Black parents should peruse college message boards

[Satchel 6908]

I acknowledge that the boards may not be a completely accurate representation of the culture on certain college campuses, but they can provide valuable insight into the current thinking of people who have attended or are attending these schools. Reading Texags, Tiger Droppings and a few other boards of B12 and Sec schools would give me pause about sending any kid of mine to a school where so many of its supporters are implacably and unapologetically racist. The two mentioned by name are clearly in a class by themselves. Some of the stuff is so vile, it’s hard to believe college educated people think as many of them do.

[OneOfTheOutOfFocusGuys 2059]

I’m a white parent and have those thoughts.  I’ve honestly considered whether I’d let my daughter go to A&M.  I’ve got plenty of friends and family that went there and turned out fine, so I know it isn’t logical.  But TexAgs is just so repulsively racist and anti intellectual I have trouble believing none of that is reflected in real life.  

[6th Street 6357]

To be fair, I think the folks that post on the Texags politics board are a special fringe of crazies that the mainstream fans want nothing to do with. Some of the stuff their is batshit crazy like anti-vax, covid deniers, and Q anon. Gotta think that doesn't represent the majority of their fan base...

(caveat being I haven't lived in TX since 2008)

[Orale 1087]

I’m a white parent and have those thoughts.  I’ve honestly considered whether I’d let my daughter go to A&M.  I’ve got plenty of friends and family that went there and turned out fine, so I know it isn’t logical.  But TexAgs is just so repulsively racist and anti intellectual I have trouble believing none of that is reflected in real life.  

A good buddy of mine is a TXAM grad and very progressive. But he also always joked about being a 2%er, never cared about sports, school spirit, and doesn't have a clue what TexAgs is. I'm sure he'd be abhorred if he ever perused it. I visited him I'm CS once, right after the bonfire collapse in fact, and all his friends seemed to share his world view.

So I suspect schools, even the SEC schools, have a fair amount of progressive types. But my friends are mostly white/latino liberals, so I can definitely see the concern a black parent would have for a kid who wouldn't have a natural set of friends to absorb into a school with lots of known racial hostility.

[bolverk 29399]

I'm pretty sure I personally know only about five people with actual degrees from A&M: One is an English professor/administrator now teaching at another university, another is an architect, a third is a historic preservationist, a fourth is a tourism marketing person, and the fifth is now a nurse who went to school there to be a vet (don't know why/when exactly she switched her major). All of them are good, smart people who somehow evaded the hive-mind, and the college professor is one of the smartest people I know (he did get his undergrad at UT).

Having said that, I have experienced the on-campus culture as an opposing fan, as well as just a visitor sitting in on the college professor's English class one day when he was a lowly TA getting his PhD in the mid-1990s. On those occasions, I and others around me got cups of Coke flung at us from the upper deck of Kyle Field, I got yelled at for walking on the grass and was told to uncover when visiting the campus as a full-grown fucking college graduate to see the professor buddy, and I also happen to know several asshole t-shirt fans from HS who've likely never even been to College Station.

While I grew up in a smallish West Texas town and got my undergrad from Texas Tech, the degree of anti-intellectualism, ingrained racism, willful ignorance, unjustified arrogance, and general spitefulness I've seen from their fanbase rivals anything I have seen since middle school. Thankfully, my daughter never even considered A&M as an option when she was looking at schools, partially because she saw some of the same shit from her HS peers and wanted nothing to do with that culture (plus she got a full-ride at a school in NY).

I don't want to sound like Randolph, but I agree that Texas deserves better than A&M and wish there were some way to avoid my taxes going to support that despicable, backwater shithole.

[Wanker Bob 379]

If they read the Daily Texan here they would get the same idea about this University

[956 Worldwide 34443]

People who post on the politics section of southern/Texas college football boards hold regressive social and political views, news at 10.

Speaking seriously, I think the slide of TexAgs, TigerDroppings, etc into nodes of radicalism, conspiracies, and racism is more about the current information ecosystem in the U.S. than about the colleges involved.  Back before DJT, especially before Obama, those places did reflect the general conservatism you’d likely find among alumni.

