Pledged (32 page)

It wasn’t as though black aspiring sorority sisters had a choice. Until the 1960s, most white sororities were contractually obligated to their national organizations to refuse membership to nonwhites. White author Rita Mae Brown wrote, “My sorority sisters were horrified by my civil rights activities. I was dismissed via a little handwritten envelope in my mailbox, silver, gold and blue border, Delta colors.” But since 1963, when federal law prohibited Greek groups from discriminating based on race, black sororities have grown exponentially. Black Greek-letter organizations estimate that 75 percent of black leaders in business, government, science, and the arts are members of NPHC sororities or fraternities. Membership has included such popular women as Star Jones and Maya Angelou (Alpha Kappa Alpha), Aretha Franklin and Lena Horne (Delta Sigma Theta), Zora Neale Hurston (Zeta Phi Beta), and former congresswoman Gwendolyn Cherry (Sigma Gamma Rho). Patricia Roberts Harris, the first black woman to be appointed dean of the Howard University School of Law and the former secretary of housing and urban development, was the first executive director of Delta Sigma Theta. The night President Lyndon Johnson appointed her ambassador to Luxembourg in 1965, she said, “While there are many things in my life which have prepared me for what I am about to do, it is largely the experience of Delta Sigma Theta which gives me the most security.”

Much of the success of black sororities can be attributed to their primary purpose. While white groups are largely college social organizations, black sorority sisters sign up for a lifelong pursuit of common service and cultural ideals. Unlike the white sororities, black sororities offer graduate and alumnae chapters that members are expected to join after college; prospective members need not even be undergraduates to join in the first place. According to the NPHC, graduate chapters expect each member to “attend regular chapter meetings, regional conferences and national conventions, and take an active part in matters concerning and affecting the community in which he or she lives.”

At one of these conventions—the 2003 Alpha Kappa Alpha North Atlantic Regional Conference held at the Baltimore Convention Center—I attended the opening event, a public meeting. During that session, devoted to speeches from sorority officers and the presentation of “Spirit Awards” to Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Chief Charles Moose (who could not attend) and Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, I was surrounded by women swathed in salmon pink and apple green—the AKA colors—from their hats to their sneakers. From the start, I was struck by the main difference between this opening session and that of the white Greek Leadership Conference in Pittsburgh. Here there was no talk about boosting numbers to fulfill a quota, no side discussions about mandating specific types of clothing. Rather, the vast majority of this meeting was devoted to talking about community service. (There was also a short discussion of public service; Maryland State Senator Gloria Lawlah noted that of six African American senators on the Maryland floor, three of them were AKA women.) Speakers addressed the sorority’s efforts to improve health care and literacy and strengthen the family bond of African Americans. “Always giving back to the community,” said the sorority’s international president. “This is the foundation of the heart of Alpha Kappa Alpha.”

This theme encapsulated one of many differences between white and black sororities. Sabrina and Melody, it turned out, had good reason to think that the black and white sororities were not interchangeable. These are not organizations that are born from the same beast; they embrace entirely different meanings of the idea of being pledged to a sisterhood. As Irene Padavic and Alexandra Berkowitz revealed in their aptly titled study “Getting a Man or Getting Ahead: A Comparison of White and Black Sororities,” all of the black sorority sisters they interviewed said that community service consumed the majority of their sorority time. By contrast, the white groups were focused on date events and romantic relationships—something that black sororities, which don’t have lavaliere and candlelight ceremonies, are not concerned with. Meanwhile, the researchers pointed out, the white sororities in their study had elaborate ceremonies to celebrate when sisters achieved various stages in their romantic relationships, but one white group’s award for the sister with the highest grade point average, unaccompanied by ceremony, was a bag of potato chips.

I spoke about these issues with Mary L. Bankhead, a Sigma Gamma Rho and Eastern Illinois University graduate student who was working on a thesis about whites in black sororities. She described three additional major differences between black and white sororities. First, she said, “I’m in Sigma Rho for life. If I choose not to pay my dues, I’m not active but I’m still a member. In [national white sororities], if you don’t pay you’re not a member.”

