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Crowd-funding Campaigns Have Raised $75,000 for the SAE Fraternity’s Black Chef

The chef, at work.
The chef, at work.

As it turns out, the guy who cooked for Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s terrible University of Oklahoma chapter is a black chef named Howard Dixon … who’s out of a job now that OU has shut down the frat. Distraught by this exceptionally cruel consequence, two guys who say they’re SAE alums have launched a pair of crowd-funding campaigns to “make sure he lands on his feet.”

The first, an Indiegogo page that launched three days ago, has raised $60,000 from over 1,000 donors so far, and it’s already funded. The other, on GoFundMe, has pulled in $15,000 of its $50,000 goal. “Some ignorant kids have quickly destroyed something that thousands of men built,” one alum, Blake Burkhart, writes on Indiegogo. “You know and I know that this isn’t the house we lived in.” Meanwhile, the anonymous GoFundMe creator says the frat’s doors deserve to close, but that it’s unfair to a longtime staffer like Dixon, “a hard-working and loyal employee for over 15 years, always making it in through rain, sleet and snow.”

It’s worth noting that Dixon still thinks of the frat brothers as “his family.” He says he didn’t know the bus chanters very well yet because they were pledges, but that doesn’t make the current controversy any less troubling. “We know people think like that,” Dixon told CBS, “but to be right here, looking at your face and eating your food … to do something like that, that was very shocking.”

[WP]

Crowd-funding Campaigns Have Raised $75,000 for the SAE Fraternity’s Black