Now it’s something different, those places are huge and fertile ground for malicious actors to drag conversations to the extreme and to amplify conspiracies and disinformation. The pre-existing general lean to the right laid the groundwork, but it wasn’t sufficient. The mods and operators bear a lot of responsibility for refusing to adapt to the new reality of the digital space, business models that rely on touting the number of users, a clear toleration for socks and multiple accounts, and extremely loose community standards.  They care more about naughty words and photos than about spammers and trolls.  Crowd source banning, like here really goes a long way. 
 

Those boards have become kind of like FOBs for 8Kun and other extremist sites. And I really think a lot of the activity is not organic interaction between college football fans and alums. 

[UpperWestside 6136]

Satchel the apprehension you have about schools right now I believe is completely warranted. I do not believe any minority family willingly wants to send their child somewhere that can either expose them to racist rhetoric on a consistent basis or perhaps even physical danger. 
 

I believe that what you might have to eventually reckon with is that there are places where the racism has a far higher concentration amongst the local community than others. I would also say to you though that it can still be found anywhere. It does not matter if you send your child to LSU or Harvard or Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship (A scholarship named after one of the most egregious perpetrators of colonial era racism and destruction of the lives of native southern Africans as a whole).
 

You are going to find it, but I would say the best thing you can do is trust that wherever your child chooses to go is a place they feel comfortable at and one that you do as well. The world, despite evidence to the contrary in recent years, is becoming a better place and the youngest generation in college right now is part of the solution to stamping out rampant racism. They are just not putting up with it and I think that’s awesome how vocal they are about attacking racism in all its many forms in society. 

[Neonmoon 38127]

1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Now it’s something different, those places are huge and fertile ground for malicious actors to drag conversations to the extreme and to amplify conspiracies and disinformation. The pre-existing general lean to the right laid the groundwork, but it wasn’t sufficient. The mods and operators bear a lot of responsibility for refusing to adapt to the new reality of the digital space, business models that rely on touting the number of users, a clear toleration for socks and multiple accounts, and extremely loose community standards.  They care more about naughty words and photos than about spammers and trolls.  Crowd source banning, like here really goes a long way

This is such a great point. This goes for message boards to Facebook to Twitter. All of these technologies are not inherently bad, but introduce the emotional cesspool of humanity and monetization, and bad things will happen. Regulation is needed. The hope is self regulation would be sufficient. Everyone agrees to act responsibly, but that hasn’t worked so far in some spaces. 

[achooloco 1065]

Sadly, IMO the old Hornfans political board is indistinguishable from texags, tiger droppings. Never gone to orange bloods, so no clue on them or other texas boards. 

That said, the food and investing boards on texags and tiger droppings are pretty great and seem rather “normal”.  The few threads on those two specific sections that I’ve checked out have funny/interesting info and nothing glaringly vitriolic. I think they even started a penny stock thread due to the one here but that’s just pure conjecture. 

[TwiceHorn 31280]

2 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

People who post on the politics section of southern/Texas college football boards hold regressive social and political views, news at 10.

Speaking seriously, I think the slide of TexAgs, TigerDroppings, etc into nodes of radicalism, conspiracies, and racism is more about the current information ecosystem in the U.S. than about the colleges involved.  Back before DJT, especially before Obama, those places did reflect the general conservatism you’d likely find among alumni.

Now it’s something different, those places are huge and fertile ground for malicious actors to drag conversations to the extreme and to amplify conspiracies and disinformation. The pre-existing general lean to the right laid the groundwork, but it wasn’t sufficient. The mods and operators bear a lot of responsibility for refusing to adapt to the new reality of the digital space, business models that rely on touting the number of users, a clear toleration for socks and multiple accounts, and extremely loose community standards.  They care more about naughty words and photos than about spammers and trolls.  Crowd source banning, like here really goes a long way. 
 

Those boards have become kind of like FOBs for 8Kun and other extremist sites. And I really think a lot of the activity is not organic interaction between college football fans and alums. 

Yeah, a college sports/football message board is going to trend older, whiter, and maler than most places.

