Blackface Comes to UVa. Sensitivity Triumphs. Two Fraternities Suspended

An article in yesterday’s Cavalier Daily, and another on the first page of the Metro section in today’s Washington Post, reveal that two UVa fraternities have been put on suspension pending a thorough investigation of a blackface incident at a Halloween party October 31, photographs of which were temporarily posted on a party-related web site.

According to the Cavalier Daily article,

The photographs pictured one individual dressed as Uncle Sam with his face painted black. Two other students painted their faces brown and dressed as tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams.

“I find such representations hardly fun Halloween costumes, but rather despicable displays of ignorance, intolerance and jocular folly,” [Assistant Dean of Students Aaron] Laushway said.

Patricia Lampkin, vice president of student affairs, voiced a similar position.

“This is not reflective of what the University stands for,” Lampkin said. “Anything that makes any statement against another race is absolutely abhorrent.”

You would think that by now fraternity bozos would have learned that this sort of thing is offensive, or at least that it will get them into trouble. But you would also think that university administrators would have learned a little, well, sensitivity, or something, as well. Exactly what “statement against another race” does UVa Vice President Lampkin hear, for example, in one student in blackface dressing up as Uncle Sam? To whom, and for what reason, is this so offensive? Can Uncle Sam only be portrayed as white? Moreover, precisely what is the offense of two men dressing up as the Williams sisters? Would it have been less offensive to come to a costume party dressed as the Williams sisters but not in blackface? Is this a celebration of or offense to crossdressers? Can the Cavalier Daily really believe that fraternity boys dressing up as Uncle Sam and the Williams sisters is “similar” to an

incident [that] occurred at Auburn University last fall, where local chapters of Beta Theta Pi and Delta Sigma Phi were suspended because their members attended fraternity-sponsored Halloween parties in which they dressed up in Ku Klux Klan robes and painted their faces black. Some fraternity members were photographed pretending to lynch a guest in blackface.

Rather than trying to add a bit of perspective, Vice President Lampkin kept the pot stirred with a letter printed in the Cavalier Daily this morning. “I am writing,” she writes,

because of a recent event that has come to light within our community and has proved to be hurtful and demeaning to members of our community. The event was a fraternity Halloween party where costumed guests chose to dress in blackface and otherwise mock racial and ethnic groups through their attire and demeanor.

Such mockery is not acceptable. The aforementioned costumes, which later appeared in photographs placed on a Web site for viewing by students, symbolize a vestige of the past of which none of us are proud. This particular past is especially demeaning to African-Americans. Many citizens, black and white alike, have worked and continue to work to ensure the end of such cruel symbolism.

I find this statement a bit odd. We indeed have a racist past, but that past is not “demeaning” to blacks. They, after all, have overcome, or even if you’re a pessimist have come a long way toward overcoming. If anything is demeaning, it is discussing boys dressing up in blackface at a costume party as Uncle Sam and the Williams sisters in the same breath with references to a past of slavery, lynching, and segregation.

I propose a compromise: send the boys to sensitivity training, and send Vice President Lampkin back to remedial grammar, where she would be reminded that “none” is singular (“none of us is proud”).

UPDATE – Erin O’Connor, as usual, also says what needs to be said about this.