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It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:
Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.
In your hypothetical, the student is characterizing being a Nazi as detestable. In the real-life event, the student is characterizing being Black as detestable.
I'm skeptical of widespread American anti-Black racism narratives, and I don't think this case supports them (except weakly at the margin). I think it's possible (although unlikely) that the White girl doesn't harbor meaningful animus towards Black people, and that she was just grasping clumsily for an epithet that carried a powerful valence. I also assume the White girl has some fairly serious emotional problems (as do many people, such as myself) which were exacerbated by alcohol use.
Nevertheless, the White girl's behavior was grotesque. I have no objections at all to expelling her from school.
Exactly. The fact that you reach for a racial epithet when you're trying to inflict pain says something. Racism by the classic definition is thinking that someone is inferior or hating them because of their race.
Analogy, a man can't get it up, he's impotent after an accident. His wife says to him, over and over, "Honey it's fine I love you, not your dick, I don't think any less of you at all! You're still just as much a man as you were the day I married you!" Maybe he even believes her. Then she gets drunk one night, and they get into a fight, and she screams at him "You're not even a man, you can't even fuck me, you're a pathetic eunuch, half a man at best!"
Which is the truth? The polite bromides mouths when she's sober, or the hurtful epithets she reaches for when she is drunk? If someone brings it up when they want to hurt you, whatever they say sober you know they think it but they're too polite to say it sober. It's pretty obvious she does think less of him, and that she thinks he ought to think less of himself.
That said, this kind of incident is beneath notice.
I've never really understood this line of thinking, that the "real you" comes out when you're inebriated. Couldn't both sides of her - drunk and sober - represent what she really thinks, such that one could just as well say that when she's drunk she's being too impolite to say the truth?
I would say that the unfiltered (or at least, less filtered) side of you comes out when you're inebriated. This is the "real you" if you consider those filters to be an artificial construct constraining your true self, but I would not agree. Behavioral filters, like habits, generally are constructed, but they are constructed by a long series of choices that are morally attributable to yourself.
Similarly, however, the choice to become inebriated is a choice to relax those filters (involuntary intoxication is another matter), and that is also a decision with moral weight. In short, if you don't like what you tend to do while drunk...don't get drunk.
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