LSU’s Delta Tau Delta Under Fire for Hate Speech
Earlier in September, the Louisiana State University body was faced with a question of how to deal with an act of prejudice that has riveted and divided the campus community. The Delta-Tau Delta Fraternity at LSU has demonstrated an act of Anti-Palestinian hate after the hanging of a banner that read, “What do Nicholls + Palestine have in common? Getting BOMBED.” While this hate speech is unacceptable under Greek-life and administrative rules, it is something that, like many college campuses, has been dusted under the rug by the administration and has only been brought up by other students according to The Reveille, LSU’s student magazine.
This act of hate speech only occurred days after 9/11, which does not just hold significance because of the history of the terrorist attack itself, but also because of the violent impact that it has had on the lives of Islamic Americans since the attack. Hate crimes against Muslims spiked by approximately two hundred percent directly after 9/11, and increased by five hundred percent in the decade following according to a study conducted by Brown University. LSU, in spite of its cultural significance to the community at large, is a university at its core–a university with Title IX resources and protocols for this sort of behavior.
Although Title IX resources do not have set implications and criteria from what counts as hate-speech and how it should be dealt with, it does vow to protect students from discrimination. In an article written by Stanford Office of Community Standards, it claims that if a verbal statement or an action in question meets the criteria to be reported to Title IX officials, then those officials are required to report it to legal authority. Students and organizations have reported the incident, including but not limited to The Reveille and LSU College Democrats.
An LSU affiliated Title IX official should have been informed about the incident, and although the information has not been made public, they very well may have reported it to someone with the power to enact something on the upper level. Although there are not any laws against hate-speech in the United States, there are laws against inciting violence, and the comment about the bombing in relation to Nicholls State could easily be interpreted as such, given that violent incidents such as shootings and bombings have taken place at many universities across the nation.
With this information, LSU should have taken action days ago. There is precedent for suspending and disaffiliating fraternities, sororities, and other organizations in the past for violation of conduct rules. It is in just as poor of taste for LSU to avoid dealing with hate-speech as it was for Delta Tau Delta to hang the banner up on their porch. By being unresponsive to this issue, LSU is proving itself to be irresponsible and unresponsive to the violence and fear that Muslim communities have faced for over twenty years, as well as the fear that all students and faculty face when they walk into a school.