Add in that the denizens are net literate and on other social media and the likelihood of retrograde opinions and attitudes is off the charts.

Just like "we" don't represent current UT students and attitudes, Texags probably doesn't represent current aggy.

Then again, without ever reading a message board, you know there is a somewhat greater chance of encountering racism and other regressive attitudes at eaTme.

 

[Fudge Nuggets 19151]

My kids have said no way in hell they want to go to aggy.  It's called good parenting, people.

I would be willing to pay full price to a Stanford / Rice / etc over a free ride to that shithole.  If the kids are smart enough to get into a top school, I'll find a way to make it work.

[Walden Ponderer 12639]

6 hours ago, 6th Street said:

To be fair, I think the folks that post on the Texags politics board are a special fringe of crazies that the mainstream fans want nothing to do with. Some of the stuff their is batshit crazy like anti-vax, covid deniers, and Q anon. Gotta think that doesn't represent the majority of their fan base...

(caveat being I haven't lived in TX since 2008)

I lived there for 16 years. It's real life. Yes, there are progressives in College Station, but don't let that fool you. Racism is normal, Q-love is rampant, and repugnant beliefs are more common than rational beliefs. That place is a moral cesspool.

[Goredho 17348]

No black athlete, at least from the Deep South, where racism is just a part of their life, is going to write off Alabama because it’s alumni base is full of Alabamans with all that implies racially.  They already live in a state populated with Alabamans, or Louisianans, or Texans with all that implies racially.  The attitudes towards race in the online communities you mentioned are only shocking to those of us who are not tasked with living in it as an African American.

Thats not the way it should be, but it’s the way it is.

Edited April 21, 2021 by Goredho

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

6 hours ago, 6th Street said:

To be fair, I think the folks that post on the Texags politics board are a special fringe of crazies that the mainstream fans want nothing to do with. Some of the stuff their is batshit crazy like anti-vax, covid deniers, and Q anon. Gotta think that doesn't represent the majority of their fan base...

(caveat being I haven't lived in TX since 2008)

IMO, I would say the majority of the fan base is of the 'go along' type of racism. The 'bootstraps' crowd, the 'I have a black/brown/Asian friend' crowd, and a good part of them appear to admire 'fake' masculine symbols and adopt that identity or buy into a myth of behavior. When one does that, then buying into myths about 'others' isn't too difficult.

That being said, their board has changed a lot over the last decade or so. I lurked both there and here (well, TOS) back then and their politics board shifted further and further. From doing research with my oldest, their school has maintained pretty much a <3% African American enrollment while their total enrollment has grown until they have almost 70,000 students. Their Hispanic enrollment has increased some, but is still not reflective of the state population. Yet, there is a general freakout if the word 'diversity' is mentioned or if a member's child is not admitted (the blame being placed on 'diversity,' top 10%, or something similar). Like here, though, they allow non students and graduates to post though, so as near as I can tell, unless a person has a verified ag symbol next to their name, they could be anyone. And I've seen evidence of RW trial balloons by users I suspect to be pushing specific agendas and are likely not graduates. They don't start out that way, but eventually the rhetoric finds enough fertile ground and it takes off. If they cross some line, then posters used to flag their post and I guess they get banned or some such, but the window has gotten shoved quite a bit further I've noticed, and that action the owners took where they removed large swaths of content was probably one of the better things they have done, but a lot of nasty still remains. I don't have to agree with their speech, but some of it was very threatening, and yes, if I were to counsel a potential student, I would show them the good and the not so good in order for them to make an informed decision.

It certainly exists in higher education, but at this specific institution 'they' (the ag site users) claim they essentially ran off  one black professor during a controversy several years ago and seemed quite happy about it so that attitude is prevalent there.

Also @Goredho--spot on.

Edited April 21, 2021 by Mrs Whiggins
error

[immamac 42519]

6 hours ago, OneOfTheOutOfFocusGuys said:

I’m a white parent and have those thoughts.  I’ve honestly considered whether I’d let my daughter go to A&M.  I’ve got plenty of friends and family that went there and turned out fine, so I know it isn’t logical.  But TexAgs is just so repulsively racist and anti intellectual I have trouble believing none of that is reflected in real life.  

