Racist college incidents show need for sensitivity

Burroughs, Todd Steven
Tri-State Defender
11-21-2001
Racist college incidents show need for sensitivity

WASHINGTON -- The recent racial incidents at Auburn University and the
University of Mississippi that showing White students in blackface
simulating lynchings and adorned in Ku Klux Klan robes shatters the
illusion of racial harmony in the wake of terrorist attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"I'm disheartened, particularly after what we've gone through," Evelyn
Crayton, president of the Auburn Black Caucus, the campus's group of Black
administrators, faculty and staff, told NNPA News Service. "It's set us
back."

Auburn University Interim President William F. Walker, characterizing the
actions of the fraternity members as "shocking and outrageous," was this
week expected to decide the appropriate punishment for the students.

The two fraternities involved in the Auburn Halloween party, Delta Sigma
Phi and Beta Theta Pi, have already been suspended from the campus. Delta
Sigma Phi, the first fraternity in the nation to include Jews as well as
Christians in its membership, has expelled two of its members and suspended
four, while Beta Theta Pi has "indefinitely" suspended 13, university
officials say.

The University of Mississippi is facing a similar uproar after photos
surfaced showing a White frat member in blackface, on his knees picking
cotton with a gun pointed to his head by another White member.

The Black SGA president at Auburn, Brandon Riddick-Seals, in a letter to
The Plainsman, Auburn's campus newspaper, says the fraternities' actions
represent "blatant ignorance" and "public displays of racial
insensitivity."

Crayton pointed out the two Auburn University Halloween parties where
members of Delta Sigma Phi and Beta Theta Pi dressed up in blackface and
the T-shirts of a Black fraternity, were organized less than 60 days after
the terrorist attacks. "It's kind of hard to feel patriotic while dealing
with such an incident," says Crayton.

Auburn represents the two contradictory faces of the New South.

On one hand, the predominantly White student body elected an
African-American, Riddick-Seals, as president of the Student Government
Association. On that same campus in southern Alabama, near the Georgia
state line, a fraternity nationally noted for being the first to include
Jews among its members can display rank insensitivity.

The semblance of national unity after Sept. 11 "adds even more shame to the
situation," says William Sauser, associate dean of Auburn's Business and
Engineering school, and one of the school's White faculty members enraged
by the incidents.

The Halloween celebrations took place a month before the Southern Poverty
Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based organization that monitors
domestic hate crimes, was going to deliver an update on terrorism in
Alabama. The SPLC moved quickly to replace the planned workshop with one on
racial sensitivity.

The pictures of White fraternity students in blackface have circulated the
globe via the Internet, sparking renewed debates of racism on America's
college campuses and on the ugly history of derogatory images of African
Americans. The pictures can be viewed on www.tolerance.org, the SPLC's
site.

At Auburn, two White students dressed in baseball caps and in T-shirts
displaying the Greek letters of the Omega Psi Phi, one of the nation's
historically Black fraternities; others dressed up as Klan members. One
student wore a rope around his neck, pretending to be a lynching victim,
with the Confederate flag proudly displayed in the background. One of the
pictured "Klansmen" is holding the end of the rope.

At "Ole Miss," the university that was forcibly desegregated by James
Meredith in 1962, one picture shows a student in blackface on the ground,
pretending to pick cotton with a gun pointed at his head by a fellow
student portraying a police officer.

All of the national offices of the fraternities involved with the parties
on both campuses have denounced their members' activities.

Omega Psi Phi National President Lloyd Jordan called for calm among its
members. He says his fraternity is "appalled that today, in the year 2001,
that such behavior still exists in America, particularly at an institution
of higher learning."

The Auburn campus newspaper's Internet message board, www.plainsman.com,
filled with comments from students attempting to understand the
controversy, particularly since it involved a Halloween party where
students normally sport outlandish costumes.

"When I see White boys at a fraternity party dressing up like the
stereotype... I see it as them mocking the stereotype," says one poster who
signed his correspondence, "Good." The post continues: "That's why I am not
up in arms about it. I can see the humor in dressing up like a `thug' for
Halloween, just the same way I could see the humor in a couple of Black
guys dressing up as `honkeys.'

"They weren't mocking intelligent, great Black men such as Martin Luther
King, Jr., or any of the famous Omegas listed on their web site."

Article copyright Tri-State Defender Publishing, Inc.

Article copyright Tri-State Defender Publishing, Inc.
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