From the New York Times opinion section, the umpty-umpth op-ed by a black woman enraged by the sheer effrontery of pretty blondes continuing to exist:
In Alabama, White Tide Rushes On
By Tressie McMillan Cottom
Opinion Columnist
Aug. 22, 2023
Sorority rush is a tradition at many colleges. But in the South, rush inspires the same passionate zeal as collegiate football. Thanks to TikTok, the University of Alabama’s incarnation of that tradition—peak neo-antebellum white Southern culture on display—is now a global phenomenon. …
The current sorority members choose coordinated outfits like crop tops and tennis skorts for synchronized dance routines to promote their chapters on TikTok. There is a lot of hair in these videos—standardized for length and blond in ratios impossible without chemical intervention; it swings exuberantly, signaling good health and traditional femininity. Their robotic dancing to hip-hop songs showcases gymnastic athleticism instead of looser routines made for the club. They keep time, but even the fact that they aren’t clapping on the one and three seems intentional—being cute rather than sexy protects them from the dreaded label “trashy.”
… Their Southern accents are the linguistic equivalent of pointing a ring light at their shiny hair and tasteful makeup. …
For a mainstream culture struggling to adapt to the ways that gender is exploding all around them, that accent is seductive. It says these are ideal women from a regional culture that values traditional gender norms—and people cannot get enough of it.
As for myself, I’m proud to say that my TikTok algorithm has not delivered me any Bama Rush videos. … I assume I don’t get Bama Rush videos on my social media feeds for the same reason that I would not have been an ideal Bama Rush candidate when I was a coed. Bama Rush is very, very white, and my algorithms are programmed for me—someone who is not. Fleit’s documentary touches on the inherited culture and code of conduct that filters for the “right” type of young woman—thin, able-bodied, athletic and, yes, in most cases, white—to rush at the University of Alabama.
… S022, almost 85 percent of the sorority members in the Alabama Panhellenic Association, comprising most of the university’s sororities, were white, a percentage disproportionate to the racial makeup of the university and the state.
It looks like U. of Alabama has three specifically black sororities, which would make up about 8-10% of its sororities. The U. of Alabama student body is 74% white, 11% black, 5% Hispanic, 2% Asian, 3% mixed, and 3% foreign.
By the way, the student body at Alabama is 57% female. So there being 4 girls for every 3 boys (and the boys tend to be straight, affluent, and, in general, Good Prospects for husbands) helps explains the intense female vs. female competition. In contrast, when I was at Rice U., there were 3 boys for every 2 girls, so coeds didn’t bother to wear high heels even to dances.
Consider the university’s failed attempts to integrate rush in concert with its comfort with the social media blitz. While there is no definitive proof of causation between the Bama Rush popularity and the University of Alabama’s fiscal health, the university is coming off record enrollment in 2022, even as the general higher education climate in the United States is being roiled by crises.
,,,For too much of the public, higher education’s complex problems are reduced to culture wars about diversity, gender studies or critical race theory, which have become the brands of many elite, Northeastern schools. In this climate, these sororities’ annual viral juggernaut is counterprogramming to the Northeastern elite university brand. The Bama version is wholesome, nonthreatening, traditional femininity in Lululemon athleisure. For free. Welcome to Emotional Labor 101, Bama Rush ladies. You already aced it.
These young women’s world—which exists outside the frame of a TikTok video—deserves to be taken seriously. Their emotional labor moves a lot of capital. …
Elite status cultures invest a lot in marriages, and that is no different in the South. For all that the sorority sisters talk about bonding and lifelong friends, the power of these sororities is not sisterhood. It’s the brotherhood that desires it. Bama Rush codifies the many incentives behind marrying power and turns them into a long audition to become a handmaiden to patriarchal privilege. Becoming pretty enough to sit at the right hand of machines that chew up history and the future is not my idea of getting ahead. …
This is Alabama. The University of Alabama. This is the university where George Wallace infamously stood in the classroom doorway on the first day of class in 1963 to block Vivian Malone and James A. Hood from matriculating. You look at the images from that period of massive resistance to school integration, at the crowd shots of young white men and women chanting at Vivian and James who are flanked by the National Guard as they broker integration with their lives. The idea that joining a sorority is integration feels hollow, but especially at a place where integration once meant so much.
It might be reasonable to want everyone to have access to what Bama Rush promises. But the sorority does not have the power to confer it, not really. It can only brand it and, if it works really hard and looks pretty while doing it, can grow up to marry it. And I ask, why would anyone want to integrate that?
Sometimes the proper place for something is the past, and the thing just does not yet know it.
I look forward to reading a similarly snippy op-ed by a white woman making fun of Vice President Kamala Harris’s lifelong obsession with being a member of her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.
I’m sure Prof. Cottom is completely unbiased in how she treats white sorority girls in her classes.