It is 100% representative of the general student population. At least it was during my time there which ended in May of 2009

6 hours ago, 6th Street said:

To be fair, I think the folks that post on the Texags politics board are a special fringe of crazies that the mainstream fans want nothing to do with. Some of the stuff their is batshit crazy like anti-vax, covid deniers, and Q anon. Gotta think that doesn't represent the majority of their fan base...

(caveat being I haven't lived in TX since 2008)

No, they are the mainstream, the fringe crazies are the 2%ers, literally by definition.

6 hours ago, Orale said:

A good buddy of mine is a TXAM grad and very progressive. But he also always joked about being a 2%er, never cared about sports, school spirit, and doesn't have a clue what TexAgs is. I'm sure he'd be abhorred if he ever perused it. I visited him I'm CS once, right after the bonfire collapse in fact, and all his friends seemed to share his world view.

So I suspect schools, even the SEC schools, have a fair amount of progressive types. But my friends are mostly white/latino liberals, so I can definitely see the concern a black parent would have for a kid who wouldn't have a natural set of friends to absorb into a school with lots of known racial hostility.

I graduated from the George Bush school, which was the most progressive/liberal school at TAMU. I can guarantee you being gay at TAMU is still an issue, let alone the "what sport do you play?" Question if you are black. 

5 hours ago, bolverk said:

I'm pretty sure I personally know only about five people with actual degrees from A&M: One is an English professor/administrator now teaching at another university, another is an architect, a third is a historic preservationist, a fourth is a tourism marketing person, and the fifth is now a nurse who went to school there to be a vet (don't know why/when exactly she switched her major). All of them are good, smart people who somehow evaded the hive-mind, and the college professor is one of the smartest people I know (he did get his undergrad at UT).

Having said that, I have experienced the on-campus culture as an opposing fan, as well as just a visitor sitting in on the college professor's English class one day when he was a lowly TA getting his PhD in the mid-1990s. On those occasions, I and others around me got cups of Coke flung at us from the upper deck of Kyle Field, I got yelled at for walking on the grass and was told to uncover when visiting the campus as a full-grown fucking college graduate to see the professor buddy, and I also happen to know several asshole t-shirt fans from HS who've likely never even been to College Station.

While I grew up in a smallish West Texas town and got my undergrad from Texas Tech, the degree of anti-intellectualism, ingrained racism, willful ignorance, unjustified arrogance, and general spitefulness I've seen from their fanbase rivals anything I have seen since middle school. Thankfully, my daughter never even considered A&M as an option when she was looking at schools, partially because she saw some of the same shit from her HS peers and wanted nothing to do with that culture (plus she got a full-ride at a school in NY).

I don't want to sound like Randolph, but I agree that Texas deserves better than A&M and wish there were some way to avoid my taxes going to support that despicable, backwater shithole.

Well, I don't know how to break this to you, but I'm an Aggie(aggy)

[Guest]

If Texags, or surly, makes the difference  in evaluating the college options for your kids, then you probably suck at more things than assessing future education avenues for your spawn.

 

[Armybrat 40744]

6 hours ago, bolverk said:

I'm pretty sure I personally know only about five people with actual degrees from A&M: One is an English professor/administrator now teaching at another university, another is an architect, a third is a historic preservationist, a fourth is a tourism marketing person, and the fifth is now a nurse who went to school there to be a vet (don't know why/when exactly she switched her major). All of them are good, smart people who somehow evaded the hive-mind, and the college professor is one of the smartest people I know (he did get his undergrad at UT).

Having said that, I have experienced the on-campus culture as an opposing fan, as well as just a visitor sitting in on the college professor's English class one day when he was a lowly TA getting his PhD in the mid-1990s. On those occasions, I and others around me got cups of Coke flung at us from the upper deck of Kyle Field, I got yelled at for walking on the grass and was told to uncover when visiting the campus as a full-grown fucking college graduate to see the professor buddy, and I also happen to know several asshole t-shirt fans from HS who've likely never even been to College Station.

