n Goldfinger, the seventh in a series of novels featuring British spy James Bond, author Ian Fleming made this observation: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
So what do you call it when it happens six times?
Ole Miss.
Last Thursday, a group of pro-Palestine students held a protest on the Ole Miss campus where they were met by a much larger group of counter-protestors. These kinds of protests and counter-protests are happening on college campuses across the country, but at Ole Miss what began as a dispute over the Middle East devolved into racial slurs directed at a Black student because, well, of course it would.
A white Ole Miss student identified as J.P. Staples was captured on video mimicking a monkey by jumping up and down and grunting to taunt a Black female protestor. Chants of “Lizzo!” were directed at the student, a reference to the student’s body type as a crowd of other students laughed and jeered.
To the surprise of no one, Staples is an out-of-state student from the Dallas, Texas, area and a fraternity member. The national office of the fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, kicked Staples out of the fraternity, but his status as student remains uncertain as university officials investigate the incident.
That’s probably a moot point, though. If you are a rich white kid from Dallas what’s the point of going to Ole Miss if you can’t be in a fraternity?
The demographic Staples represents has become sort of a cottage industry at Ole Miss, where two of three students are out-of-state enrollees, many drawn to the university’s reputation as one of the top party schools in the United States.
Sixty-two years ago, Ole Miss was thrust into the national spotlight when a riot broke out on campus when James Meridith arrived as the first Black student in the university’s history. It’s long been stated that most of the rioters were from out-of-state, although proof of that has never been established and probably couldn’t be.
For years, Ole Miss administration, faculty, staff and student groups have fought the good fight in trying to redeem the university’s tarnished reputation. These are good-faith efforts, not damage control.
And yet, every six years or so, some ugly racist incident, almost always instigated by out-of-state students and in one case financial boosters, emerges.
In 1988, the first black fraternity house to integrate the campus burned down under mysterious circumstances.
In 2012, white students spilled out over campus burning campaign signs for Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president while chanting, “The South will rise again.”
In 2014, three students from the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house placed a noose around the neck of a statue of Meredith. They also placed a Georgia flag of the past that at the time contained an image of the Confederate flag.
In 2018, copies of emails from a booster to the university’s dean of journalism, Will Norton, and others included a photo taken on The Square in Oxford showing Black women in tight-fitting clothing enjoying a night out in town. The journalism school’s founding donor and namesake, Ed Meek, used one of the photos in a Facebook post calling on others to “protect the values we hold dear that have made Oxford and Ole Miss known nationally.”
In 2019, an Instagram photo showed three white men, later identified as Ole Miss students, posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.
And now we have Monkey Boy, another painful reminder of the school’s troubled past, an act that perpetuates the worst perceptions not just of Ole Miss, but the entire state.
To suggest that racist attitudes on Mississippi college campuses exist only at Ole Miss is implausible.
In theory, it could happen anywhere.
In actuality, it happens at Ole Miss – like clockwork.
One has to wonder why this is so.
My theory is that white privilege, and the racist attitudes that prop it up, are not confined to the stereotypical poor, ignorant, rural whites in double-wide trailers with Confederate Flags flapping in the breeze. It is also manifested at the top of the social order among the wealthy party boys, mostly from out-of-state, who see Ole Miss and its past as a place where racism has a home.
What do I do about it? I honestly don’t know.
I don’t think anybody knows.
Maybe that’s why it keeps happening.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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