Rise above the hate

On Thursday morning, IU students woke up to hate.

Scrawled with chalk, a multicolored line traversed campus, encouraging passersby to follow it.

It started at the Showalter Fountain and claimed to promote AIDS awareness.

“Got AIDS? They do. Follow the line,” it said. It wasn’t a timeline of AIDS victims or a history of the disease’s struggle to overcome social phobias.

Rather than advocating for AIDS testing or promoting resources for dealing with the disease, the chalk line quickly descended into a series of homophobic and AIDS-phobic accusations leveled at Phi Gamma Delta fraternity.

The chalk line became a compilation of almost every offensive term imaginable for gay people and AIDS victims. “Loose buttholes,” “cum guzzlers,” “sausage jockies,” “fudgepackers,” “assless chaps” and “bangin’ monkeys” were just a few of the insults scribbled in rainbow chalk.

Other terms made light of the disease. One sentence simply read “bottomless buckets of AIDS,” with an arrow pointing toward the Fiji house.

Although the perpetrators of this are technically still unknown, many have assumed it was probably done by a rival fraternity, likely as a pledgeship duty for new recruits.

Most pledgeships involve pranks targeting other fraternities, although such pranks are usually limited to acts deemed “harmless” such as throwing a rock through a target’s window or spray painting a target’s official sign.

No one could claim that this act was harmless.

Whether it was done jokingly or not, there’s no excuse for perpetuating homophobia and AIDS-phobia on campus.

Bloomington is considered one of the most gay-friendly cities in the nation, and IU has been voted one of the most gay-friendly campuses in America. This is no small audience you’re offending.

But whether there’s a huge gay population here or a tiny one, this behavior is unacceptable.

To write such insults on paths many students must take to get to class fosters an environment of hate and fear.

Although IU is a gay-friendly campus, the perpetrators seem to forget, or just not to care, that being anything besides heterosexual is still a difficult thing.

The LGBT community has only recently begun to be accepted into mainstream culture after thousands of years of repression and violence. The wounds are still fresh and made all the more painful by acts like this.

It’s supposed to “get better.” This proves that’s not always the case.

Moreover, researchers are still grappling to overcome the stigma of AIDS.

It wasn’t so long ago that Ryan White of Kokomo was kicked out of his high school for having the disease.

AIDS victims are still struggling to be socially accepted, with many unable to tell others about their condition for fear of alienation.

Ridiculing AIDS victims and gay people as a way to embarrass another fraternity is ignorant, hateful and tasteless.

It’s ignorant to think this act would go unpunished or unnoticed. It was hateful to use the aforementioned slurs. It was tasteless to belittle historically oppressed communities for some petty prank.

While we, along with others on campus, believe it was someone else within the greek community, this assumption has not been proven.

Whether or not we are correct, we will say that it’s acts like these that give greeks, especially fraternities, a bad name.

Many people outside of the greek system associate fraternities with homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, violence and a handful of other negative qualities, based on their own observations, biased media portrayals and long-standing reputations.

These ideas are not necessarily true, but acts like this only add fuel to the fire. It’s telling that the perpetrators chose accusations of homosexuality and AIDS as the ultimate insults against Fiji.

It speaks of a wider culture of hate.

Regardless of whether this was a pledge prank, this incident serves as an opportunity for the greek community to combat the negative stereotypes with which it is often associated.

If this goes uninvestigated and unpunished, the blame will also lie on those in leadership positions within the greek system and on the IU administration for letting such behavior slide.

Failing to make an effort to find out who did this and administer appropriate consequences is akin to showing you don’t care enough about this hate speech to pursue the issue.

We call on the administration to take a stance. Let the members of our community and students on our campus know hate is not an idea IU tolerates.

We know greeks aren’t inherently bad, so we also call on the greek system to rise above their negative stereotypes and to prove through their behavior that they are better than the bad seeds that likely did this.

And to the gay community and AIDS victims on campus, we express our solidarity.