Watch Larry Wilmore Blast Racist Fraternity Video, Lack of Female Leadership
As Larry Wilmore observed during Tuesday’s Nightly Show, America is clearly not living in a post-racist or post-sexist society. In the frighteningly hilarious video above, the host breaks down the the University of Oklahoma’s recent fraternity racism scandal and reflects on America’s lack of female empowerment.
Wilmore first looks at the racist actions of University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter, which, in a video leaked online earlier this week, found members chanting, “There will never be a n***er S-A-E. They can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never (inaudible) with me.” The University expelled two of the students – a decision Wilmore applauds. But this is only the first battle. “Don’t worry, you won’t be seeing any more of those frat boys,” the host says, “until they’re your congressmen.”
To gain more insight into the issue, Wilmore speaks to “1990s Oklahoma frat guy D-Train” direct from his lucrative Wall Street job. “It was disgusting,” the guest says of the racist chant. “I completely denounce it. You can never use that word. Clearly the song should have been, ‘There will never be a black guy in SAE.'” Later, D-Train inadvertently makes a sharp commentary about the hive mentality of frat culture. “Maybe you don’t understand what a frat is, dude,” he says. “It’s not about excluding anybody — it’s about including people who are exactly like you.”
As Gawker notes, Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski took time out of her Monday show to blame rappers for the frat members’ racist chant. After mentioning that Waka Flocka Flame declined to perform at the university following the incident, Brzezinski said, “If you look at every single song, I guess you call these, that [Waka Flocka’s] written, it’s a bunch of garbage. It’s full of n-words; it’s full of f-words. It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them – he should be disgusted with himself.”
In the second half of Wilmore’s Nightly Show segment, he begs the United States to give women more positions of power. “Saturday was International Women’s Day,” he says. “People gather to support women’s rights, and 1,000 came out to march in New York City – which sounds like a lot, until you consider that, last year, over 100,000 New Yorkers showed up to Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade.”
He notes that “Liberia and Pakistan had female leaders before the United States” and that there are more American male big business owners named John than women, period. “Sometimes it feels like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with men,” Wilmore says.