[Steeltrap]

From another list, a commentary on the Auburn situation from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The author's name is Tony Norman:

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
November 9, 2001

NO EXPIRATION DATE ON STUPIDITY AT ALA., MISS. COLLEGES


Forty years ago, Auburn University admitted its first black student. He was a brave soul who didn't mind being shadowed by 100 Alabama state troopers if that's what it took to get the education the American Dream said he had coming to him.

Twenty-three years later, one of the school's two dozen all-white
fraternities finally got around to admitting a black pledge who had a very high tolerance for humiliation. It was a historic moment that meant nothing. The times were in no hurry to go a-changin' in Alabama. Today, Auburn's all-white fraternities are determined to maintain the same sad percentage of blacks adopted in 1984 by admitting one guileless black pledge to their ranks per generation. After all, somebody has to be on the bottom.

Auburn's monochromatic fraternities have been able to maintain this quota to this day, though two recent Halloween "lynchin' parties" at the school may cause the one black pledge still hanging around the white frats to reconsider the company he keeps.

Last week, the good ol' boys of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi
threw Halloween parties on different nights with identical themes: Old-fashioned racial degradation as fun and games.

Judging by the photos posted on the Internet by a not-too-savvy photo service soliciting future business, the Halloween parties were a racist hoot.

The not-ready-for-prime-time Klan parties featured frat boys in
blackface wearing faux Afros and mugging for the cameras. They
flashed stereotypical gang signs and large pieces of fake jewelry and wore their hand-scrawled FUBU shirts proudly.

The less imaginative nitwits wore T-shirts bearing the legend of
Omega Psi Phi, Auburn's black fraternity. Two "ghetto-studs" posed with white sorority girls sporting Playboy bunny ears. They were supposed to be "hoochies," I suppose, but I've seen packs of stray dogs that were prettier.

But the photos that will stick with me forever were taken at Delta
Sigma Phi's party. Two men holding shotguns to the head of a grinning man in blackface, pose before a large Confederate flag, making the connection between that symbol of racial oppression and the kind of people who revere it.

A frat boy in a Klan outfit grips a noose around the grinning man's
neck, recreating a moment all too familiar in American history. Just
like the people in the lynching photographs now on display at the
Andy Warhol Museum, they are all smiles, oblivious to their moral
idiocy or the obscenity of their actions.

These pictures wouldn't be out of place in the Warhol's "Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" exhibit because they provide contemporary analogies to those long-ago images of actual murder. If they were postcards, you'd expect to read "Guess what, Ma? I went to a mock lynchin' today," scribbled on them.

Auburn University is embarrassed by all of this, of course. Both
fraternities have been suspended pending investigation. Several
students in the photographs have already been suspended or expelled from their fraternities.

To his credit, the president of Delta Sigma Phi apologized to the
members of the university's Black Student Union for his chapter's
shenanigans. The BSU was so startled by the student's willingness to forgo the usual Alabama song-and-dance, they applauded him.

Meanwhile, Auburn's interim president has garnered rave reviews from the city's blacks for dealing swiftly with the fraternities. Everyone appears eager to use the insult as an opportunity for long-neglected dialogue across the racial divide.

This is a good thing because racist Halloween parties are catching on in the Deep South. One state over, at the University of Mississippi, two students were expelled from Alpha Tau Omega fraternity yesterday after a photo of their Halloween antics migrated to the Internet.

A professional photo service looking for business from fraternities
posted those pictures, too. If I didn't know better, I'd swear these companies were fronts for the Klan's chief nemesis.

The offending picture at Ole Miss featured a frat boy dressed as a
cop holding a gun to the head of a second idiot in blackface. If
all-white fraternities conducted just one party-planning session
sober, they'd avoid these embarrassing situations.

Now we're all wondering if the old cliche, especially about the
South, is truer than we'd like to admit: "The more things change, the more things stay the same."