Second, black sorority candidates, who aren’t allowed to join as first-semester freshmen, are expected to learn about the sorority before they choose which group to rush. “You can’t join when you’re seventeen or eighteen and don’t know what you’re getting into. We get a chance to know each other beyond the superficial crap so the people who join really know they want to be in that particular group,” Bankhead said. “Whites are about what they can learn about the organization as a pledge instead of before accepting. Their attitude is, ‘Whoever picks me I’ll go from there.’”

Third, Bankhead told me that in the black sororities the continuity of a chapter and the recruitment process—which black sororities call the “Membership Intake Process” (MIP)—rely on far less bureaucracy than in white groups. A chapter of a black sorority begins MIP with an interest group meeting (not necessarily the same week as the MIPs of other black chapters on campus) during which the sisters give a presentation about their organization, explain MIP, and distribute application forms. Interested candidates are discouraged from applying to more than one chapter and, in some sororities, are interviewed by undergraduate and/or graduate members. And that’s it—no rush parties, no open houses, no Preference ceremony, no ranking. Candidates are judged on criteria that include their GPA, community service experience, leadership roles, and the way they mesh with the members. If a candidate is rejected, she is welcome to apply again, both as an undergraduate and/or after she graduates. “In my sorority, as long as you’re in good standing financially and not in trouble, you can go through the Membership Intake Process,” Bankhead said. “White sororities are based on money. They’re
forced
to take people or get shut down. My undergraduate chapter now has six people and it’s functioning.” (It must be said that black sororities are much less likely to have houses, which can affect the number of women that Nationals believe are necessary to maintain the chapter’s bottom line.)

These varying emphases lend black sororities a much different aura from that of white chapters, beginning with a sense of inclusivity. Unlike white sororities, black sororities generally hold events that are open to the campus and the community, instead of emphasizing the kinds of closed parties that are supposed to be one of the main perks a girl can gain by joining a white group. Parties, in fact, are not emphasized nearly as much as service and networking opportunities. Furthermore, attention to scholarship is not merely lip service: a 2002 study found that black and other minority Greeks achieved higher GPAs than white Greeks. And the network that is available both within and among these sororities is far more perceptible than with white sororities. As a former national president of a black fraternity told Virginia Tech professor Elizabeth Fine, active black Greeks are “the best trained, most highly experienced, and most influential people in the black community [and belong to a] network that cannot be matched anywhere in the black community. The NAACP can’t match it; it doesn’t have the highly trained and sophisticated people you’ll find in a fraternity or sorority. Even the black church doesn’t have it.”

This is not to say that black sororities are flawless. Agendas of the sororities’ national organizations are similar to the “Message from Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.,” a mission statement from the late 1990s: “The future vision of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., simply stated, is to raise its voice and its volunteer service commitment to assist African Americans in our search for racial, social, and economic parity.” Some black sorority sisters I spoke with said they wished the chapters would focus on the community as a whole, rather than on a specific African American demographic.

Additionally, some of the drawbacks of white sororities pertain to black sororities as well. Although black groups generally don’t base their membership selection on looks, some black sisters have admitted that their chapters use “the paper bag test”: rushees with skin darker than the bag don’t get in. Moreover, in 1990 the presidents of each of the black national sororities and fraternities banned pledging, replacing it with an educational process lasting between three days and three weeks, during which time new members perform community service projects and attend meetings about their sorority’s history, structure, and values. But the transition hasn’t necessarily gone smoothly. Student and nonstudent members have since divided into “old school” and “new school” camps, with the old schoolers charging that nonpledging sisters haven’t earned their letters.

