Why The 'Race Card' Is Played

When well-intentioned people, often white folks, seek token friends from another race, or impose their ideas of what can be done, things end badly. 

Now Duke? Duke was the enemy. The antithesis of what we loved and aspired to. They’d won the national championship the season before the Fab Five came together, but in our minds Duke embodied the privileged, spoiled team that had everything given to them. The referees cheated for them, mainstream America loved them … and we hated everything about them. (Though everyone always admitted Grant Hill was cool.)

“A crowd of weird-looking people watches Donna Belt’s interpretative dancing at a Zeta Tau Alpha costume party given by the fall pledge class,” reads a caption under a picture of a group of students, many of whom are in blackface, in the 1962 Yucca — the university’s yearbook at the time — on Page 305.

School Board member John H. Hicks Jr. proposed a ban of “any symbols of racism or oppression such as the Confederate Flag or KKK symbols or anything of that nature” in response to the incident.