Expelled Oklahoma frat student, Parker Rice, apologizes for racist chant
One of the two University of Oklahoma students expelled for their role in leading a racist chant has issued an apology, The Dallas Morning News reported.
“I am deeply sorry for what I did Saturday night. It was wrong and reckless. I made a horrible mistake by joining into the singing and encouraging others to do the same,” Parker Rice said in a statement printed by the newspaper.
Earlier Tuesday, Rice and another student were expelled over their alleged “leadership role” in a racist chant by Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members, a decision that President David Boren says speaks to his school’s “zero tolerance” policy for such “threatening racist behavior.”
The decision comes two days after a video of frat members singing a racist song surfaced and hours after Boren told CNN he would suspend or expel the group’s ringleaders if at all possible.
“At this point, all I can do is be thoughtful and prayerful about my next steps, but I am also concerned about the fraternity friends still on campus. Apparently, they are feeling unsafe and some have been harassed by others. Hopefully, the university will protect them,” Rice reportedly said in his apology.
“For me, this is a devastating lesson and I am seeking guidance on how I can learn from this and make sure it never happens again. 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,” his apology read.
The Sigma Alpha Epsilon house at the University of Oklahoma has dominated headlines after a video showing party-bound fraternity members on a bus chanting a racial epithet found its way anonymously to the school newspaper and a campus organization, which both promptly publicized the nine-second clip.
The students on the bus clap and pump their fists as they boisterously chant, “There will never be a ni**** SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me.”
Not everyone will be forgiving as the NY Daily News article title says to not suspend them and “let them off easy” – “make them stay” and “learn a lesson.”
The idea that college students in the 21st century could harbor the kind of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and racism that marked earlier generations not only seems anachronistic, but anathema to everything we think we know about millennial open-mindedness and enlightenment.
So one is forced to wonder if these students are coming to college with these ideas baked in — or if they’re learning them there, even on the bastions of liberalism that are today’s college campuses.
The article continues: “Isn’t kicking them out letting them off the hook?” it says of expulsion. “Instead of allowing them to crawl off campus into the cold comfort of anonymity, I might rather like to see them have to face their peers everyday… why not keep them on campus, where they might have to live in the kind of fear for their safety that generations of African-Americans did — and in some cases still do?”
photo/ George Zimmerman protester planted by a leftist group
