Minorities in 'white' frats/sororities

[Lady Pi Phi]

Originally posted by sugar and spice
We've discussed this a few times on the board before, and I'm just going to warn you that it can be a touchy topic, so don't be surprised if it gets out of hand.

I think the main problem is two-fold: a lack of interest from many of the minorities to join, and a sense (justified in some cases, not justified in others) that they're not welcome. This is especially true of African-Americans -- because of the strong history of black Greek organizations, many blacks are raised to not even consider the historically white sororities and fraternities. Now with the proliferation of multicultural/Asian/Latino/Native American/whatever-based organizations, people of color have a lot more choices, and they may not want to join a group that they associate with being "white" (or that has the history of race-based discrimination that some of the NPC/NIC groups do). There are still tons of people out there that don't know that the historically white organizations TAKE people of color, which is ridiculous, but shows what stereotypes we're working against in this country. Also, there are a handful of campuses in this country where the Greek system still is extremely segregated, and these are the places that tend to get in the news quite a bit for the race issues -- and every time that we get another article saying, "Our sorority has never had a black girl in it" it's more enforcement for the stereotype.

I would just like to add to this that another problem could be the lack of diversity on the campus in general. It's very hard to have a diverse chapter if the school is not diverse. It's important to look at the big picture and start increasing diversity on campus before increasing diversity in the fraternity/sorority.