Fight Song for New Hampshire Hockey Team
Banned As ‘Theoretically Racist’
DURHAM, N.H.
“Black Betty,” a rock song used to rally fans at University of New Hampshire hockey games for about a decade, is no more.
Athletic Director Marty Scarano told the campus newspaper, The New Hampshire, that the 1977 song by the band Ram Jam was banned because it is “theoretically racist.”
The NAACP deemed the song offensive to Black women when it was initially released nearly three decades ago. According to the Concord Monitor, the university has received intermittent complaints about it for years.
Two years ago, a student group that studied diversity at the school said it should be banned. Scarano says a more recent complaint pushed him to outlaw it, though he didn’t say who complained.
The song has been played at the start of the second and third periods of UNH hockey games for more than a decade, according to a school Web site. But complaints about the song have also come in to the Hockey East Association, the collegiate league where UNH plays. Hockey East spokesman Noah Smith says league members have had “a couple of discussions” with UNH officials and decided the song was “probably inappropriate.”
But Smith says Hockey East couldn’t force UNH or any other school to stop playing a song.
