The Halloween fallout continues:

Hundreds of students at Union College are up in arms about a student who dressed as a pimp for Halloween. His costume consisted of blackface, an Afro, and a purple velvet coat. The student will appear before the school Conduct Board, and could face anything from a warning to suspension.

At Swarthmore, campus-wide consciousness-raising is taking place after a student donned blackface for Halloween. The student apologized publicly, explaining that he painted his face black on the spur of the moment, as a way of satirizing his less-than-stellar dancing abilities.

At the University of Mississippi, administrators are debating whether to reinstate Alpha Tau Omega after an offensive photograph was taken at last year's Halloween party. In the photo, one frat member dressed as a policeman held a gun to the head of another wearing blackface and a straw hat while kneeling and picking up cotton. Ole Miss has hired the Institute for Racial Reconciliation to perform a "cultural audit" of race relations on campus.

At Oklahoma State, Alpha Gamma Rho has agreed to disciplinary sanctions after two fraternity brothers came to a Halloween party dressed in offensive costumes: one wore KKK robes while the other wore blackface, overalls, and a bandanna with a Confederate flag print. In the photo that was taken of the two, a noose dangled above the head of the student in blackface.

And of course there are the cases at UT Knoxville and UVa. The UT students were dressed as the Jackson Five; the students at UVa were dressed as Venus and Serena Williams, and a black Uncle Sam. FIRE has put together a fascinating catalogue of past blackface cases as well as the relevant First Amendment law.

I catalogue the cases because I want to stress the highly stylized pattern that surrounds the wearing of blackface on college campuses. It's almost always fraternity brothers who do it; they almost always do it at Halloween; they always incur the righteous wrath of the campus; that wrath doesn't distinguish between dressing as tennis stars and dressing as Sambo; there is always some kind of discipline; often, in the process of doling out the discipline, administrators violate the offenders' constitutional rights; there is also always talk of institutionalized racism--the history of minstrelsy is always invoked, as are the less-than-optimal numbers of black students on the campus in question. To say that blackface episodes signify the presence of unreconstructed racism on campus is to miss the wider picture, which is that the donning of blackface is one scene in a complex campus-wide dramatization of the racial tension built into the multicultural agenda that presides over an increasing number of college campuses.

Fraternity members wear blackface not because they don't know that it will be seen as racist, but because they know it will. They are deliberately flouting campus convention with their costumes; I would argue that blackface says less about the racial awareness of its wearer than it does about his rejection of politically correct codes of conduct. The white male fraternity brother is the emblematic oppressor on campus today--he symbolizes all that the many speech codes, harassment policies, sensitivity workshops, and diversity requirements cluttering up his campus most revile. To use the phraseology of oppression theory, blackface as it is worn on campuses today might more rightly be understood as a form of resistance than a sign of neanderthalism. That doesn't make it right. But it might help explain it.

UPDATE: The Washington Times has more.