Subsequent racist incidents at universities across the country could be the result of unsatisfactory responses by college presidents, an expert says.
A third racist incident involving OU this semester surfaced today, and the OU administration called the behavior in the video posted by a former OU student as “racist” and “deplorable,” and that it “in no way represents the values of the university.”
Eddie R. Cole, assistant professor at the William & Mary School of Education and an expert on college presidents and race, said in an interview with The Daily on Jan. 28 that further racist incidents following one public incident is “not unheard of.”
“What's happening at Oklahoma is sort of the worst of what you would imagine happening on a college campus, to where you don't have this sort of one really notable public racial incident happened but where you've had a series of highly visible, highly public racial incidents happening,” Cole said.
Cole said subsequent racist incidents can happen when the first incident is not specifically called out as racist – like in the first statement put out by the OU administration that called the video “innapropriate and derogatory.”
“You could almost imagine if the initial statement from the OU president had just had two additional sentences that said 'Blackface is racist. We're not going to stand for it.' And then five days later you had someone walking around campus in blackface,” Cole said. “It's controversial, but the administration hasn't condemned it specifically. And so all of a sudden you see follow up behavior of doing the same thing.”
