After the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action programs in higher education in 2023. The next natural step was to shut down Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs because who really wants any of those things? LSU recently announced additional steps to dismantle its DEI Programs after scrubbing all references to DEI from its website in late January 2024. Videos on the website addressing racism were also removed. I submit that the reason DEI programs exist is to avoid the appearance of racism. Are not the institutions racing to eliminate DEI bringing focus on their past racism?
Suppose you only know of LSU through television appearances of its football and basketball programs. In that case, you might imagine LSU doesn’t have a problem with diversity based on the number of Black players. LSU was founded in 1860, the current location is on land that once was three plantations: Gartness, Arlington, and Nestle Down. The current student health center was built atop a slave cemetery. The campus also contains Native American burial mounds so there’s that.
The first Black undergraduate, A.P. Tureaud Jr., of New Orleans, applied to an LSU program that enabled students to get an undergraduate degree in arts and sciences and a law degree in six years, not available at the HBCU, Southern University. LSU denied him entry, but federal Judge J. Skelly Wright ruled in Tureaud’s favor. Tureaud registered on Sept. 18, 1953. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the ruling on procedural grounds on Oct. 28, 1953, and LSU canceled Tureaud’s registration and returned his fees. Tureaud’s attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Tureaud left LSU and did not return. When a definitive court ruling supporting Tureaud came in 1956, he was a junior at Xavier University in New Orleans. For just over a month in 1953, LSU had a Black student. In 1964, LSU admitted six Black students after another federal judge ordered they could not refuse to admit qualified Black applicants.
Court-ordered integration didn’t end LSU’s issues regarding race. In 1961, then LSU President Troy Middleton wrote to another college president bragging how his Black students were kept in check.
On Christmas Day, 1972, LSU basketball coach Press Maravich (Pete’s father) called Black players “jumping jungle bunnies.” He softened his stance (insert sarcasm emoji) when addressing his own player, Collis Temple, who was the first Black player at LSU.
“Your race ain’t shit, but you’re all right.” — Press Maravich
That same season, white point guard Mike Darnell refused to pass Temple the ball, once calling him a “nigger.” After being pushed by Coach Maravich, Darnell would pass the ball at Temple’s ankles. Press Maravich was replaced after that season, having everything to do with a losing record and nothing to do with his racism. Maravich coached for three years at Appalachian State, where he continued to lose.
In 2008, the only black LSU non-visiting law faculty member, Darlene Goring, said she was denied a promotion due to her race. Jack Weiss, the law center chancellor, said the minority candidates are less qualified than their white counterparts and should be held to a different standard. This prompted Goring to sue over “racist practices” at Paul M. Hebert Law Center. The University never responded to the lawsuit filed in September 2008 in the 19th Judicial District Court. Weiss called the lawsuit “utterly false,” and it was an insult to the entire faculty at the law center. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2010, and the judge ruled that Goring lacked the “proper evidence.”
2015 was a busy year. Reggie’s Bar stamped its patrons with the word “Reggin,” which backward spelled something different. The day after that made headlines, a noose was found hanging from a campus tree. The university released a statement saying the noose was part of a weather prevention system that came loose and released a statement pertaining to racial intolerance on campus. Days later, multiple Black students complained that a dress code at Reggie’s was applied unfairly to exclude many Black patrons.
A study by LSU researchers, Ozkan Eren and Naci Mocan, show when LSU football loses games, especially unexpected upsets, sentencing was harsher for black juveniles. The theory was that the mostly white judges faced emotional distress after LSU losses and took it out on Black youth.
In 2016, a Black student went to a campus house party, and a white girl told him she was drawing hearts on his neck. Instead, she drew swastikas. He was told he shouldn’t get mad because he was Black and not Jewish. Later that year, four students in university housing found this expression drawn on a decoration on their front door.
“Go Back 2 Africa Nigger Monkeys!”
At a 2019 football game, a white student yelled racist slurs at a group of Asian students, “Get the Fuck Out, Ching Chongs!”. He was later identified by social media but LSU chose to do nothing, citing his First Amendment rights. The school issued a longer statement about why they would do nothing.
The present LSU campus started construction in 1922 and therefore didn’t use slave labor. I’ve yet to uncover who actually did the construction, but I’m not ruling out prison labor which because of the loophole in the 13th Amendment was little different. The mostly-Black prison population of Angola State Prison was leased out to employers since its completion in 1880. LSU has used prison labor from 1997 until at least 2022 to do landscaping and other functions, especially the clean-up after LSU football games. The prisoners mostly work weekends in secluded areas, and most of the students don’t know they are there. Initially, prisoners once didn’t get paid, with all the proceeds going to the state. They still don’t get paid, but they do get lunch at MacDonald’s, so there’s that.
Executive Director of Facility & Property Oversight Tammy Millican had this to say:
Political Communication Assistant Professor Nathan Kalmoe offers a different perspective.
“There are several problems that need to be addressed with the program. If they are doing work, they should be paid for that work.”
Another problem with the University’s contract with the Dixon Correctional Institute, is that Louisiana still ranks second in global incarceration rates. Louisiana was first, until it was surpassed by Oklahoma in 2018.” — Nathan Kalmoe
Kalmoe said Louisiana’s criminal justice system disproportionately targets black residents as opposed to white residents.Kalmoe made his views known by responding to a September tweet by artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass that said, “Slavery never ended. They turned the plantations into prisons. Never forget.” Kalmoe responded:
Kalmoe forwarded his Tweet to University President F—King Alexander, who then unfollowed him.
In 2024, Forbes magazine published an article about sexism and racism directed at LSU female basketball players, including Angel Reese. The point is that LSU with its history has no business eliminating DEI programs when they should be doing much more.
To be fair, the efforts to remove DEI is rarely driven by the schools but by state governors, anxious to prove how anti-woke they are. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry has banned the use of the words “critical race theory” (CRT) in the public schools K-12 where CRT wasn’t being taught anyway and seized control of college boards. Landry’s efforts pale in comparison to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who has made eliminating DEI one of his reasons for living. A similar history timeline could be drawn for Florida’s public schools, including colleges and universities, especially the University of Florida in Gainesville. In March 2024, UF closed down its entire DEI department, firing all its employees.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that all the schools shutting down DEI programs have demonstrated racism in the recent past. The states and their governors involved include North Carolina, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, Iowa, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Do any of those states suggest progressive values? I’m sure I’ll get a lot of feedback about DEI with suggestions on how it ignores merit or is racist against white people. I say to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion is to promote the opposite, and when schools with a long history of racism do it. It proves they are who we think they are. I randomly picked a few schools with backgrounds not to be proud of to see how they handle DEI: Ole Miss, Tennessee, Alabama, Clemson, Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma. They are all targeting DEI to varying degrees, perhaps because they never believed in the concepts in the first place.
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This post was previously published on William Spivey‘s blog.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
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 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
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Photo credit: Stuart Adams, stuadams.com, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
