THE IDEA was to raise money for a favorite charity and have some fun at the same time. What better way than to sponsor a contest in which women from campus sororities dress members of the Sigma Chi fraternity in female clothing? To make the event even funnier, why not dress each participant as an "ugly woman" and formally call the exercise "Dress a Sig"? That is what led sorority women at George Mason University's Fairfax County campus to dress 18 Sigma Chi members in their idea of ugly women last spring. What helped bring this to the public's attention was one particular version created by the sorority Gamma Phi Beta and the Sigma Chi brothers.
For starters, she had to be black. So they painted a Sig's face black. And since a black woman's hair is not supposed to be straight like theirs, they found a "black wig" to place on his head. Their notion of black ugliness then led them to strap a pillow under his blouse and a pillow to his behind under a skirt. And there you have it -- their very own portrait of ugliness, which is, in the view of brothers of Sigma Chi and their Gamma Phi Beta friends, a bewigged, big-breasted, large-buttocked black woman. "We had done it before, it was funny before, and maybe people went a little too far. We apologized, and it won't happen anymore," said the former GMU Sigma Chi president.
A federal judge in Alexandria has now decided that what Sigma Chi did to black women fell under the protection of the First Amendment. So the fraternity's two-year suspension by the university was overturned. Since the Gamma Phi Beta sisters didn't join the suit of the Sigs, they still remain on a one-year probation imposed by the university. "Although the university disagreed with the message propounded by the fraternity's activity, GMU may not discipline the students by infringing on their First Amendment rights based on the perceived offensive content of their activity," the judge wrote. If freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are to have meaning, they must embrace the unpopular and profane as well the pleasing and harmless. The court opinion should stand.
Still, it needs to be noted that the GMU campus chapters of Sigma Chi and Gamma Phi Beta showed a streak of bigotry and callousness that was thoughtless and mean-spirited. It is astonishing that until they were confronted by outraged black students, they claim to have been oblivious to the stereotyping and to the racial slurs they had cast.
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