Burnt Orange Racism- A Tradition Throughout the Decades

Longhorns love to call Aggies a bunch of racists, when in actuality there is history at both universities.

Let's face facts!

Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of their most famous alumni, thinks they are racists:

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Connecting with such a prominent alumnus could be huge for The University of Texas. This is even truer because Tyson is African-American, and UT has long had a troubled relationship with the black community. But Tyson is not exactly UT’s biggest fan. That’s because he and the University had a bad break-up—one that prompts tricky questions about how academia defines success. As we’ll see, his time at UT is the one thing Tyson doesn’t like to talk about..

After Harvard, Tyson moved straight to Texas to start his PhD at UT-Austin. He felt stereotyped from the start, as he would later describe in a speech at Columbia: “The first comment directed to me in the first minute of the first day by a faculty member I had just met was, ‘You must join the department basketball team!’”

He took the criticism hard, and he also faced racial discrimination on campus. “I was stopped and questioned seven times by University police on my way into the physics building,” he says. “Seven times. Zero times was I stopped going into the gym—and I went to the gym a lot. That says all you need to know about how welcome I felt at Texas.”

But at other moments, it’s clear that he’s still raw about Texas, almost 30 years later. “When I get mail from the Texas Exes, it goes straight in the trash. Why should I believe in an institution that didn’t believe in me?”

That’s the way Tyson sees it: UT didn’t believe in him, while Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton did. “When I look at my life, the tracks of my success take a detour around Texas,” he says. “It’s the only place where I didn’t succeed, and I’m still figuring out what that means.”

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Don't forget their Mathematics-Physics Hall is named after a racist:

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Moore taught at the University Texas-Austin until he was 86 years old...

The Mathematics-Physics Hall at UT-Austin was named after him and when he died, there was a laudatory article in the Math Monthly, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America. However, many preferred to hide his low side so as not to tarnish his memory. To ignore his staure as a proponent of scientific racism. For African Americans passing through Mathematics at Texas, there was only a tarnished memory and I hope to tell what is partially known of that story.

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Or this spooky article about their racism from 1997 that basically outlines Charlie Strong's downfall decades before:

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Despite the fact that Hoberman lives and works in Austin, his book has been virtually ignored by the local daily. That is an odd fact, given the University of Texas' inglorious history of race relations both in the classroom and the athletic field.

While giving extensive coverage to the debate over the Hopwood decision and the recent bill by Rep. Ron Wilson that would require athletes to meet the same academic requirements as other students, sportswriters at the Austin American-Statesman ignored Hoberman's work. In fact, the only mention of his book in the Statesman was a negative op-ed piece written by syndicated columnist William Raspberry.

But then, perhaps it isn't surprising. The Statesman also ignored the racial underpinnings of the on-campus debate over the naming of the football stadium for Darrell K. Royal, the last football coach in America to win the national championship with an all-white team.

"Our football team would be Division III if it weren't for the black athletes," says Hoberman, who points out that the vast majority of the "skill" positions on the UT football team are occupied by blacks.

Despite that fact, Hoberman says UT won't be hiring a black head football coach any time soon. "It would be very difficult to put a black man at the head of this football team" while answering to the team's mostly white constituency, says Hoberman.

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Or that their song comes from racists:

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T.J. Finley, who graduated from UT with a bachelor's degree in kinesiology in the spring, stopped singing UT's iconic alma mater completely after being told that the song was first performed by students wearing blackface makeup in a turn-of-the-century minstrel show.

"At first, I was just so shocked that something like this could still exist," said Finley, a graduate student at the Duke University School of Law.

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There were racists on their golden era football teams:

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According to NowPublic.com, when Buck Burnette, a back-up center for the University of Texas football team, realized that Barack Obama would win the 2008 election, he posted this update on his Facebook page: “All the hunters gather up, we have a N$%&er in the White House.”

To his credit, Texas head coach Mack Brown immediately kicked Burnette off the team. But the initial report only stated that he was dismissed for an “unspecified violation of team rules.” The silence suggests that Brown and the University of Texas might be a bit more concerned with bad publicity than with Burnette’s bad ideology.

If they really wanted to make a lasting statement about intolerance and garner positive publicity, perhaps they should have been less secretive about what team rules were violated.

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Yeah

Don't forget the hispanic racism:

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Fliers advertising pledge "rules" for a University of Texas fraternity circulated around campus early Tuesday morning, arousing suspicion, bringing confusion and shining new light on campus racial issues. The unofficial document, intended to represent the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, known as FIJI, alleged several confidential pledge rules. Some of the rules were trivial in nature, like "Know Longhorn Football," but other rules implied blatant discrimination, including "No Mexicans."

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A picture of it