The White House has denounced how some white fraternity members responded to a pro-Palestine protest at the University of Mississippi. A video, which UM student and journalist Stacey Spiehler shot and for the Mississippi Free Press on May 2, showed a white fraternity student dancing like a monkey and making monkey sounds in the direction of a Black woman.
President Joe Biden’s White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Tuesday that she had seen the video, which Republican U.S. House Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia also tweeted with the message, “Ole Miss taking care of business.”
“The behavior captured in that video is undignified and it’s just racist, period, and it is beneath anyone to be sharing that kind of material and the actions in the video are beneath any American,” she said during a press briefing. “And it is insulting to anyone who has to view it, whoever they are, and it is saddening. It is incredibly saddening. We are so much better than that. We are. And we owe it to one another and ourselves to act like it.”
When a reporter for The Grio pressed for an answer specifically about Collins’ tweet, Jean-Pierre repeated her prior comment.
“I think I just said it’s beneath any person to be sharing that video. It’s beneath any elected official, or a leader, to be sharing that kind of material and the actions in that video are beneath who we are supposed to be,” she said.
Collins has since revised his initial praise for the video, saying in a statement that “I did not believe that to be the focal point of the video shared at the time, but I recognize that there certainly seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify.”
In addition to Spiehler’s video showing the fraternity student making monkey gestures at a Black student, Jaylin Smith, another video that went viral on Twitter showed members of the largely white and male group of protestors chanting and hurling remarks at her focused on her weight.
On Sunday, May 5, the Phi Delta Theta fraternity said it had expelled one member over “racist actions” during the protest last week. University of Mississippi Chancellor Glenn Boyce said in a May 3 statement that the university was also investigating at least one student.
“To be clear, people who say horrible things to people because of who they are will not find shelter or comfort on this campus,” the chancellor said.
The roughly three dozen protestors who gathered on the Quad in the Oxford campus on May 2—only to be widely outnumbered by hundreds of mostly white and male students—were protesting Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has killed more than 30,000 innocent civilians since it began last October.
The militant organization Hamas, which invaded Israel and killed about 1,200 Israeli civillians in a violent terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, agreed to a ceasefire proposal brokered by Egypt and Qatar on Monday, but Israel has declined to accept the agreement. Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to continue with a planned invasion of the City of Rafah, where about 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering—most of them refugees from elsewhere in Gaza.
