I’ll preface this with I really don’t care what they play after the game, but regardless of what anyone thinks about the song and it’s history, context, and meaning — that it’s plainly racist, maybe racist, or obviously not racist — those emails and what they represent have to be very discouraging to black students and black student athletes. As someone who is pretty insulted from that garbage in my day-to-day life, it’s discouraging even if it isn’t surprising.
There’s real merit to the idea that the song’s history and origins are unclear but it now functions as a unifying force (or at least did) and has shed whatever racist meaning and history it might have once had, but a bunch of old racists sending plainly racist emails about the song kind of hurts that case. Like I get the case for the song not being racist, but these emails are telling me that the racists seem to think otherwise. That doesn’t completely sink the chances of keeping the Eyes, but it sure doesn’t help.