Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  Many southern sororities blow up each girl’s rush application photo onto a large piece of poster board to display during the rush meetings held weekly throughout the fall—a semester before rush actually begins. In sororities that use this method, girls told me, it is this photo, more than any other single factor, that essentially determines a sorority candidate’s fate. When a rushee’s photo is shown in front of the membership, the sisters’ candid assessments are unleashed: true examples include “I don’t like her clothes,” “She’s obnoxious,” and “Ew, she’s a total dog.”

  In many sororities, sisters are allowed to use only specific descriptive phrases. In some chapters in the Deep South, the good descriptions include, “She is just the most shining star and she can look so pristine and she went to such-and-such school.” In these chapters, the worst description a sister is technically allowed to give of a rushee—and the phrase used most often when no one likes a particular candidate—is, in full, drawn-out southern drawl, “I think she would shine brighter in another house.” (Conversely, Tri-Delts who think a rushee will fit in use the phrase “She has that Delta Sparkle.”)

  Nonetheless, another nonlist phrase that comes up often is “That girl’s a real slut.” In many chapters, when a sister has objections to a recruit, she can take her concerns to the chapter’s Rush Council, a jury of sisters like the Standards Board. It is the Rush Council’s job to dig up the secrets of rushees, using their sorority’s network of alumnae across the country to unearth potentially damaging dirt. The Rush Council listens to every complaint about a freshman, such as, “I heard she’s already slept with seven Pike brothers—and it’s only September.” The Rush Council then investigates the claim and the girl’s reputation first by calling the alumnae chapter in the girl’s hometown to ask those members to find out as much about the girl as possible. The members of the council then talk to people on campus (usually their boyfriends) to try to confirm rumors. In these chapters, it is up to the members of the Rush Council to weed out the undesirables, to ensure that the sorority doesn’t accidentally admit a girl who would never belong.

  FEBRUARY

  Every once in a while one member’s behavior negatively affects those around her. Her actions, which are inappropriate and unsisterly, lessen the quality sorority experience that Kappa Delta attempts to provide to all members . . . Acceptable reasons for placing a member on National Probation: 1. Disparaging remarks against the Sisterhood. 2. Refusal to cooperate with the chapter. 3. Violation of the principles of the Order, which make her uncongenial to the other members of the Sisterhood.

  —The Norman Shield of Kappa Delta, 2003

  FEBRUARY 26

  SABRINA’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  I am simultaneously colorful and invisible.

  IT WAS COMPOSITE DAY at Alpha Rho, the day when a professional photographer came to the house to photograph each girl for the Composite. The large, framed compilation of portraits of each sister—organized alphabetically and by pledge class, with the exec board and the older sisters on the top—hung in the chapter room with Composites from previous years. This afternoon, like every year at this time, the sisters were complaining that it took at least thirty minutes to put on makeup to prepare for a photo session that took only two. While one sister posed in the chapter room, the next five or six girls were crammed into the small bathroom across the hall, helping each other fasten black drapes around their bare shoulders. This was no easy task. Once the drape was on, a sister couldn’t move her arms without disturbing the way the drape fell. Therefore, each girl had to do her makeup and fix her hair, have another girl close the drape, and then walk like a penguin across the hall for her photo.

  “Can you help me with this cape thing?” a sister asked Sabrina. “Last year it was pulled down too much and showed way too much cleavage.” Sabrina stood on her toes and raised the drape. “Wait, don’t pull it too high—I still want to show a little!” Now surrounded by penguins, Sabrina was the only one in the room who hadn’t preened. The sorority had instituted a new rule this year that required the girls to wear their hair down and unadorned for the Composite. (Caitlin had persuaded the exec board that Sabrina could keep her hair in braids.) This meant that Sabrina, who didn’t wear makeup and therefore had nothing to primp, was assigned to drape-fastening duty as she waited for her turn. Most of the sisters passed the time gossiping about who was taking whom to the upcoming Date Party.

  Sabrina wouldn’t be going, again—this time because she was reeling from her relationship with Mike. After weeks of getting the runaround, she decided that she was tired of the way that Mike, who seemed always to be busy this semester, had been ducking out of possible dates. When they were together he would profess his love for her and bring her daffodils, but when she phoned him and left a message, sometimes it would take him days to return her call. When she finally reached him a few days before Composite Day, he said he would call her back at seven the next evening.

  He called at eleven.

  “Why didn’t you call me at seven?” Sabrina asked.

  “I had things to do,” Mike replied.

  “Why didn’t you call me and tell me you had things to do?” she pressed.

  In the ensuing three-hour discussion about his insecurities, the professor brought up his past girlfriends. “Every time we broke up it was because I was afraid to let them in,” he said.

  Sabrina loved him, she respected him, and she appreciated the way he had, as she put it, furthered her “intellectual development.” But she was not going to be his lapdog. For the first time, she realized, she was more mature than her professor was.

  “Okay, fine,” she said to him. “Clearly this isn’t working for you. But you’re an adult, so you go figure out what you want. I’m done with this.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’ll try harder.”

  “First you get your head straightened out, and you do it alone,” she said. And hung up the phone and wept.