While I grew up in a smallish West Texas town and got my undergrad from Texas Tech, the degree of anti-intellectualism, ingrained racism, willful ignorance, unjustified arrogance, and general spitefulness I've seen from their fanbase rivals anything I have seen since middle school. Thankfully, my daughter never even considered A&M as an option when she was looking at schools, partially because she saw some of the same shit from her HS peers and wanted nothing to do with that culture (plus she got a full-ride at a school in NY).

I don't want to sound like Randolph, but I agree that Texas deserves better than A&M and wish there were some way to avoid my taxes going to support that despicable, backwater shithole.

So,nothing has changed about that shithole since 1876?

[sasquatch69 583]

I do wonder if it will get to the point that the school itself goes after the message board owners (not sure how they'd do that, but they can probably find a way) because of how badly it reflects on the school. The new TAMU president seems like a reasonable sort, so who knows. 

[tantric superman 4667]

It's a tough world out there, but not that tough. 

The idea that the insularity of a Stanford or a Rice is necessarily better as to issues of race as compared to big state southern schools seems pretty counterintuitive to me.  Those big states schools are interesting laboratories with lots of room (and opportunity) for change, and students would be better served (as far as race issues are concerned) going into those environments than more Stepfordy environments. 

Using boards of big state schools is just silly, in my opinion.  Completely unrepresentative of the mission of the school or the interpersonal relationships of the students, even in A&M's case.

College campuses are not necessarily representative of the communities they sit in. 

[atomheartbevo 89447]

8 hours ago, Satchel said:

The two mentioned by name are clearly in a class by themselves. Some of the stuff is so vile, it’s hard to believe college educated people think as many of them do.

As much as I joke, I have plenty of aggy and LSU friends. It's the nature of where I went to high school, and where my dad worked.

I really don't think it's a coincidence that those two boards you mentioned had huge qanon threads.  Qanon seems to go hand-in-hand with the stuff you mentioned.

I don't judge those fanbases on their sports forums, because that's a minority of sports fans, and an even smaller minority of overall alumni. 

But when you see them go off the rails, pushing racist views or batshit crazy qanon shit, and you realize they are tolerated, that's a problem.

[atomheartbevo 89447]

5 minutes ago, sasquatch69 said:

I do wonder if it will get to the point that the school itself goes after the message board owners (not sure how they'd do that, but they can probably find a way) because of how badly it reflects on the school. The new TAMU president seems like a reasonable sort, so who knows. 

16 minutes ago, slorch said:

If Texags, or surly, makes the difference  in evaluating the college options for your kids, then you probably suck at more things than assessing future education avenues for your spawn.

On the one hand, like I said, don't judge a school by its 3rd-party sports forums.

On the other hand, TexAgs seems to have a lot of access to the athletic department, and their batshit crazy stuff (qanon threads, Chauvin threads, etc.) don't seem to get a lot of coverage by people who should be asking themselves "why are we associating with this group?"

I could be wrong, and Luigi doesn't have any access to any aggy officials.  But if he did, he needs to police his board a little more closely.

 

[GW Hayduke 1952]

20 minutes ago, immamac said:

I can guarantee you being gay at TAMU is still an issue

[DigglerontheHoof 21063]

24 minutes ago, immamac said:

It is 100% representative of the general student population. At least it was during my time there which ended in May of 2009

No, they are the mainstream, the fringe crazies are the 2%ers, literally by definition.

I graduated from the George Bush school, which was the most progressive/liberal school at TAMU. I can guarantee you being gay at TAMU is still an issue, let alone the "what sport do you play?" Question if you are black. 

Well, I don't know how to break this to you, but I'm an Aggie(aggy)

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

I could be wrong, and Luigi doesn't have any access to any aggy officials.  But if he did, he needs to police his board a little more closely.

 

There is a joke I could make here in very poor taste, but in light of recent events, I'm going to pass.

Racism is tied up with athletics as well and is a topic deserving of its own thread--from youth sports to the ultra competitive hs money generating sports, it is burrowed deep into our institutions but the reality is deny deny deny. The stories I could tell about school board zoning, coaches, position players, etc just from my own involvement are bad enough, I suspect it is worse elsewhere.

