OU’s Black Emergency Response Team issued a Friday statement responding to the emergence of an OU student’s racist social media posts from high school.
“In the face of yet another racist incident within the University of Oklahoma, the Black community is exhausted. BERT is exhausted. At this time, we call upon our white allies to address this incident and work towards eradicating racism within their spaces,” BERT said in the statement.
On Tuesday, a student posted screenshots of several social media posts by freshman Jaxon Moore. Several screenshots show Moore using racial slurs, and others show Moore with black purposefully edited onto his face. In another post, Moore drew black stick figures with nooses around their necks with him smiling in the center.
The incident comes just two years after OU Tri Delta members were filmed wearing blackface and, similarly to Moore, said “I am a (n-word).”
BERT was formed shortly after that incident, and was created to respond to “any racial incidents in the future.”
During a February 2020 sit-in protesting the university administration’s response to several racist incidents that month, BERT released a set of demands — one of which was a mandatory diversity training. University administrators emphasized the importance of the new Gateway to Belonging class — a response to that demand set to be implemented in the fall 2021 semester — in their response to Moore’s posts.
“This harmful event is a prime example of why training and education are so important for students to receive during their first year of college,” the university statement read.
