Without a doubt, one of the things that makes the Boston University Hockey experience so unique is the game-day environment that is created by our student section, particularly the chants you hear routinely throughout a game.
Overwhelming cries of “Let’s Go Terriers” and “Go BU” constantly fill the rafters at Agganis Arena, accompanied by the perpetual and dedicated energy of Chris Parks and the BU pep band. Along with this, you even have some chants that exhibit the kind of wit that you would hope could be gathered with a $50,000 a year education, ignoring last year when people tried to start the “If you can’t get into college, Go to State” song against the University of Michigan (I’m still shaking my head in disbelief).
Whether it’s because of profanity or just the overt messages in particular chants, a lot of what comes out of the mouths of a majority of spectators in the student section borders, but doesn’t necessarily traverse, on controversial and downright inappropriate. For me at least, one of these chants doesn’t just toe the line, it crosses it and more: the seemingly time-honored “Wheels on Your House” song.
For anyone who doesn’t go to games or just isn’t fully with it while they’re present, the chant is set to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round”, but the words are changed in select places so that it goes “The wheels on your house go round and round, round and round, round and round. . .Cause you’re white trash.”
The chant is traditionally saved for games when the Terriers play opponents from places that people from around here deem to be rural, most notably New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and even Western Massachusetts to a point.
The implication of the song is pretty basic. It plays on stereotypes that people who live in metropolitan places across the country like Boston have about those who don’t leave near or around themselves: images of people in raggedy overalls with missing teeth, living in trailer parks, holding onto a Bible in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. All in all, the common image of a “redneck” or “hillbilly” that we all love to look down on in order to feel better about ourselves.
Hysterical, right?
All crude stereotypes aside, what truly angers and outrages me more than anything else with this whole chant is the end of the song and the usage of the term white trash.
Everything before that last phrase in the song is undoubtedly misconceived and ill-informed, but it still seems to be hinting at nothing more than a few cheap laughs; however, by using a pejorative phrase like “white trash”, the song takes on a completely different meaning, one plagued by ignorance and utter hatred.
While the term “white trash” doesn’t carry the same sort of historical implications that slurs like the n-word do, it is still a slur that is unmistakably trying to belittle a group of people whom those chanting it clearly know nothing about.
Maybe part of the reason why this strikes such a chord with me is because I come from a state like Kentucky that is open to these same sorts of “trailer trash” jokes and delusions. I’m always proud of where I come from and I can take a lot of the jokes, but after repeatedly getting asked if I’m married to my cousin, believe it or not, it gets a little tiring, especially once it has become apparent to me that a lot of these people asking these questions aren’t joking-they actually have this idea in their head of people from my state don’t wear shoes and chill with Colonel Sanders on the weekend.
From ignorance stems malevolence, so if you get to saying something enough, it truly begins to sink in, and it goes from not knowing about a person or group, to misunderstanding them, to ultimately hating them.
Hearing this chant reverberate during a game makes me think of all the people that I know who would be deemed “white trash” by the nonsensical people who lead this song-my friends from back home who could never afford to go to a place like BU even if they were qualified enough, my dad who worked his way out of the south end of Louisville to become the first person in his family to go to college.
And what exactly do we accomplish by doing all of this, other than coming across as a bunch of arrogant, spoiled kids who are going to school on mommy and daddy’s tab? Thus, in reality, our ruthless attempt at stereotyping is upholding another convention of the northeastern college kid with his or her nose hoisted high in the air.
Congratulations.
Perhaps the illustrious Jay-Z put it best when he said “You can pay for school, but you can’t buy class.”
The student section, from what I know, has made a concerted effort this year to clean things up, meaning no swearing aside from “The Song”, because, as they like to say, “we’re better than that”.
You know, the last time I checked, if we’re supposedly above hurling obscenities at the Northeastern University student section, we should also be too good to degrade others based on nothing more than crude stereotypes and slurs.
Then again, if a group of hundreds of students is inclined to do a chant like that in the first place, then maybe we’re no better than those supposedly “trashy” people that we verbally diminish.
