Diversity on Sorority Row

chronically online @queenie4c

Y’all don’t find it annoying that during #bamarush whenever y’all spot a Black girl in a tiktok y’all rush to the comments like “I hope she’s okay!” “Be careful Black girl!” I know what you’re trying to do and it isn’t coming off as big sis as you think…

#BamaRush is exactly what it sounds like. Two weeks ago was Rush Week at the University of Alabama (UA) where over 2,500 ladies submitted resumes and transcripts to get a spot in their preferred Panhellenic sorority. Many on TikTok, myself included, tuned in like it was a live reality show, picking our favorites and making predictions to see who would get dropped and who would get a bid.

But what is big fun without a little controversy?

This is the big question people asked last year and now this year: Where is the diversity? My question to them is, "Where do you expect the diversity to come from?” For the 2021/2022 school year, there were 37,840 students (grad and undergrad) at Alabama and 21,699 were female. 2,757 of the student population were black females. This year a little over 2,500 people registered for rush, so one can deduce that 11% of the female population at UA went through Rush, and given that black women also have the option of going through the pledge process for a black sorority, and Panhellenic sororities at UA didn’t really desegregate until 2013, I’d say the number of black women rushing is low. Even with the numbers being low, why didn’t we see any of their TikToks? This year we had Grant Sikes, a “non-binary” male who identifies as female and uses she/her pronouns (we’ll talk about that later) who was dropped by all of the sororities by the second to last day of rush, but the TikToks from black women were almost non-existent.