sugar and spice |
12-09-2003 11:15 AM |
Quote:
Originally posted by 33girl
I'm not sure if I stated this in the other thread but if you find OLD Baird's Manuals (like from the 20's - 30's - 40's) the racial and religious clauses are often stated outright.
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Really? My school library has an old copy of Baird's from the late 1940s, I think. Maybe I'll go do some research.
I don't understand why some people seem to be so desperate to point out that their historically white organization never had a written whites-only policy. Whether the policy was written or not, we all discriminated on some level, and most of it was pretty bad and supported -- if not required -- by HQ. And the possibility that some orgs might have had this policy well into the 1970s makes me sick.
On the other hand, I'm almost positive that my organization had a whites-only policy in place at one point in time, and given the national rep that my sorority has (conservative, very traditional, and historically very strong in the South) I wouldn't be surprised if we had that policy, written or not, until pretty late in the game too.
As sad as that makes me, I do think it's something we need to discuss and not gloss over and pretend didn't happen -- and unfortunately, a lot of NPC HQs like to pretend it never happened. That's why there's so little written documentation on which organizations had whites-only or no-blacks policies. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe they're so embarassed that we once had these policies that they want to obliterate the evidence. Or maybe it's just that they want to cover it up because they know that in some chapters the same things are still going on. Either way I think it's something that needs to be discussed so we can learn from it.
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