Racial incidents at Kentucky’s Georgetown College and at the University of Alabama have put race relations in the crosshairs once again at Southern colleges, and raised tensions on both of the campuses.
A fraternity at Georgetown College in Kentucky has been suspended after members yelled racial slurs at an African-American student leaving a party.
Tevin Lloyd, a freshman from Dallas, said he was participating in the school’s annual Boxer Run when members of the Beta Delta chapter of Kappa Alpha Order fraternity yelled slurs and threatened violence to him and other members of the President’s House Association.
Once Lloyd made the allegation public, the school responded slowly to the incident, allowing tensions to escalate. Bill Crouch, Georgetown College president, took full responsibility for the situation.
“The college takes full responsibility for not being fully prepared for this situation,” The Georgetown News-Graphic reported Crouch as saying during a Feb. 14 assembly. “We own the problem. The problem is ours.”
Despite that, some students are concerned about the atmosphere on campus. Dawn Daley, a Black student at the school, said that there’s still tension at the school.
“It’s been tense,” she told ABC Lexington affiliate WTVQ. “You can feel the tension, but at the same time people still … go on with their days, still go to classes.”
Georgetown College isn’t the only site of a racially charged atmosphere recently. The University of Alabama had to deal with a very similar incident when Justin Zimmerman, a Black student, was called the “N-word” by a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity.
That incident was followed by racist comments towards Blacks and Whites being written all over campus in chalk.
The fraternity suspended that student and the university released a statement which read, “On Friday evening, a member of the UA student body used a racial slur to refer to another UA student. The words that were used are offensive to our community, and are especially upsetting to African Americans. I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms that The University of Alabama finds this behavior totally unacceptable, and appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.”
The problem appears to be global and some people think punishing the perpetrators isn’t enough. Nancy Hogan, president of Alabama’s Black Student Union told Inside Higher Education that it’s time to get to the root of racism.
“If you make it so harshly punitive, you won’t get any type of progress out of it,” Hogan said. “All you’re doing is reacting to the action and not the thought and reasoning behind it. And that’s where the issue lies.”