To the Editor:
Reading about the truly deplorable incident at Psi Upsilon last week, I was reminded of a situation that arose during my senior year, in my last term as president of KDE, which struck me then and now as in many ways paradigmatically symbolic of race and gender relations at Dartmouth.
It was the Tuesday before Homecoming, and at the conclusion of an otherwise routine Coed Fraternity Sorority Council meeting the president of Gamma Delt casually requested that the fraternity presidents stay after. While I had come to respect many of those men as the most thoughtful and well-intentioned representatives of their groups, we sorority presidents also knew better than to miss any explicitly "boys-only" communications. I stayed. He stood, and holding up a t-shirt, he announced, "A guy in my house is selling these shirts; please let me know if anyone in your houses wants one." On the shirt was a drawing of a bulldog performing oral sex on a caricatured Indian; below, the inscription, "Yale Sucks."
What sucks, in fact, is that it was clear to me that the shirts were advertised exclusively to my male counterparts due to the presumption that women would be offended by the cartoonish portrayal of a blow job. Would he have been surprised to hear that on the hierarchy of offensiveness, I was far more troubled by the Indian? (And forever puzzled why self-interested men would seek to characterize that particular act as infused with degradation.) Regardless, the message was clear: on this campus, women get offended -- and men buy t-shirts.
I'm generalizing. But the Indian jacket, too, was the topic of just one of several recurring fruitless arguments I had with male friends during my time at Dartmouth. I never understood why, intellectual and historical reasoning aside, the mere fact that the use of the symbol is very offensive to many people isn't reason enough to trade it in. Some traditions must be carefully preserved, but others just as surely should be allowed to fail, quietly. And some should be firmly and publicly rejected. Times change.
And yet to those who would urge the College to "ban" the Indian jackets, a strong word of caution. While the Bill of Rights may not restrict the actions of private universities to the extent it does the government, the First Amendment should be nurtured and celebrated in an academic community. How immensely preferable to one day see those men reject the hateful image of their own accord. Until they do, no coercive effort should made to substitute force for good judgment. Let the jackets, and the t-shirts that portray women as pigs, and whatever else people are wearing these days serve as their own punishment. Let it be enough that their wearers mark themselves for your easy identification as misogynistic, as racist, or perhaps merely willfully ignorant of community values, disrespectful to the feelings of their peers, indifferent to the dictates of common decency. Just don't let them hide on the balcony.
