“But the White sororities I have seen around here have lots of non-white women in them who are not African-American. Why is that not the case at Alabama, unless discrimination is still really active there?”
Your “around here” means Penn, right?
As a practical matter, Penn, Temple, Drexel, Chicago, and WUStL, where one of my virtual nieces was in a sorority and posted a lot of pix on Facebook.
@JHS First and second gen Asians and Indians tend to self segregate from elementary school on. There have been a lot of posts on it in this forum. It may be due to parental influence or just comfort. They stereo"typically" are not interested in hanging out with a bunch of white girls. Do some minorities go through rush? Yes, but they are still in the minority.
Many second and third gen Hispanics don’t mark the Hispanic box.
Also remember dues are expensive and to the extent SES correlates with race and ethnicity, some minority students will be limited in their ability to join.
Alabama has only 3% Hispanic/Latino. Also “only” 40 % of girls at Alabama join sororities. So even if you had proportional representation, out of every 100 sorority girls, there would be less than half of an Asian girl, and less than two Hispanic girls.
College Board does not reveal the breakdown of attractive vs. unattractive girls, though.
Their statistics show that over 90 percent of girls find a house. There are certainly some unattractive girls in every chapter and some chapters with a lot of them. They just don’t get to be in the video, I am sure.
I’m like Charlie Brown–I want to know about the 10%. Did they fail to get in because they are socially inept, or because of race?
Well, maybe they’re in the back in the big group shot inside the house.
So, all the pretty women get up front here, and for the few women of color and/or those not in the desired height-weight range, please wait, you will get your turn the next go round?
Well, if they were trying to attract smart women, they’d probably feature the smartest ones they currently have.
It’s possible that if they had one black member that she’d be in lots of the shots. You know, like in glossy college brochures.
Attractive is in the eye of the beholder, let us remember.
I think your stats are failing to allow for self-selection. Girls who don’t meet the breed standard for inclusion in the sororities at AL undoubtedly know it, and I’m willing to be that most of them don’t even bother to try.
I also think that you are not taking into account the amount of preparation required to get into a sorority at AL. Reference letters. Attendance at some kind of pre-rush thing in the spring. Legacy.
Girls who have not grown up with that are at a severe disadvantage, and that is likely to disproportionately include girls from other parts of the country as well as girls from other cultures. (And by culture I mean the Southern sorority girl culture.)
My understanding is that it is virtually impossible to just show up on campus at the start of freshman year and successfully rush a sorority.
@Hunt I posted a link to the article on recruitment outcome last night. Many girls drop of out rush at a lot of schools. A lot of them once they see the costs. I just looked and the Alabama houses require you to have a chapter meal plan. All in dues, meals, etc. average 3,300 per semester and the university still requires you to buy a small meal plan. There are additional costs pledge semester. And then you have to “keep up.” Parties, clothes, going out.
Some people only go through rush to see if they will like it. Others because their mother made them.
And yes, some get cut because they are socially inept, too unattractive or had a bad reputation in high school which follows them to college. You can generally overcome unattractive with brains or a good personality, but socially inept is not going to fly.
I agree about the preparation. No, you can’t just show up. You have to start in May/June. First gen girls have it harder but if you know these girls in high school, you can easily figure out what to do.
I haven’t been on CC in a while and I’m not going to read through 21 pages of this, but I have a few things to point out.
- It's not a good or a bad thing, but it's classic CC to have 300+ comments on a five minute sorority rush video.
- Sororities from all over the country have videos exactly like this, I can show you videos from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa that are the same as the videos from Alabama, California, and Florida.
- I saw a "sexier", just as "homogenous" rush video from Alabama a few days before this one came out. I don't know why people decided to jump all over this one.
- If you guys saw fraternity party/concert videos you'd be even more amazed. Or if you want to see something crazy, just YouTube I'm Shmacked
- There are fraternities and sororities that specifically cater to African and Asian Americans. Somehow them being homogenous isn't weird.
