Certainly, fraternities seem to be cesspools of racism and misogyny in many cases on many campuses, but the simple fact is that they’re just intensified Petri dishes for that which infects our culture more broadly. And focusing just on fraternities — or any other singular site or incident—lets our broader society (that is, the rest of us) off the hook.

Just days before the SAE video surfaced, the Department of Justice released a report documenting that in Ferguson, Missouri, a largely white police force routinely violated the rights of the city’s majority black population. The stark and frequent incidents ranged from multiple racist “jokes” emailed by white Ferguson city officials to the fact that black motorists accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops and were twice as likely to be searched as white drivers. Searches of white drivers, meanwhile, were more likely to turn up illegal contraband.

Ferguson and the University of Oklahoma fraternity may seem like aberrant or spontaneous weeds. But they grow, quite deliberately and predictably, from the same rotten soil of American racial bias.