In response to the racist hate imagery at Halloween party, Auburn University has revoked its recognition of the local chapter Delta Sigma Phi [AU], and the national board of directors of Delta Sigma Phi voted to dissolve the local chapter. The University also withdrew its recognition of the local chapter of Beta Theta Pi, which had already been dissolved by its national board. Disciplinary action is still being considered for the individual students involved.

The Southern Poverty Law Center gave a presentation on building diversity and fighting hate on campus, which about 100 people attended. Meanwhile, well after we are done purging the people involved in this particularly heinous act of racism, the broader context of overt bigotry and structural racism in our community, the context that the administration is doing everything to distance itself from. And no wonder: they are an overwhelmingly white Good-Ol’-Boy administration which remains under a court desegregation order to recruit more Black students and faculty, and which has had a federal discrimination suit filed against it by Black workers in the Facilities Division. If we draw attention to the broader context of racism in the Auburn community, they are implicated.

I have been returning again and again to the theme that the Auburn community as a whole is accountable for fostering and enabling these images. Indeed, as images, no matter how cruel and horrific, they are actually not even as bad as the economic and political structural racism that continues to afflict our community. However, I want to thank Southern Poverty Law Center for pointing out again that this is not a problem unique to Auburn, and it’s especially not a problem unique to the Deep South. Note their list of known hate incidents on campus. Note that, despite what anti-Southern defensive bigotry would make many assume, Northerners and Westerners are all over this list: California, New York, and Massachusetts all have more incidents than Alabama or Mississippi. Hey, guess what, virulent racism is not limited to those of us who speak with a drawl. If we continue to delude ourselves and scapegoat a demonized South, we not only undermine the real accountability that the rest of our country needs to take, we are also going to ruin the hopes for change in the South: the more the problems of the South are treated as a unique problem, as long as we are led to believe that the South is nothing but irredeemible maleducated bigots, poverty, and Right-wing zealots in unfliching control of it all, as long as we are led to believe that as soon as you cross the Mason-Dixon line it all gets better… the more we make progressives and radicals, those of us who might fight to build a social justice infrastructure in the South, just want to get the hell out to the supposed utopia outside of ol’ Dixie. We lose 90% of our potential for change from people just giving up and moving out. Meanwhile, the progressive community in the North, caught up in the nonsensical belief that most of its problems are already solved, falls into stagnation and complacent lifestylism. Well, listen up y’all: if there is hope for anywhere, there must be hope for the South. Nowhere else is there a part of the country which has had to so thoroughly and so constantly confront its own history of sexism, racism, classism, homophobia. We are the birthplace of Frederick Douglass, the Grimké sisters, Harriet Tubman, Lucy Parsons, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the home of SNCC and SCLC and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Our task has to be to unite and build a social justice infrastructure in the South, not to cripple our efforts by invoking class prejudice against rednecks.

For further reading:

• GT 11/14/2001 Auburn chapter of Beta Theta Pi dissolved, and commentary on the moral crippling of laid-back liberalism
• GT 11/9/2001 the broader context of racism in Auburn
• GT 11/6/2001, the original report on the Halloween blackface incident
• I come to realize my Southernness at a Northern school
• GT 3/16/2001 More on anti-Southern prejudice and elitist Northern faux liberals
• GT 7/27/2001 Southern Girls Convention works to build radical infrastructure in the South

The national board of Beta Theta Pi has announced that it will be suspending and indefinitely dissolving its Auburn chapter [link courtesy of the ever-awesome Max] in response to the fracas over racist hate imagery at the local chapter’s Halloween party. Delta Sigma Phi’s Auburn chapter remains under investigation for possible further action by their national board. In addition, individual members and both chapters may face disciplinary proceedings by the University for discriminatory harassment and violation of alcohol policies.

I should say this. I have been really sharply rhetorical so far in my stories and discussions of this most recent incident. I think the callous, racist cruelty and the horrifying nature of the images demands it. But I do want to say that I am not blind to the human element of this whole event, and it saddens me that many young men’s lives may be permanently knocked back, as a result of what they surely thought of not as racism or any kind of conscious malice, but just a lark, a stupid good time.

I don’t just say this because I know people in the Auburn fraternity system who are not the sloped-brow, amoral, reactionary meatheads that the Greeks’ history on Auburn’s campus might lead you to believe they would have to be—although this is definitely true; I have friends in the fraternity system who neither have nor want any part of that mindset. I also say it because I really regret that the meatheads that were directly involved will probably never understand just what they did wrong. They will understand that they did some dumb things that got them caught. And they may look back and grumble at the P.C. Thought Police Bastards who ruined their college career. But will they ever understand that there really was a very deep cut of wilful cruelty in what they did? They didn’t put on those costumes in order to be malicious racists (although I believe that there was certainly some overt malice involved). They put them on to have a roguish bit of fun, that old irreverant frat boy panache. Meaningless images of MTV gangstas and some documentary on the Klan they saw in school or on the History channel—trivial, ultimately, like the whole flux of images across our consciousness. Anything can be funny, right? If you don’t really go out and attack Black people, the images don’t mean anything, do they?

But words, images, costumes, historical scripts do mean something; they mean a hell of a lot. The images and rituals, the signs of white supremacist brutality in this country have a meaning, a meaning they are rooted to by centuries of blood and chains. But we live in an age in which the detached image and the spectacle is omnipresent, and yet the prevailing laid-back liberal ideology tells us that we have no reason to care, indeed, that if we do care it’s a sign of pretentiousness, humorlessness, a general need to lighten the hell up. And it’s slowly, surely killing our conscience, eating away at the possibility of being moral agents. Which has what to do with frat boys in Klan robes? I really fear that this soul-killing laid-back liberalism, the impetus behind the costumes in the first place, will also cripple the boys at Beta and Delta Sig from ever understanding what they did wrong, the cutting cruelty that they were willing to ignore in order to have a laugh. Just as much as their hate party outrages me against them, what it means also saddens me for them.

Nevertheless, I don’t hesitate to say that they must receive the harshest sanctions from the University, and I maintain that the fraternity system as a whole must be re-examined and challenged for the rather disgusting and reactionary culture that it helps maintain. I firmly believe that every time a frat house is bulldozed, an angel gets its wings.

For further reading:

• GT 11/9/2001 on the broader context of racism in Auburn
• GT 11/6/2001, the original report on the Halloween blackface incident