Monday, March 16, 2015

Black Privilege, Oklahoma Style

“Today, President David Boren accepted the recommendation of the Director of Athletics and the Head Football Coach to suspend Joe Mixon from the football team for the entire season. He will be excluded from all team activities, including being removed from the team roster. With appropriate conditions, he will be permitted to continue as a student, eligible for financial aid.”
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The above statement, as noted in this article from last August, is from the president of the University of Oklahoma.  It was made in regard to the actions of Joe Mixon, who was charged with "'acts resulting in gross injury", a misdemeanor, by the Norman, OK Police Department after Mixon was involved in an altercation with a 20-year-old woman inside a restaurant.  The alleged victim, Amelia Rae Molitor, suffered broken bones in her face as a result of the fight; apparently Mixon punched her in the face, resulting in a fractured jaw, cheekbone, sinus and orbital bone.  According to the affidavit, Molitor told officers the altercation stemmed from the use of a homosexual slur directed at one of her friends.

Last week, as I wrote several commentaries in its regard, the selfsame Dr. Boren threw two OU students out of the university for good, threw the fraternity chapter of which they were members off campus, and  put out of jobs two full-time employees of the chapter house, one black.  Their crime?  The two sang a racially tasteless song on a bus.

Let's see ... offensive song equals expulsion.  Breaking a woman's jaw in the context of a gay slur, that equals suspension from the football team, but still able to go to class; still a member of the OU community, penalized only by whatever the laws of the city of Norman came up with.

I'm hard pressed to come up with the moral compass in which it is a worse offense to make bad racial slurs, than it is, in the context of gay slurs, to break the jaw of a fellow student who, by the way, is a woman.  But David Boren, who as a former governor and US Senator should have at least some sense of morality, has decided that the punishment for the racially-insensitive song singers and SAE, their fraternity, must be worse.  Joe Mixon, by the way, is back with the football team, and each racist singer is ... well, no longer an OU student.

Obviously more people than I made the connection, to the point that Dr. Boren had to make a statement.  He tried:

“There is no double standard at the University of Oklahoma. We punish bad behavior without regard to race. He [Mixon] was suspended from the team for a year and was not allowed to play. He was also ordered to perform community service, which he has completed. We punish bad behavior without regard to whether a person is an athlete or non-athlete, black or white. It is sheer and utter nonsense to make such a statement. We are colorblind at the University of Oklahoma and make no distinction between athletes and non-athletes. We have even taken one case to the state Supreme Court to enforce the findings of our internal disciplinary process under Title IX, in a case involving a student athlete.”

David Boren is almost 74 years old.  He has earned the right through his age and through long years of public service, even as a Democrat, to say stupid things.  But the above really takes the cake.  However, we'll take him at his word and stipulate that the fact that Mixon was a football player had nothing to do with his relative slap on the wrist -- so light a slap that all he had to do was pay his own way at the University this year -- in contrast to the two SAEs, who were kicked out of the school.

But I have to infer, then, that the color of Mixon's skin was the vital factor, not his athletic prowess.  It couldn't be that he is a football player, right?  He isn't any more valuable to the University than the two former SAEs, is he?

Really, I have a hard time with this, and so should you.  The University of Oklahoma, of which I count one of my closest friends as an alumnus, last August set a standard for punishment for students for the offense of "being whatever-you-call-bigots-against-gay-people and then breaking a young woman's jaw".  The punishment is a year of paying your own way and not getting to compete -- excuse me, we'll use Dr. Boren's word -- play -- with the football team.

The two SAEs, half a year later, cannot be argued to have done even as much.  They made bigoted remarks (songs) against blacks with no remorse.  Mixon made (or at the least, countenanced) bigoted remarks against gays with no remorse.  Then Mixon went three miles further and punched out a woman.

If the standard for punishment that Dr. Boren set in suspending Mixon from the football team is indeed the standard, then the SAEs should also have been allowed to stay in school and do some kind of community service as Mixon did.

In fact, the problem is the standard itself.  The University of Oklahoma should have kicked Joe Mixon permanently out of the university, which would have given them the flexibility to punish the SAEs with the expulsion they may have deserved.  But it didn't.

Why did it not?  Why, in fact, is racial bigotry punished worse by OU than anti-gay bigotry?  There seems no doubt that blacks in the USA have attained the curious status of being privileged -- the very word the Sharptonian race industry is trying to shove into the vernacular as applied to whites.  If you are black, you can use the "n-word" and make millions selling rap performances.  If you are white and use it, you will be kicked out of OU.  If you are black, you can make hateful aspersions toward gays and not be punished for it until you follow it up by punching a woman and breaking her jaw.

David Boren was far too lenient on one student in August, which makes him look immensely hypocritical when he is forced, clearly by fear of the race industry, to treat white offenders who injured nobody far more severely than a black offender who added assault and battery to his bigotry.

And it worked.  Al Sharpton had nothing to do, nothing really to say on this one.  He has already won one battle.  He has created a very interesting flavor of black privilege.

And David Boren's next comment?  "Go Sooners", I guess.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton

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