[Editor’s Note: this article appeared in the Gallaudet University student newspaper “The Buff and Blue” in 2016]
Posted on October 27, 2016
Gabrielle Humlicek
The Buff & Blue
The photo that was circulated on Twitter. It depicts members of Kappa Gamma using the salute
Back in the day, access to information took days, sometimes weeks to find, but with increasing technological advances, we obtain information with just a tweet, post, and text within seconds. Social media, in our generation, is what we use because access to information is vital; it’s how the world functions nowadays. Recently on Twitter, during the last week of September, an old photo of the Kappa Gamma fraternity was tweeted and re-tweeted, and it caused a lot of concerns, anger, and feelings of animosity for Gallaudet students and others. The photo, taken 25 years ago, consisted of Kappa Gamma brothers, with shaded circles blotting out their faces, doing a Bellamy Salute, indeed cause the student body to speak out against the photo.
Why did this shared photo cause outrage amongst the majority of Gallaudet’s student body, especially the ones who use Twitter? For some background information, the Bellamy Salute, developed by James B. Upham, originated as a salute that often times was conjoined with the Pledge of Allegiance, aka, ‘the flag salute’. During late 19th century, the Bellamy Salute was not perceived negatively, but instead, in a very patriotic way. That changed shortly after.
In the 1930’s, Europe was going through a government upheaval, a Jewish genocide, and the Nazis designed a salute that was very similar to the Bellamy Salute. The ‘Heil Hitler’ salute is almost indistinguishable from the Bellamy salute, and the salute represented obedience and adherence to the third Reich’s leader, Adolf Hitler. As civilians of the United States, what Hitler did to the Jewish population was despicable and it is the utmost atrocity any human being can perform. After Germany decided to go to war with the United States, the United States Flag Code for saluting the flag was altered and changed to best fit American morals and values. The United States did not want to be affiliated with the war crimes and genocide that Germany conducted and performed. This is why we, as Americans, place our right hand on the left side of our chest as a respect to our flag instead of doing the Bellamy Salute.
Due to the darkly ingrained history of Nazi Germany and the salute in relation, the Bellamy Salute is not widely practiced anywhere around the world. From time to time, the photo of those Kappa Gamma brothers doing the Bellamy Salute re-emerges and circulates across the internet, like this recent incident. Some of the comments made under the tweet were questioning Kappa Gamma’s lack of response to the public about the photo, and the moral code the whole fraternity carries and respects as a whole. After the questions and concerns about the lack of a statement from the well-known fraternity, Kappa Gamma made a Facebook post to address the circulated photo on September 26th. “The gestures shown are denounced, not practiced, nor accepted in any form by any recent or current administration. These pictures go against our present-day standards of conduct for our members, pledges, and alumni,” the Kappa Gamma fraternity replied, dispelling any doubts.
Source: www.thebuffandblue.net/?p=14840
