National SAE leader called for equality one year before racist video

Controversy was no stranger to Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, even before the cellphone video of a racist chant at the University of Oklahoma went viral and sparked a firestorm earlier this month.

After a series of recent member deaths earned Sigma Alpha Epsilon the dubious title of America’s deadliest fraternity, SAE’s national leadership decided to ban pledging last March.

In a video address to members marking the fraternity's annual Founders Day, SAE’s Eminent Supreme Archon Bradley Cohen explained the “historic decision.”

Beyond the documented physical risks involved in forced alcohol consumption, paddling and other hazing rituals that have become a big part of the sometimes months-long pledging process at SAE chapters and many other fraternities, Cohen argued that such prolonged initiation periods have lasting negative effects on the fraternity’s ability to function. By treating new members like “second-class citizens,” Cohen said, pledging essentially fosters divisiveness and inequality.

To illustrate his point, Cohen, who grew up in South Africa during apartheid, pointed to that period in his nation’s history as an amplified example of the dangers of a two-tiered society.

“The days of second-class citizens are over,” Cohen declared, as black and white images of South Africa’s violent anti-apartheid protests rolled across the screen.

Two and a half rounds of pledge-free national recruitment later, SAE finally seemed on track to shake its deadly reputation. Membership numbers were up, as well as average chapter GPAs, according to Cohen, with new recruits neither deterred nor distracted by humiliating and time-consuming hazing rituals.

Then, almost exactly one year after Cohen’s video calling for equality, a new video surfaced. This one showed SAE members from the University of Oklahoma chanting racial slurs to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know it”—slapping the fraternity with a new label: racist.

Two weeks after the Oklahoma video circulated—prompting the local chapter’s immediate closure and suspension of its members—Cohen told Yahoo News he was “probably more disgusted than anyone by that behavior.”

“It took us all by tremendous surprise,” Cohen said, describing the video as something “deplorable that no one can justify.”

Cohen, who is fifth generation South African, immigrated to the U.S. with his family at 16 because “my parents felt [it] wasn’t the environment to raise your kids.”

He says he received a lot of criticism for the apartheid analogy he used in the video last year. Cohen insists, though, that he wasn’t comparing the treatment of pledges to the treatment of black South Africans, but rather the unfavorable results of dividing any group of people—be it a country or a fraternity house—into two classes.

“There’s no room in society for that,” he said.

Cohen is also the first Jewish president in SAE’s history.

He says he’s “never once experienced any form of racism or anti-semitism in 30 years with this organization,” nor has he “spoken to a single SAE across the country who thought what took place at Oklahoma was right.” Still, while the Oklahoma incident may not be representative of the larger organization, he acknowledges that the existence of any chapters, or even groups within chapters, where such behavior is considered acceptable is cause for concern at the fraternity’s highest level.

Earlier this week, SAE executive director Blaine Ayers announced the national organization’s new plan to crack down on the kinds of attitudes that led to the Oklahoma video and try to prevent incidents like it in the future.

The plan includes requiring all members to participate in a diversity education program, establishing a confidential hotline for reporting offensive behavior, and appointing a diversity and inclusion director. The fraternity will also appoint a committee to investigate all 237 SAE chapters, to pinpoint places where behavior like that depicted in the Oklahoma video is treated as anything less than unacceptable.

The racist song doesn’t exist in a vacuum, of course. In the wake of the Oklahoma ordeal, several news outlets dug into the history of SAE—the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South. Inside Higher Ed, for example, uncovered a steady stream of incidents over the past two decades for which SAE members were suspended at chapters across the country, from hosting parties with derogatory themes like “Jungle Fever” and “cripmas”, to throwing bottles and yelling racial slurs at black athletes during a cross-country meet, to harassing a fellow member for dating a black woman.

A number of SAE alumni have also come forward saying that they, too, learned the lyrics to song from the Oklahoma video when they were members of the fraternity’s chapters at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas Tech University and Louisiana Tech University.

But even if racism is more deeply rooted in SAE’s culture than it’s national leadership would like to admit, Cohen’s view on the success of the pledging ban suggests reform is not impossible.

“It’s easy to reflect in hindsight that it was a no-brainer, ” Cohen said of ending pledging. “But it was a huge change.”

The ban was naturally met with resistance but ultimately, those first few weeks of controversy were worth it, Cohen says. SAE members vote on proposed changes to national laws at the fraternity’s annual convention. For opponents of the pledging ban, their chance to try to amend the law would have been at this year’s convention, coming up in June. But the deadline to propose changes to national laws came and went and, Cohen says, not a single person submitted a proposal to bring back pledging.

He hopes SAE will have the same chance implement its new diversity initiative before the whole organization is tarnished by the "deplorable" actions of a few members.

“In a way we are kind of like a business with franchises,” Cohen said. “If McDonald’s has a bad manager somewhere that’s involved in sexual harassment or a racist incident, that doesn’t make McDonalds worldwide a racist organization.”

With some 15,000 undergraduate members, “you’re going to have a few bad apples,” Cohen said. “That’s the nature of the beast with 18- to 22- year-olds.”

“Some of these young guys do stupid things and they wake up the next morning and say, ‘what did I do?’ Our job is to educate them and make sure they are prepared to know what’s right and what’s appropriate in today’s world.”

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