Fraternity Suspended For Whitest MLK "Black Out" Party Ever
College is a time for exposure to different cultures, tastes, points of view. It's a great opportunity to put yourself in another's shoes. Let's go back to college now, and try to understand where Arizona State's Tau Kappa Epsilon chapter was coming from when it threw this "MLK Black Party."
A representative for Arizona State University said school officials have suspended Tau Kappa Epsilon's chapter operations while they investigate an unregistered Greek event that has many on campus offended.
Pictures from the event, coined "MLK Black Party" by the group, show members and guests dressed in basketball jerseys, flashing gang signs and even drinking from watermelon cups...
A spokesman from the local chapter, who would only identify himself as Cole, would not comment on the party or investigation. Rather, he told CBS 5 News to contact the national organization for TKE.
Damn, Cole, this is hard times, brah. How can people so badly misconstrue your frat's efforts to really think themselves into the lives of African-Americans? Oh wait, maybe it had to do with all these Instagrams.
The surreal thing is, the Tekes' performance of blackness is so absurdly whut? that it almost looks like a conscious performance of really dumb white kids cluelessly performing blackness.
Not that their tragicomic bungle dulls the insult to blacks. "There should be a zero tolerance policy for racism at ASU, period," one local African-American activist told the Phoenix New Times—which noted that the TKE house at ASU rival University of Arizona was suspended in 2012.
A representative for the national TKE organization told KPHO that shit was gonna get real as a result of the party. "They obviously need to be checked on what they're doing, how they're acting and how they're presenting themselves," he said... before un-ironically and unfortunately adding: "Not only as a fraternity of brothers, but as people."