[Beau Vine 54002]

With the possible exception of Auburn, there is not a single major university in the country that is less like what a university should be than A&M and LSU, so I have no idea why OP is surprised.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13414]

Political boards seem to swing strongly to the majority side of the people posting. Eventually people on the minority side get tired of swimming upstream. Hornfans and even the TOS political boards were more conservative than Surly. For some reason the Politics board here started off more liberal/progressive and some of the strongly conservative people ran over to the Football and DT boards only.

You can find a few (rare) reasonable people on a Texags thread but they're dismissed as idiots. To some extent that occurs here in the opposite direction.

[Huckleberry 32702]

2 hours ago, achooloco said:

Sadly, IMO the old Hornfans political board is indistinguishable from texags, tiger droppings.

Do you mean now or back when it was the most popular forum? Because if you mean back then this is pretty much nonsense.

[Guest]

Few things in the ‘getting into college’ process are as satisfying as the day Texas A&M comes off the board as a possible destination for your child.

Texags has virtually zero impact upon my opinion on aggy. It comes down to when you have to interact with the motherfuckers.

Edited April 21, 2021 by slorch

[Armybrat 40744]

50 minutes ago, DigglerontheHoof said:

+1

Learn something new every day.

[achooloco 1065]

22 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

Do you mean now or back when it was the most popular forum? Because if you mean back then this is pretty much nonsense.

Now, only now. Back when the flashing envelope warning was flying around it seemed to span the spectrum of ideas, albeit obviously conservative considering it was a Texas message board.

If you hide the url and user names, for the most controversial/"popular" political threads from 2020 on you'd be hard pressed to guess whether the posts were on TD, Texags, or Hornfans. A lot of the HF posts would get shut down pretty quick over here.

[Beau Vine 54002]

26 minutes ago, achooloco said:

Now, only now. Back when the flashing envelope warning was flying around it seemed to span the spectrum of ideas, albeit obviously conservative considering it was a Texas message board.

If you hide the url and user names, for the most controversial/"popular" political threads from 2020 on you'd be hard pressed to guess whether the posts were on TD, Texags, or Hornfans. A lot of the HF posts would get shut down pretty quick over here.

Wait, Hornfans still exists?

 

[Huckleberry 32702]

26 minutes ago, achooloco said:

Now, only now. Back when the flashing envelope warning was flying around it seemed to span the spectrum of ideas, albeit obviously conservative considering it was a Texas message board.

If you hide the url and user names, for the most controversial/"popular" political threads from 2020 on you'd be hard pressed to guess whether the posts were on TD, Texags, or Hornfans. A lot of the HF posts would get shut down pretty quick over here.

Well that makes sense. I only go to HornFans these days in order to dig up embarrassing old posts.

[SydneyCarton 47884]

5 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

Well that makes sense. I only go to HornFans these days in order to dig up embarrassing old posts.

I just stopped by out of curiosity. It feels like it's 12 people, but they're all disturbing fuckheads. 

[Huckleberry 32702]

1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

I just stopped by out of curiosity. It feels like it's 12 people, but they're all disturbing fuckheads. 

My last venture there was just this week to get the link to ctj's Do You Realize How Good We've Got It? post to put it on the basketball forum Chris Beard to Texas thread. Good stuff.

Also, I do think someone with more time and patience than I have could do a good service for Texas youth by starting and running an @AggieOpinions Twitter account with nothing but screen shots of vile TexAgs posts.

[SydneyCarton 47884]

2 minutes ago, Huckleberry said:

My last venture there was just this week to get the link to ctj's Do You Realize How Good We've Got It? post to put it on the basketball forum Chris Beard to Texas thread. Good stuff.

Also, I do think someone with more time and patience than I have could do a good service for Texas youth by starting and running an @AggieOpinions Twitter account with nothing but screen shots of vile TexAgs posts.

I mean, there's already something similar. The Twitter Hashtag #RacismAtTAMUFeelsLike. But that would be pleasant too. Maybe we can get Randolph Duke out of his padded cell and put him to actual good use.