Some chapters have continued not only to pledge girls, but also to haze them. In 1998, a Western Illinois University Delta Sigma Theta pledge told police that during her pledge process, sisters kicked and pushed her, ripped her hairpiece from her head and stuffed it in her mouth, and forced her to eat whole raw onions, hot peppers, and a concoction of vinegar and hot sauce until she vomited. She also claimed that sisters ordered her to do one thousand sit-ups until the skin on her behind cracked. Additionally, she was allegedly forced to use her elbows to grind cornflakes until she bled into them—and then to eat the cereal. In 2003, Virginia Union University suspended its Zeta Phi Beta chapter when several sisters were fined and convicted of misdemeanor hazing for paddling a pledge; after being struck approximately thirty-five times, the pledge was taken to the hospital for her severe bruises.

In many chapters that abide by the ban on pledging, the step show has become more important as a way to prove and publicly display devotion to the group. The NPHC recommends that step shows “convey positive political, social justice, and moral messages.” New sisters are now taught their sorority’s signature steps as part of their initiation process and are encouraged to participate in shows. “Step shows,” Professor Fine wrote in her book on the topic, “have become a key venue for displaying and asserting group identity as well as for negotiating the status of each group within the social order.”

Latina groups, too, have adopted stepping as a dominant expression of group loyalty. More similar to the black groups than to the white groups, the fourteen national Latina sororities belong to the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations, which formed in 1998. Latina sororities are easily identifiable because their pledges can often be spotted marching silently around campus in a line that moves only at right angles. They step in time, expressionless, refusing to acknowledge the friends they pass and the spectators who inevitably heckle them.

A 1999 alumna of the Sigma Lambda Upsilon/Señoritas Latinas Unidas sorority explained to me the meaning behind “lining,” which white Greeks, who traditionally have not lined, are quick to define as a militant form of hazing. “The line is about unity because you’re walking in unison. You’re there for each other—literally someone is behind you. Sometimes people try to harass the line, but the line does not respond. It teaches you to focus academically and prioritize your life. When you spend your day stopping and chatting with people, you waste two or three hours on nonsense. We’re cutting out the extraneous social stuff,” she said. “People are curious. Some people are nice enough to ask about the line, but other people walk up to the pledges and harass them. When people see blacks and Latinos pledging, they’re quick to say that that’s hazing. Meanwhile, we see white pledges with black-and-blue eyes. In our sorority, if you don’t want to do something, you don’t have to do it.” The pledge process for many Latina sororities is public and “like a cross between the military and the Girl Scouts,” the Sigma Lambda Upsilon said. “It’s to teach self-discipline. You fight for things in the community.”

Members of Latina sororities described to me a scene that differs markedly from that of their white counterparts. Latinas don’t generally stray far from home when they are growing up—no overnight summer camps and few sleepovers, a Latina sorority member told me. “So when you go to school in the boonies, with trees everywhere, it’s a culture shock. You’re lonely and far from home, so we consider the sorority to be family.” For these girls, the sisterhood, or
Hermandad,
is said to last
hasta la muerte
—until death—and exists so that the girls can support each other in an unfamiliar environment. “Our sisterhood doesn’t look like any of the white sororities,” the sister said. “A lot of our girls came from poverty and had to fight for scholarships. Some of them are single mothers. And they all work hard.”

Some sororities do not limit membership to a specific ethnic group. Mu Sigma Upsilon, founded in 1981 at Rutgers University, was the first multicultural minority Greek-letter organization in the country, with a goal of “unity among all women.” A senior sister at one of MSU’s nineteen chapters told me it has succeeded. “I have been asked many times why I, a white Jewish girl from East Brunswick, New Jersey, would join a ‘minority’ organization rather than a mainstream sorority,” she said. “It’s true that I get looks sometimes when I’m wearing the letters or when I’m surrounded by my sisters. I have sisters of all nationalities and religions: Latina, African American, Filipino, Italian, Egyptian, African, Asian, Christian, Muslim. People can’t figure us out when we are all together. There have been many instances in my life when I have been criticized or penalized for being different. What I loved most about MSU was that the differences between each person are celebrated.”