The Dark Side Of SEC Football

SEC football is like a religion, which means that along with the good stuff it also breeds intolerance and bigotry. Jerit Roser, the managing editor of LSU's student paper the Daily Reveille, wrote an excellent op-ed piece for the Friday Picayune about pigskin and prejudice. Here are the first few graphs:

I enjoy traveling to LSU road football games, and I have close friends who happen to be African-American.

These two facts wouldn't seem to have much to do with one another, but trying to convince these friends to make the trip with me to Oxford, Miss., this weekend for LSU's game with Ole Miss proved a futile task.

Oxford apparently is a destination for the Southeastern Conference's racists -- at least based on my friends' experiences and the comments littered across SEC fan message boards.

I've heard of Ole Miss fans yelling the n-word at LSU fans. I also have heard this: "They hang Confederate flags -- enough said." (LSU had its own problem with flags at tailgating a couple of years ago.)

It is not that Ole Miss itself condones this or isn't trying to eliminate it. The chancellor, for example, has asked the band to stop playing "From Dixie With Love" if fans don't stop chanting, "The South will rise again." Still, things might only be getting uglier. The threat of losing "From Dixie With Love" has sparked a YouTube video of an Ole Miss fraternity member embarrassing himself, his fraternity, his school and state. The university has since shown him the door.

"I really don't care," said the student, Michael Hudec. "(F-word) those (n-words)." Phi Kappa Tau suspended Hudec and another member when the video hit the Internet, according to the Ole Miss student newspaper.

How charming.

LSU and Ole Miss square off later today. That guy Hudec is definitely what LSU fans refer to as Tiger Bait and what this Tiger fan calls a malaka.

Comments

[Elspeth Ravenwind]

I wish it wasn't so easy for folks to take the path more hateful. I hope he gets a 'oh sheeyat, I am an awful person and need to change' moment, SOON.

[pansypoo]

to hate is human.

more pigskin, less war.

[jeffrey]

Can we just fire Miles already? Ole Miss is going to wipe the floor with us. Program is about to collapse and it's all because we didn't fire Miles two years ago when the damage was still reparable.

[Alan]

This is a repost of a comment a posted Friday at Oliver Willis' site, if you want an insider perspective from someone who lives in Oxford, MS:

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Okay, here’s how this went down (I live In Oxford, MS and have had to deal with this crap for quite some time):

For several decades, the Ole Miss Marching Band has played the same song for its pregame show, a song called “From Dixie, With Love” which is a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” which is basically Elvis Presley’s “American Trilogy” with that boring middle section cut out. The problem, believe it or not, is not with Dixie, but with the Battle Hymn, specifically the last six notes. The actual lyrics of the Battle Hymn (which was, I remind you, a song associated with the North during the Civil War) which go with those six notes are “His truth is marching on.” Beginning sometime around 2003, a small group of drunken, idiot frat boys thought it cute to instead loudly sing “the South will rise again” (hereinafter “TSWRA”).

For the next several years, it was literally just a handful of drunken douchebags doing it. Then, this year, Ole Miss got a new Chancellor, Dan Jones, who expressed displeasure over TSWRA. Jones, incidentally, is not an alumnus, and his appointment was somewhat controversial. After Jones complained about TSWRA, the small group of drunken douchebags got a little bigger, as students who didn’t like Jones for reasons unrelated to TSWRA began chanting it in a childish bid to piss him off.

Then, the Associated Student Body got involved and passed a resolution calling on all Ole Miss students to refrain from chanting TSWRA and asking them(bizarrely, IMO) to instead chant “Go to Hell, LSU!”

I am not making this up.

At this point, the Daily Mississippian (the ludicrously conservative school newspaper whose editorials usually consist of regurgitations of whatever Sean Hannity said the night before) got involved and took the position that the University was trampling all over the students’ First Amendment rights by asking them not to be douchebags. Meanwhile, the coaches and players issued statements asking the students to stop chanting TSWRA, and several of university’s most influential donors began making noises that they would no longer give financial support to Ole Miss if it continued to be associated with a racist chant. The band director (David Willson, who I admire more than Jesus for what he’s been through since taking that job) rearranged “From Dixie With Love” to eliminate the six notes that were being used as a trigger for TSWRA.

Incensed, the douchebags figured out how to incorporate TSWRA into a different part of the song and coordinated through Facebook. At the next game, TSWRA was even louder. Although it was still only a small part of the attendees chanting it, they all sat together in the student section, and the chant was impossible to ignore.

The Chancellor then took the extraordinary step of publicly announcing that if students yelled TSWRA at the next game, he would ban “From Dixie With Love.” Letters poured into the Daily Mississippian imploring students to show some maturity and stop TSWRA. Sheppard freaking Smith (an Ole Miss alum) sent a video message to the students asking them not to chant TSWRA. Richard Barrett, noted white supremecist, entered the fray by making a public statement in favor of TSWRA. The Daily Mississippian printed several editorials. A few were opposed to TSWRA, but most took the utterly preposterous stance that the First Amendment required the University to play “From Dixie With Love” so that students could sing racist lyrics that the University found objectionable.

On Nov. 7, 2009, the Ole Miss Band played “From Dixie With Love” for the last time, as moronic fratboy douchebags chanted TSWRA to the very end. The next week, the band had two rehearsals to put together a new pregame show, replacing a song that had been its repertoire since before I was born with a medley of “America the Beautiful” and “I Saw The Light,” (the latter a gospel tune that had been part of its stands music for several decades). While there was a smattering of boos at the Nov. 14 game against Tennessee, the crowd was overall supportive.

The announcement by “KKK Great Titan Shane Tate” that the Klan would put in an appearance at this Saturday’s game came this past Monday, I believe, which brings us up to the present day

The University has done everything it possibly could to shut this down short of engaging in outright (and probably illegal) censorship in the form of actually arresting students for the crime of being abject morons. A clear majority of the students and alumni are appalled. I promise you, we’re not all crazy racists in North Mississippi, but damned if we don’t have an abundance of stupid.

[Adrastos]

Thanks for the long and very informative comment, Alan. I *know* that you're not all racists. They're starting to die off and there's fewer of them every generation. Trust me, I hear the same sort of stupid shit in the Gret Stet all the time.

[consigned]

If you check marriage-license bureaus, you'll find (suprise, surprise) that over 99% of people marry within their own race. So, what's your beef with people (as well as plants and animals) doing what comes natural? Being a Clarence Thomas is not only immoral but plain silly. The students see through the guff, why can't you?