Archive for October, 2006

The idea of restraining the legislative authority in the means of providing for the national defense is one of those refinements which owe their origin to a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.

~Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 26)

The great desideratum in Government is, so to modify the sovereignty as that it may be sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to controul one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controuled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society.

~James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 24 October 1787)

Why A Racist Fraternity-Sorority Exchange Deserves a Campus-Wide Response

This column was printed today in the Daily Illini.

Imagine for a moment that the headline on the front page of today’s Daily Illini declared that a fraternity and sorority had held an exchange in which attendees came in blackface and ate watermelon and fried chicken. Now, back off from that just a tad, and you’ll have the actual headline, declaring a “Mexican Exchange” held recently by the Delta Delta Delta sorority and Zeta Beta Tau fraternity with the theme, “Tequilas and Tacos.”

At this exchange, participants hit piñatas, wore sombreros and wife-beaters, dressed as gardeners, and had fake bellies to pose as pregnant Mexicans. Pretty hilarious, huh?

A response to the event quickly mobilized. Cultural organizations and houses expressed their disgust, the president of the Panhellenic Council condemned the event, the Illinois Student Senate’s Cultural & Minority Affairs Committee began formulating a response, and the presidents of both Delta Delta Delta and ZBT, Emma Miller and Brandon Keene, issued letters of apology.

Patty Garcia, the president of the United Greek Council, wrote a letter to administrators, faculty, cultural house directors and student leaders calling for ideas on how to “address, correct, and educate” students about this matter, saying “I feel that it is only right that something at a larger level gets done.”

This is not the first event like this. For years fraternities and sororities have held ghetto-themed parties that play off racial stereotypes just as this exchange does.

In an e-mail to me, Keene, who attended the event, said that the leadership of his chapter “did not have reservations prior to the event, nor did we see it as offensive.” He continued by saying that “a few individual members of the fraternity and sorority involved did engage in insensitive stereotyping,” and said the chapter would “work with the counseling department to increase awareness so that a situation like this can be prevented in the future.”

Many will be tempted to use this event to paint the Greek system with the same brush, much the same way this exchange painted the Latino community with the same brush. But the Greek system is an all too easy scapegoat for what is in reality a campus-wide and nation-wide problem. Be it this exchange, the unthinking “humor” of Carlos Mencia, or the minstrel show that is VH1’s “Flavor of Love,” our society has come to celebrate racism by labeling it irreverence. In the widespread national outrage over “political correctness,” we defend negative stereotypes as “jokes” and can thus claim anybody who doesn’t like them simply doesn’t have a sense of humor.

But where is the joke? Where is the biting satire, the witty observation, the clever pun in a group of privileged, predominantly white college students playing “dress up like a person with darker skin than you”? How exactly can that be interpreted as funny?

And yet, as Garcia put it in her letter, “I just don’t think that the campus community completely understands why it is wrong to make money and entertain yourself through a culture.”

And so the University must respond. The answer is not merely inflicting punitive wounds on those who organized and participated in this embarrassment. Some have called for the Delta Delta Delta and ZBT houses to be shut down. Such a solution would do nothing but foment more anger and resentment and would lead the University down a slippery slope of regulating what students think and how they express themselves.

A better solution is available. A broader campus-wide educational campaign should be undertaken. Far too many students will laugh this event off and roll their eyes at those who have been offended. But the behavior engaged in here was not a joke, it was an insult.

This is not an overreaction by the PC-police coming to stifle the free exchange of ideas and turn everybody into humorless automatons. Part of this University’s obligation to educate and enlighten is to persuade students of the fact that this kind of behavior is deeply wrong. Anything less would be negligent.

UPDATE: Two letters to the editor on this subject were printed today, here and here, both blaming the event on the racist atmosphere promoted by Chief Illiniwek. I specifically avoided mentioning the Chief in my column so as to avoid starting that debate up, but if you want an excuse to scream at each other about him, here’s your chance.

The comments section under my post of Jon Stewart’s debate with Bill Bennett has spurred discussion of whether legalization of gay marriage will lead to legalization of polygamy, and whether or not that would be a good or bad thing. Here I will argue (1) that there is no reason legalizing one form of marriage will lead to legalizing another, and (2) that while gay marriage should be legal, polygamy should not be.

Much of this is merely an exercise in logic and the law. Decades ago, debate was circulating about whether the government should recognize interracial marriages. Ultimately, of course, advocates of its legalization won based on the argument that race is not a legitimate criterion with which to restrict a man and a woman who are in love. That assertion today would go unchallenged by the vast majority of this country’s population. Today, we see a debate over whether the government should recognize same-sex marriages. The argument made by the advocates of this change is that gender is not a legitimate criterion with which to restrict two loving adults. That assertion is being debated and I need not go into that debate here.

The point is that while I would argue that gender is not a relevant factor in a marriage, I would not use all of the same arguments to make that point that advocates of interracial marriage made decades ago. They are two separate and unrelated debates. Advocates of interracial marriage could easily be opposed to marriage rights for same-sex couples, because there are different reasons to be opposed and in favor of each form of marriage. The only way one argument could lead to the other is if one is arguing that any kind of relationship between consenting adults should be recognized as marriage. Some people do argue that, but I certainly am not, and there is no inconsistency in not doing so. Interracial marriage advocates had to argue why race should not restrict marriage. I have to argue why gender should not restrict marriage. Polygamists have to argue why number should not restrict marriage. They are three different arguments.

If marriage is to exist at all, it must have some definition. How we define it depends on what we think it is good for and how we judge the morality of certain types of relationships, and those judgments will be different for each type of relationship.

So why do I think gender is not a reason to deny marriage rights but number is? This is where the argument moves from logic to social science. Polygamous relationships, on the whole, subjugate women and hurt children. Men with several wives can have several children at the same time, stretching already thin resources even thinner. Polygamous communities often engage in arranged marriages of younger women to older men, frequently in incestuous relationships. Steve Sailer has argued that polygamy hurts men (if 20% of women are married to 10% of men, then 80% of women are left to compete over 90% of men).

These are reasons, and there are others, as to why legalizing polygamy would be dangerous for our society. Now, these arguments may be right or wrong; they are based on very preliminary and superficial research on my part. But the point is that these arguments cannot be leveled against same-sex marriages, and thus the two issues must remain separate and distinct.

This is the single best trouncing of an opponent of gay marriage I have seen, and it comes from (who else?) Jon Stewart.