Electronic mail messages accusing several members of the Government of the Student Body of being racist are racing across campus.

Continued debate over funding for the Big Eight Conference on Black Student Government has prompted several senators to send the e-mail messages expressing their disagreement over proposed changes that would decrease the $5,000 allocation to help fund the conference.

The conference is being sponsored by the Black Student Alliance.

The first of several messages was from Senator Arthur Green III, USAC. The message was addressed to the entire Senate.

Green said he wrote the message because, “I’m trying to make the GSB aware that when they make decisions that can be called racist… it’s not just this campus that is affected, it’s the entire country.”

In the e-mail, which Green said was not a personal attack on any one senator, he said, “The fact that every time the BSA or minority students come and ask GSB for money, GSB puts them through a game.”

He also said GSB was “hanging a carrot over the minority students’ heads” and that recent actions were racially based.

Mark Holm, LAS, is one of the senators who voted against the funding bill. He denied the allegations of racism. Holm said he felt threatened by the e-mail.

“Last week we talked about respect, how the BSA and black senators don’t feel respected. When I got this e-mail, if you want respect you don’t treat people like this,” Holm said.

Holm said he hasn’t supported the funding bill, already approved by the Senate and signed by GSB President Adam Gold, because it uses up one-third of the Senate’s discretionary funds on non-ISU students.

Green’s e-mail message didn’t stop with criticisms of the funding debate.

“The GSB is a bunch of sheltered little punks,” he said. “And here you and some other senators go making the whole GSB senate look like bozos.”

Accusations of racism were not taken well by Senator John Hamilton, business, who first proposed the changes in the funding bill.

“I am offended that people would even think that I am a racist,” Hamilton said. “I think a lot of this is a personal attack. … I don’t think that there is black and white; I think everything is gray.” he said.

Green’s letter did have support from other GSB senators, including Zia Hassan, international, and Yasmin Blackburn, off campus, who each sent e-mail messages of their own.

“With due respect, I find your (Hamilton’s) and some other senators intention to move this bill as an act of racism,” Hassan wrote.

Blackburn agreed, and said most groups do not have the same problems getting funding that minority groups have.

“I have not yet heard one feasible argument as to why in the long and arduous history of GSB a problem like this never came up with any of the white groups that have been funded,” Blackburn said.

Hamilton said when students look at this issue they will see that senators are simply fighting for student money.

“There are certain things that every student group has to go through to get funding,” Hamilton said. “I don’t think we treat BSA differently and I don’t think we should.”