Dartmouth College "Editorial"

[LXAAlum]

HANOVER, N.H. -- Late Wednesday night, I was talking with a friend in her room; she and three friends had just been through the rush process together. At its end, her three companions -- two of whom are her roommates -- were all granted a bid to their first-choice sorority. She was not given a bid to that sorority, or to any other.

Suddenly we heard paper rustling and low, excited voices in the hall. The noise settled just outside the room. "Oh God," my friend said, "They're here to decorate the door."

I stepped out into the hall and found myself confronted with three white women crammed into tiny clothing and plastered with makeup. They stared at me, in my jeans and flannel shirt, as though I had just materialized from another planet, or, perhaps, Brandeis.

"Hi. May I ask what you're doing?" The women replied they were decorating the door with their sorority letters, to proclaim that the room was home to two members of the elect. "I see. Were you aware that your sorority rejected my friend, who also lives here?" They were. But it's a tradition, one explained. "Ah. Well, listen: my friend is having a rough time right now, partly because your group rejected her. So until your 'sisterhood' is predicated on something other than exclusion, we don't want any part of it."

I closed the door. There was a muffled conference outside.

"Hey girl, it's me. Can I come in?" one of the women called. As she entered the room, my friend began apologizing profusely.

"I'm sorry for being such a bitch. I'm so sorry. I'm not myself. I was sexually assaulted two weeks ago, and my COS hearing is tomorrow."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Listen, we didn't reject you. It's the system, and yeah, it's screwed up. There are lists for making selections and it's really complicated and we don't really have much to do with it. I'm sorry you didn't get in. Don't worry, we can come back in a few days. And we won't tell your friends that we were here."

Not especially supportive. Not especially courageous. Not especially sisterly.

More like cowardly, obscuring any personal responsibility behind the incorporeal machinations of "The System."

You know this system: it's the same system that, apparently devoid of human involvement, deleted the name of at least one woman who rushed this term, ensuring that no house would accept her. It's the same system that allowed a sorority member to shamelessly ask another friend of mine, "We need a black girl in our sorority. Will you join?" It's the same system that commands that pledges constantly drag around a bunch of crap -- hair bands, Ramen noodles -- and entitles their older "sisters" to accost them and demand these items; if they are missing, their younger siblings must humiliate themselves in public. And it's the same system that teaches that none of this may be questioned.

I've got news for you, sorority women: your system stinks. It reeks of cattiness and jealousy and exclusion, and it is downright putrid. And guess what: if you're in it, then like it or not, you're responsible for it.

The system stinks of something else, too: privilege. According to the Student Life Initiative report (Jan. 2000), while 67 percent of Dartmouth's female student population is white, 81 percent of its sorority members are. This figure becomes even more dramatic when one realizes that it includes the members of our two historically black sororities. The same report also notes that only 45 percent of sorority members receive financial aid, compared to 61 percent of non-affiliated students.

But paramount among all the privileges within the greek system -- and the most antithetical to Dartmouth's stated mission of fostering a diverse, egalitarian and fully co-educational community -- is the privilege to exclude.

Professor Susan Ackerman called it out at a faculty meeting last spring:

"'You're just not right,' 'You'd be happier elsewhere,' 'You don't fit' ... we know this language. It is a language that has long served as a code for discriminating against blacks, Latinos and Latinas, Asians, Native Americans, Jews, gay men and lesbians and women. Like all codes, the language is covert -- so covert, indeed, that I suspect most fraternities and sororities would recoil at the idea that their organizations use this language in discriminatory ways. But I challenge these groups to examine their exclusionary principles carefully, and I remind them, and you, of the SLI data, that these organizations are significantly whiter than the rest of the Dartmouth campus."

To those of you now thinking how much your sorority has empowered you, I say, "Wonderful." But was it necessary for your empowerment that other women be excluded? Can you justify the scorning and marginalizing of your fellow women that occurs in the creation of your "sisterhood?"

Rejecting women who don't quite fit the mold is no way to uplift the status of women in general. Instead, it keeps us all down. It is, in fact, the mark of truly internalized oppression: our oppressors need no longer concern themselves with perpetuating our subjugation, because we women will take care of it ourselves.
This was posted in Dartmouth's paper yesterday....to me, it's very disengenuous....just thought I'd post it here to get everyone else's thoughts.....