Racism In Blackballed

Racism, unfortunately, is something that black students still struggle with at predominantly white institutions, especially when it has to do with greek life. Lawrence Ross explores racism and how administration tries to minimize the severity on college campuses in his book Blackballed. In chapter one titled, Jim Crow Greek Row, he focuses in on a particular incident that happened involving the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter at the University of Oklahoma. Ross argues that white privilege influences America’s reactions to race incidents on college campuses and that black students are put into situations where they feel disconnected from the rest of the school, only belonging where they play sports. Ross successfully gets his message …show more content…
Eric Striker, linebacker for the University of Oklahoma would agree that by being black, athletes get treated differently from when they’re on the field and when they’re off. He refers to white fraternities like SAE as “hypocritical” because when the black athletes are on the field their main supporters are white people but when they are off the field it’s as if they don’t exist. Striker recalled a memory of going to white frat parties and always feeling like everyone was staring at him with expressions of, “Damn, we usually don’t see this kind” (Ross 21). Athletics, mainly football, at institutions like University of Oklahoma is the main focus rather than making the university a diverse and welcoming environment for people of all walks of life. Athletes academic schedules are all made to correspond with their football schedule. Ross would agree that white students don’t see fit for black students anywhere else other than the field where they are to play sports. A lot of the times black athletes are scared to speak out about racism because they live in fear of being thrown off of the team or making their teammates feel as though they’re against them. In the same sense, there are plenty of white athletes that don’t agree with racism but hold the same fears. To combat this dilemma, speaking out about racism shouldn’t be taboo. Players should feel …show more content…
At this time in the nineteenth century most were solely white but, going into the twentieth century when blacks began attending predominantly white schools, whites believed that they had to take “protection” and make their sororities and fraternities “white only” (Ross 35). It is safe to say that the organizations were built on racist foundations that still often time peek through to today. Under those circumstances, there needs to be solid solutions implemented to fix these problems on college campuses overall, not just with greek life. Ross says, “ You can’t just hope each generation of white students gets more sensitive to racism, because as we see with campus racism, it’s just not true” (Ross 33). The first solution would be to increase the representation of black students. University of Oklahoma took upon this action by hiring Jabar Shumate as OU’s new vice president. Since the outbreak of the video Boren knew he needed to act quick and give the black community more of a voice at University of Oklahoma. The next valuable solution to this problem is to require more competency training campus wide, not just to educators but students also, this will aid in helping people understanding different backgrounds and cultures than their own. Lastly, by increasing on campus student involvement for black people at predominantly white institutions will give black students a