A white sorority at a private Christian university in Fayetteville, North Carolina, has sparked outrage after the organization hosted a racist event at the school last week.
According to WRAL, some members of Alpha Delta Pi Sorority thought it was a good idea to have an event to rate the looks of Methodist University’s Black football players with whites. The bogus rating system, presented in a PowerPoint presentation, included the teammates’ physical attributes like hair, nose and lips.
Methodist University is now investigating the incident.
Senior Ja-Quez Harrell, a former member of the school’s football team and one of the young men who was sent the problematic presentation, told the news outlet, “I don’t see why something along the lines of this is funny. I don’t see how it’s funny.”
“With everybody that was there, how come nobody stopped it?” Harrell added.
Taylor Marie, the sorority member allegedly responsible for the presentation, sent a direct message to Harrell.
“I did not mean for any of this to be targeted towards individuals and certainly did not mean any of this in a malicious way,” she said in the direct message. “It was not targeted at African Americans in any way. I can promise that,” she wrote.
The university has now suspended Alpha Delta Pi from its campus, and the organization’s national office has suspended Marie’s membership, according to WRAL.
The school released a statement saying, “Methodist University is committed to principles of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. We abhor racism in any form on our campus, and we immediately investigate all possible incidents of racism and act on them appropriately, as warranted by the facts.”
The school stands on its diverse student population and is listed as a highly diversified institution. But the lie detector test determined that was a lie. 41% of the school’s population is white, and only 15.8% of its students are Black. 23% of students are listed as unknown.
According to its website, Alpha Delta Pi was founded in 1851 and is touted as the “first secret society for women in the world and forged the way for women in the fraternity system.”
The sorority has a diversity and inclusion initiative that has failed miserably. It also has a committee with just two Black women out of ten to facilitate the effort.
One of the sorority’s diversity tenets includes, “Don’t tokenize others. Be careful not to lean on our sisters of color, especially our Black sisters, to educate you about these topics. There is emotional labor in their being the ones to educate while also managing their feelings – it is not their job to educate the whole.”
It looks like Marie missed the memo.