  As the photographer told her to smile, Sabrina glanced at the walls full of Composites from prior years and wondered why she had ever thought she would truly belong. Alpha Rho was probably the most tolerant top-level white sorority at State U. And still, as Sabrina looked over the white backdrop, it pained her to confront a reality that she was nonetheless reminded of every day she spent with Alpha Rho: out of now 160 sisters, still only 2 of them weren’t Caucasian.

  The only reasons Sabrina had rushed Alpha Rho as a freshman was because Amy was rushing and because she liked the way the prestigious sorority promised access to a network. Not only had Sabrina not considered rushing a black sorority, but she also hadn’t seriously pursued any sorority other than Alpha Rho. Only after her freshman year Bid Day, when as a pledge she was required to be at the house much of the time, did she notice how much she stood apart from her sisters. The veneer that had glossed the house during rush quickly wore thin, exposing the true politics and stereotypes of a sorority. Sabrina had almost dropped out. But when the sisters kept telling her, “Stick with it. It gets better,” she believed them.

  She questioned that prediction now. Sabrina loved a few of the girls in the house as individuals, but the baggage that came along with sorority life—the herd mentality, the materialism, the disproportionate wealth, the stuck-up attitudes—made the girls as a group inordinately more difficult to bear. She was unwilling to believe that her sisters’ occasionally racist remarks were meant maliciously. Many of these girls had been raised to think a certain way, and Sabrina felt she couldn’t blame them for that. These were girls who didn’t understand what it meant to be poor and who certainly didn’t understand what it meant to be black. Sabrina had noticed, for instance, that when the girls described white guys, they would say things like “He has brown hair with blond highlights and blue eyes.” But when they described black guys, they would use descriptions like “Who’s that big black guy downstairs?” Once, Sabrina had asked Caitlin about it.

  “Why do white people always say stuff like that?
”

  Caitlin pondered. “Well, for me personally,” she spoke slowly, “I don’t know how to describe black people. They just seem to have less describable features. I know I sound like an asshole, but I don’t mean it that way.”

  Sabrina brushed it off. She knew Caitlin wasn’t racist—and that she didn’t fully understand the underlying racial tension in the house, and in the country in general, because Caitlin had grown up in a mostly white neighborhood that didn’t deal often with these issues. There was simply a level of ignorance among white Greeks that Sabrina assumed she couldn’t hope to overcome. This would explain why Alpha Rho didn’t offer bids to the nonwhites whom Sabrina had given high marks. The sisters couldn’t comprehend the value of diversity, which didn’t make Alpha Rho—which at least did have black sisters—much more tolerant than the other sororities on campus. The year before, when Sabrina’s friend rushed another sorority on campus, she asked a sister if there was diversity in the house.

  “Oh, sure we’re diverse,” the sister told her. “We have blond girls, red-haired girls, and a lot of brown-haired girls. I think we have a Spanish girl, too.”

  A few days after Composite, Sabrina was playing games on her computer when she overheard some Pents talking about an attractive fraternity brother.

  “Mmm, I would love to take him home with me,” Bitsy said.

  “Well,” Fiona interjected, “he’s black.” State U’s historically white fraternities were much more racially inclusive than the sororities.

  A third Pent nodded. “My parents wouldn’t be happy with me if I dated someone black.”

  Sabrina stood up. As she walked past them to go downstairs, they abruptly stopped talking.

  Another night, well into pledge period, the exec board distributed to the sisters the list of pledges and the girls the execs had assigned to be their Big Sisters. Fiona was once again holding forth in the Penthouse, complaining to a large audience of Pents about why so many of the sophomores hadn’t been given their first-choice Little Sister.

  “They must have given the officers first pick,” Fiona whined. She read aloud the list of Big–Little Sister pairs, commenting on each one. “That match makes sense,” “That one’s understandable,” “That’s a shady match.” When she got to C.C. and C.C.’s newly assigned Little Sister—Andrea, the stylish sophomore with braces—she stopped. “This doesn’t make sense,” Fiona announced. “Other people like that pledge, too.”

  C.C., sitting unnoticed on Sabrina’s bed on the other side of the Penthouse, quietly wept on Sabrina’s shoulder. “Why is this an issue?” C.C. asked Sabrina. “Why don’t they think I’m cool enough to be her Big Sister?” Sabrina was incensed. Fiona’s implication was clear: why should a black girl get a white Little Sister if the white girls wanted her, too? The longer Sabrina lived in the house, the more she noticed how Alpha Rho seemed to be an elitist institution for people who had grown up believing they were privileged. Sabrina could have said something then, in the Penthouse, with all of the girls there and C.C. still crying in her arms. She could have confronted Fiona. But she said nothing.

  “One Hundred Percent Apartheid”

  THE MOST EMOTIONAL I EVER SAW SABRINA WAS IN EARLY March, a few weeks after Composite Day. She sought me out to rehash what I had initially assumed was the last straw for her. That afternoon in the TV room, Sabrina and other sisters were watching MTV when one of the girls talked about a skit she and her friends had performed at her private high school.

