Student Body President Shamed by Racist Fraternity Brother Speaks Out
The student body president at the University of Southern California is speaking out after a male student hurled racial slurs at her from his fraternity window.
Rini Sampath, a senior, made history at USC earlier this year after becoming the first female elected president since 2006 and running on the first-ever all-female presidential ticket. This week, Sampath (pictured) made headlines again when she posted on Facebook about an incident that occurred as she was walking home from a friend’s apartment Saturday night. “A student screamed out at me through the window of his fraternity house, ‘You Indian piece of sh-t’ before hurling his drink at my friends and me,” Sampath wrote. “Once his fraternity brothers realized it was me, they began to apologize. This stung even more. Today, as I try to unpack these events, I couldn’t quite figure out why their after-the-fact apologies deepened the wound. But one of my friends explained it to me the best this morning: ‘Because now you know, the first thing they see you as is subhuman.’ And that’s the first thing some students on our campus see when they look at anyone who looks like me.”
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Sampath went on to outline “the need for safe spaces and the need for expanded cultural resource centers or the need for gender neutral bathrooms or the need for diversity in our curriculum or the need for diversity in our professors or the need for diversity in dialogue.” In the post, shared more than 1,200 times, and liked more than 8,000 times on Facebook, she pointed out that these incidents happen all the time, at colleges and universities all over the country, and that discrimination is not just based on race but on gender, sexual orientation and gender identity as well. “Whether racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia happens on the internet, or behind closed doors, or in a small group setting, or as ‘just a joke,’ it’s not okay. It’s never okay,” she wrote. “For now, this is my public plea. I don’t know if what I have written here is enough, because there aren’t enough words in the world to summarize the experiences of people who look like me and what they go through every, single day. We lost a football game last night, SC. But I think there’s something bigger, much bigger that we’re losing here. And we have to get it back.”
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The incident made Sampath wonder what would have happened if the victim wasn’t the president of the student body. “That’s an aspect that concerns me. It just makes me wonder: ‘Is this how they see us first and foremost — for the color of our skin?‘” she told The Washington Post. And while the offender has since apologized, she says that isn’t the point. “I appreciate it, but hope it becomes a learning experience. Apologies don’t fix these deep wounds. … [the slur] was a verbal assault on my identity — on who I am as a person.”
This is just the latest of a number of racist incidents on college campuses that have made headlines this year. In March, members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma were caught on video singing a racist chant that included a reference to lynching. In April, students at Duke University discovered a noose hanging from a tree on campus.
“The media may be paying more attention given the national conversation that is happening around race and racial inequality in our country, but these incidents have been going on as long as colleges have been around, or have had any level of diversity,” Julie J. Park, assistant professor of Education at University of Maryland, College Park, tells Yahoo Parenting.
But what is it about college that seems to bring out this behavior? “High school students don’t, generally speaking, have a lot of experience interacting with kids of other races before college,” Park says. “We know that, especially for white students, and especially for more affluent students, they are more likely to go to high schools that are more homogeneous in nature, that’s the way education segregation works.”
And while college provides a great opportunity for students to learn about and engage with students from various backgrounds, fostering that environment is not always easy, Park says. “College is such a rife time for students to learn from people who are different than they are, to challenge previous points of view and stereotypes,” she says. “But even though universities put a lot of investment into programs to support students of color and to bring diversity programming to university campuses, the dynamic of human relations is that when you throw people together of different backgrounds, it requires a lot of work to be sure that there aren’t a lot of negative interactions.”
Park says she’s not surprised, either, that the incident took place at a fraternity house. “It could have happened anywhere, to be sure, but that it happened at a fraternity is consistent with the research we have regarding these organizations,” she says. “Students in Greek organizations have lower rates of interracial friendships, the houses are more homogeneous than the campus as a whole, research even shows that students are more likely to oppose interracial marriage after belonging to a fraternity. So these organizations are not necessarily neutral ground.”
In preparing kids to head off to college, parents have a responsibility to discuss these issues with their children, Park says. “The predominant theme of white culture is colorblindness – we don’t talk about it, so it’s not a problem,” she says. “But it is a problem, and if we don’t talk about it, it will be more of a problem. We live in a racially unequal society, and we need to talk about that and be more honest about recognizing it, to make it better.”
Once kids are on campus, “universities have a responsibility to provide guidance for students in order to provide a climate that is safe and equitable,” Park says.
In a follow-up Facebook post, Sampath said that responsibility also lies with the student body. “What happened on our campus on Saturday is not an isolated incident: It is happening on campuses across the nation and it is the result of a climate of intolerance that accepts hateful speech and actions,” she wrote on Tuesday. “We have the power to change that climate. The internet is powerful. Community is powerful. We are powerful. And I believe that through our community we can root out the bigotry and hatred.”
Photo: Luis Sinco/LATimes /Getty Images
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