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

An Auburn fraternity brother dresses as a member of the Ku Klux Klan for Halloween

[The incident of AU fraternity members wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes for Halloween] could portray Auburn as a racist community. I do not believe Auburn is a racist community.

—Grant Davis, secretary to the Auburn University Board of Trustees

Funny that it keeps happening, then. Davis’s comments were made two years ago in 1999, when members of Pi Kappa Alpha dressed as Klansmen for Halloween and were mildly punished once it came to the eyes of the administration. The hate images put on display this Halloween 2001 by two all-white Auburn fraternities are shocking and horrifying in their own right, but they are not anything new to the Auburn community. Just in the past few years, the Auburn community has seen repeated incidents of racial hate and remains deeply engaged in institutional racism on many levels.

• As previously mentioned, two years ago there was a parallel incident where Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity members dressed as Klansmen for Halloween.

• Auburn’s historically white fraternities are, and have always been, almost completely racially segregated against Blacks.

• Among Auburn’s registered student organizations is a campus chapter of The League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that is tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• Numerous complaints of racial discrimination by Bourbon Street Bar managers in downtown Auburn, including managers inventing phoney dress codes on the spot and lying about city ordinances in order to exclude Black patrons from the bar.

• Pervasive racism in hiring, promotion, and benefits in the Facilities Division (whose workers are overwhelmingly Black, managers overwhelmingly white) has prompted marches, demonstrations, and finally a federal civil rights lawsuit against the University. In response, Auburn dealt with the problem by… ignoring worker complaints and shifting building service workers to a night shift of 4:00pm to 12:30am, which will result in many of them having to quit in order to keep family commitments.

• The Auburn University Board of Trustees consists of twelve white men, one white woman, and one Black man. The senior administration is almost exclusively white (one exception, of course, is the director of Multicultural Affairs). Auburn remains under a court desegregation order to increase hiring of Black administration and faculty and to increase Black student enrollment, but the much-vaunted 24% increase in Black enrollment still leaves Black students at Auburn as only 7.2% of the entire student population.

And there’s a lot more that I couldn’t put together for this hastily-compiled list. Of course, none of this was mentioned or responded to in the administration’s white-washing diversity rally media event. Instead there was everything I had hoped for in a serious, harsh response to the individuals who committed the most recent acts—and everything I had feared in distancing, disavowal, and refusal to deal with the larger environment that nutured the kind of moral obliviousness that would allow frat boys to think that their vicious re-enactments of hatred and genocide were all just a big stupid lark. Look, this is a serious problem in the Auburn community, and one that we’d better get damned serious about dealing with. If we fail, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, I fear that very shortly we will learn that racism is a sickness unto death.

Take action!

Please send polite and carefully-considered e-mails to Vice President for Student Affairs Wes Williams and Interim President William F. Walker urging them to take this hate incident seriously by ensuring that the individuals who committed it and the fraternities who hosted it are severely punished, urging them to permanently dissolve the local chapters of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi. Further, politely but firmly ask them to make sure that their response to this incident include a careful look at the broader racial environment at Auburn and that concrete new programs be implemented to address racism in the Auburn University community.

Two all-white fraternities at Auburn, Delta Sigma Phi and Beta Theta Pi, have been temporarily suspended by University administration [AU] for vicious racial hatred at this year’s Halloween party [SPLC]. Costumes included a hooded and robed Klansman, several white students in blackface, some wearing the shirts of a national Black fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, and one wearing blackface and a noose around his neck. Pictures included posed scenes of lynching and police brutality (all of the frat boys have big stupid grins on their faces—ha ha ha, genocide is really fucking funny, boys). I have known for a long time that the white fraternities at Auburn, and elsewhere, are some of the most reactionary networks on campus. There have been repeated problems from the fraternities for years in terms of racist, homophobic, and sexist discrimination, as well as a long record of repeated sexual violence against women. But this—this took me by surprise. And it disgusts me that anyone would feel like Auburn is a community that tolerates this shit.

I should note that despite the casual use of Southern hate imagery (the Dixie flag, the Klansman robes, the noose) this is not at all a unique problem of the South or rednecks out here as opposed to the Clean Livin’ Folk over yonder North of the Mason-Dixon line. On the contrary: the supposedly progressive liberal arts school that I spent a year in up north was marked by racial hate incidents several times within recent memory. I personally remember a student showing up in Black costume to a Halloween party (nothing as horrible as this, but still unsettling); the previous year a Black student had his bed set on fire shortly after receiving an anonymous letter stating that the college had a No-Nigger Policy. I am disgusted with what has happened here in Auburn, but I could only wish that the world were so well off that this would be a unique event or something that only happened in the South. In reality, racism is a social disease that pervades the entire country, not just us rednecks down here in Alabama.

For further reading:

• Southern Poverty Law Center page on hate on college campuses

Take action!

Please send polite and carefully-considered e-mails to Vice President for Student Affairs Wes Williams and Interim President William F. Walker urging them to take this hate incident seriously by ensuring that the individuals who committed it and the fraternities who hosted it are severely punished, urging them to permanently dissolve the local chapters of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi. Further, politely but firmly ask them to make sure that their response to this incident include a careful look at the broader racial environment at Auburn and that concrete new programs be implemented to address racism in the Auburn University community.