  “For our talent, we dressed up like Busta Rhymes, with the pigtailed dreadlocks, muscle shirts, and bling bling [jewelry],” the sister joyfully recounted. “And we painted our faces black! It was so hilarious!”

  Sabrina’s stomach dropped. “Excuse me,” Sabrina said politely, to make sure she had heard the girl correctly. “Did you just say you guys painted your faces black?”

  “Yeah!” the sister said, as the other girls on the couch laughed. “We painted our faces black and it was the funniest thing!”

  Sabrina couldn’t believe that the girls would laugh about blackface right in front of an obviously black girl.

  “Did you say anything?” I asked her.

  “No,” Sabrina sighed. “I was surrounded by a group of laughing white girls. Clearly I couldn’t say anything.”

  “But if these are your ‘sisters,’” I challenged her, “why do you feel you can’t or shouldn’t say anything?”

  “Well, I’m not ready to say anything to them yet. I know a lot of shit, I just don’t know how to articulate it in an effective manner yet,” she said.

  “But haven’t there already been a lot of instances this year when white girls in your house have had racially insensitive conversations?”

  “Ha,” Sabrina said. “‘Racially insensitive.’ I don’t know if that’s the right term for it.”

  “Well, last time when we talked about Fiona’s comments and I called her racist, you said she didn’t mean to be and so you didn’t know if you’d call it racist,” I said.

  “It’s not like they’re being ‘insensitive’ to racial issues—I don’t think that people should speak about racial matters in a sensitive manner,” Sabrina explained. “But some people just don’t get it. My sisters are nice . . . for the most part . . . but most of them have grown up with privilege or in sheltered worlds, so they don’t even think about worlds other than their own. So I just feel like they just have no idea.”

  “Have you thought about educating them?” I asked, having assumed that a sisterhood should naturally encompass a mutual learning experience. “Not that it’s your responsibility, but maybe they’d get it if you clued them in that they’re not the center of the universe. The sorority has eating disorder speakers and drunk driving speakers, but nobody can have a serious discussion about race?”

  “But there are sooo many of them compared to little me. I would become this object of . . . I don’t know,” Sabrina said. “It would be very uncomfortable for me to say anything.”

  I asked what would happen if she did speak up.

  “Most of my sisters aren’t receptive to reality or to new ideas,” she said. “I know from being in this house that if I were to say anything, number one: certain people wouldn’t like me anymore because they would think I’m just bitter. They would refuse to listen. Number two: people would pity me. Number three: people would think I’m a hypocrite. Number four: people would constantly be asking me stupid questions about it. And number five: I’d just feel like even more of a token than I already am.”

  “Why would you be a hypocrite?”

  “Because if I were to teach them some things about race and society, they may be like, ‘Well, you’re in a sorority and you’re in college, so you have no right to speak about this,’ or something like that. I feel like either all the girls see me as a token, or they don’t even see me as black. They’re color-blind or something.”

  “Even if you and C.C. were to stand up in front of the sisterhood together and start a dialogue?”

  “We’re two people out of one hundred and sixty,” Sabrina said. “Things would be awkward, and then C.C. would have to defend me or maybe even dismiss me because she would have the other girls asking her questions all the time, or making comments about me or what I say.”

  “Have you discussed this with C.C.?”

  “Not really. Just because you are brown doesn’t mean that you think differently from white people.”

  “Then why do you stay?” I asked.

  “I would have dropped out last semester but I don’t have an affordable place to live.”

  “Is that the only reason you stay in Alpha Rho?”

  “Basically. But while I’m here I try to make the most of it. It’s a learning experience, I guess,” Sabrina said. “I mean, I’m not really learning anything new, just getting more experience in how to deal with things. Because I’m in college, where people are supposed to be diverse and liberal and yada-yada-yada, but that’s not really the case. So when I ente
r the working world, I know that I am going to find more of the same stuff that I find here. I might as well learn how to cope with it.”

  I was still wondering how such a “together” girl could take the kinds of abuse I watched her sisters inflict on her without giving any of it back. “So do you think that throughout your Alpha Rho career you’re never going to confront anyone—not just about race issues, but also people like Fiona for treating you as an inferior?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “If I were able to remove myself from this situation, I probably would. But I have to live here and can’t get away for the time being.”

  I was startled by the level of ignorance at Alpha Rho, supposedly the most racially accepting white sorority on a campus that was generally perceived to be tolerant and liberal. If a minority girl here at State U—a girl with more composure and awareness than the average college student—had to have such a large reserve of strength on hand simply to survive sorority life on a daily basis, I wondered how black girls fared in the Deep South, where sorority membership is a crucial part of both university culture and adult life.

  In August 2000, the Alpha Gamma Delta house at the University of Georgia was voting to cut a few of the eleven hundred girls who had attended the first round of rush, when the sisters read the name of a particular candidate. Sophomore Ali Davis saw that some of her sisters had given the girl terrible scores. When she asked what the girl had done to deserve the scores, a sister responded, “She’s black. I don’t even know why she’d want to come to our rush.” Another sister asserted that if Alpha Gamma Delta admitted a black girl, “none of the fraternities would want to do anything with us.”