Chapters showed significant variation. Some major outposts in the South reported no black members. Others, especially those on the West Coast, such as California State University at San Marco and Occidental College in Los Angeles, were much more diverse. Amid all the condemnation of SAE at Oklahoma, it was rarely noted that the national organization itself shut down the chapter hours after leaders heard about the video—and the day before the University of Oklahoma took action.
I was particularly interested in the experiences of black SAE members, many of whom stood by the fraternity after the video. Most had joined because of their network of friends and paid little attention to SAE’s history. Their comments suggested how much a fraternity’s culture depended on the campus equivalent of retail politics—face-to-face meetings and hanging around together. McHenry Ternier, a freshman at the University of Rhode Island’s chapter, where half of its members belonged to minority groups, went on television to defend the chapter. “The campus supported us. They knew who we were,” Ternier, who is African American, told me. Will Davis, a senior from Illinois State, found himself in a tough position when the Oklahoma video hit the Internet. He was one of three black students who were about to start a new Illinois State chapter just as the video became infamous. “Why would you want to join a racist fraternity?” he remembered a friend asking. “I spent three or four days asking myself if I wanted to be part of SAE.” For Davis, the answer was yes; he had many friends among the sixty members of the new chapter, which took part in a demonstration called “Not on Our Campus,” that pledged “our fraternal community’s commitment to creating a safe, diverse, supportive and inclusive environment.” Davis had many qualities that would make him a good fit for SAE. He grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, where he was comfortable living in a predominantly white community. SAE respects athleticism, ambition, and military service. A six-foot-two linebacker for the Illinois State Redbirds, Davis was planning to join the US Air Force and then apply to medical school. Still, Davis harbored no illusions about the challenges SAE faced. “Greek life is very segregated,” he said. “It’s always been that way. It’s part of their history.”
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