@boolaHI if there were minority girls in the chapter, they would be featured just like anything else in marketing. As for unattractive girls, girls know who is going to be in the video. It is a commercial after all.
From the U of Alabama website:
If many of the houses are only open to one race, isn’t this some sort of violation of laws banning non-discrimination in housing?
Not everywhere. In my kids’ schools in Maryland, there were many groups of friends that included both Asian and non-Asian kids.
When I looked that the MIT sorority page posted by pizzagirl, it did not scream sisterhood and togetherness. The message was that they are a group of individual high-achievers who have a loose association in some organization with Greek letters. For example, only one girl participated in the marathon. I understand why you would never come close to 100% chapter participation in that event, but not one other girl from the sorority ran and raised money with her. They posted a lot of other pictures of individual girls doing things, but there was not much togetherness and cooperation shown. So I would imagine that this group would attract busy, ambitious students who don’t have a lot of time for social activities that don’t build their professional resumes. Again, that speaks to preferences, personalities, and yes natural abilities and I see nothing wrong with that. Girls who have other natural talents or desires, like the Alabama women, should be free to do it differently without recrimination.
Secondly, I suspect that young girls will cease the flouncing and hair flipping and general vapidness on the day men stop being attracted to that silliness. For generations, serious, smart girls (someone referenced Jane Eyre, who is a great example) have watched with consternation as the boys flocked to the silly coquettish creatures. Today, women in executive- level positions have trouble finding mates. I have heard complaints from young women my D’s age that most men are still intimidated or put off by openly strong, accomplished women. For some reason, they feel more comfortable with the girls who engage in high-pitched giggling and speak with a cutesy, tentative lilt in their voices. We can also thank the countless wealthy and successful men who insist on dating models. (And yes, I know that some of those models are smart and accomplished, but that does not seem to be the primary appeal.)
Re #300, #301
I went to Penn. My kid goes to Bama. There’s no question there are just a LOT more conventionally beautiful blonde-haired women at Bama than there are at Penn today or when I was a student there 30+ years ago. It’s like comparing apples to plums.
Although, come to think of it, the one coed that all my male friends men drooled over was an unbelievably beautiful blonde young woman (the perfect “shiksa” fantasy, LOL) who could have easily been a sorority queen ANYWHERE if looks were the only requirement. Twenty years earlier, Candice Bergen was a Penn coed. (https://pleasurephoto.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/category/candice-bergen/) From what my first boss told me, Candy, too, was the object of every Penn man’s fantasies. Some things never change. 
At Bama, the nerdy male just has a lot more beautiful women around who will never give him the time of day, LOL. It doesn’t affect his ability to have a great college experience or get a good education either. And there are many beautiful SMART women in STEM and other fields at UA. Some are sorority members, others are not.
Bama also has a very nice Hillel on campus for those with the mistaken notion there are no Jewish students at UA.
In the one recruitment video I watched in which women from the sorority spoke, some of them sure sounded like they came from a part of the country that wasn’t Alabama or anywhere near it. Not that I’m the world’s greatest authority on accents, but I’ve heard George Wallace, Jeff Sessions, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and some other Alabamans as well, including a couple of my cousins who lived in Birmingham until they were 8-10. (None of them was an Alabama sorority girl, though.) Not that they said much, but some of these women sounded nothing like that.
Judge for yourselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ41sevtlD4
Now here’s an Alpha Phi recruitment video that perfectly captures the contemporary zeitgeist, at least in my world. The girls are conventionally attractive and they are doing silly things, yes, but there’s an emphasis on individuality. And they look like a fun, nice group. If my daughter showed me this video and said “i want to join,” I wouldn’t recoil.
[To Pizzagirl’s point, that’s because it is consistent with my regionally inflected world view]
http://totalsororitymove.com/cal-alpha-phi-recruitment-video-california/