Some of my fondest memories attending the University of Oklahoma were whipping up on frat boys on the intramural football fields and basketball courts in the mid-to-late 1980s. They couldn’t stand me. I was their antithesis. I was a brash and arrogant Native American who was a mile ahead of them athletically and wouldn’t sit idly by and take their subtle racism against the Indian kind.

I remember when they were calling one of my Native flag football teammates by the moniker “chief.” He was actually in their Delta fraternity and I could not, for the life of me, understand why. After every touchdown I scored or threw as quarterback in our 20-point win against those Greeks I would ask them, “How do you like that, chief?”

By the second half they stopped using the term “chief.” I assume our playing ability (and my cocksure attitude) shut them up. To his credit, my Native friend later left the fraternity because of what he terms “similar attitudes” as those captured on video last weekend – a video that went viral and gave my school a black eye that will not soon fade.

Let’s examine these Sigma Alpha Epsilon members (and other students) from OU who were captured on cell phone video spewing racist chants about African Americans. “You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me. There will never be a n***ger SAE.” I know almost exactly who these guys are. They’re cut from the same mold as the frat boys who threw firecrackers under the door of my friend’s dorm room during my freshman year in Norman. They thought it was funny and thought nobody knew who pulled the prank.