Anyway, I don’t think racism is completely dead. But I also don’t think it’s anywhere near as pervasive as you do. I think that there are a lot of people who are far too credulous when it comes to racism and far too eager to use allegations of racism as a political weapon, so I tend to be very skeptical when I hear people cry racism.

And this story is a perfect example of why I’m so skeptical.

Technically, there is no such thing as statistically significant when the sample isn’t randomly chosen. But I do know what you mean.

I have a fairly rudimentary knowledge of statistics, so I may well be wrong, but I don’t think this is correct. The question is whether the data allow us to reject the null hypothesis, namely that evictions were distributed randomly with respect to race. And they don’t. Not even close (see below).

I don’t think that the two incidents Rachel mentions are evidence at all. These were things that happened 25 and 40 years ago, and for all the information given here, the accusations of racism in the 1982 incident may have completely bogus. But let’s suppose that they were legitimate. How do the actions of the DePauw chapter leadership in one incident 25 years ago constitute evidence for racism in the national leadership today?

Are you saying that you know for a fact that “a Chinese member was allowed to stay,” or is this speculation on your part?

I’ll be honest: When I said that, I didn’t have any evidence that a Chinese member (or any non-white member) was allowed to stay, and I apologize if my phrasing in any way suggested that I did. And I probably went out too far on a limb in suggesting that a reporter from the NYT would commit such a breach of journalistic integrity, and you were right to call me on it.

But what do you know? It turns out that I called it perfectly. Watch the first video clip (”Former Delta Zetas Speak Out”) here. The money quote: “Included in the 23 were all of the overweight students and three of the four minorities in the house.”

Anyway, here’s the available evidence regarding racism:
1. All the black, Vietnamese and Korean members were expelled. Which, by the way, was exactly one of each, for a total of three. Oh, and one non-white student was allowed to stay. So minorities were just barely overrepresented among the evicted, by about 4/10 of a person.

2. There were two incidents, 25 and 40 years ago, in which DZ leaders probably no longer affiliated with the sorority and almost certainly not involved in this membership review denied membership to two minority women, possibly for racist reasons.

3. Elizabeth Haneline, an East Asian member who was kicked out, apparently didn’t suspect racism: “The Greek system hasn’t changed at all, but instead of racism, it’s image now” (emphasis mine).

Wynton, can you link to an actual example of a feminist saying that “enhancing one’s appearance (light makeup, jewelry, etc.) and displaying one’s smarts [are] mutually exclusive”? If you can’t, then I think your credibility here may be forever blown.

What many ardent feminists have never understood is that enhancing one’s appearance (light makeup, jewelry, etc.) and displaying one’s smarts are not mutually exclusive.

At this point, I feel fine completely ignoring anything Wynton ever writes ever. There is so much wrong with that sentence: I have never heard an actual non-straw feminist claim looks and brains are mutually exclusive not being least of them.

Meantime, the one thing I liked about this whole thing is that 6 of the remaining women quit. Kudos to them, I say.

I was looking for an ultra-bright woman, and married her when our paths crossed. She is no less a feminist than my 1970’s girlfriends, but the effort she makes to look attractive is a lesson that some women (even of 21st century vintage) have never learned.

Indeed. Look at the photo in the NY Times article of an Asian girl who was expelled. She was ugly.

The NY Times is probably using this card because race based discrimination is possibly illegal in this context, but there are no laws against discriminating against ugly people

I’d be astonished if a society ruled by women was not subject to a whole host of failings, since the last time I looked we’re human beings too. ;)

Btw, Susan, have you read The Gate to Women’s Country? I think of it a sort of a complement to The Handmaid’s Tale: a dystopian post-apocalyptic fantasy wherein the women have won, and… life still sucks.

I could muster a platoon of men who weren’t sexist, but that doesnt mean we’ve stopped living in a sexist society.

Let’s mate with the ones who aren’t, and the other kind will die out. :)

That race was an issue is purely speculation, and IMO purely groundless speculation at that. Yes, the NY Times tries to turn it into a racial thing by pointing out that all the black, Korean, and Vietnamese members were thrown out,

I find the attribution of motivation here to be odd, for someone who is arguing against “pure speculation.” Are you saying the Times should have deliberately omitted reporting that the evicted members included all the black, Korean and Vietnamese members? As far as I can tell, they merely reported the facts.

but the membership was low enough, and there appear to have been few enough non-white students (note that almost everyone in the picture is white) that it’s probably not statistically significant.

Technically, there is no such thing as statistically significant when the sample isn’t randomly chosen. But I do know what you mean. However, it’s almost always true, when discussing individual events, that the numbers are too low to be able to support statistical claims from a social science point of view.

Can we know for sure that claims of racism are true? No, we can almost never know that on an individual case level. But to say they are “groundless” seems like a vast overstatement, given the history of racism in the Greek system (and possibly in DZ in particular) that Rachel mentions, and the factors Joe mentions.

Call me cynical, but I bet the reason the NYT mentions Korean and Vietnamese members specifically, rather than just “Asian,” is that a Chinese member was allowed to stay.

Are you saying that you know for a fact that “a Chinese member was allowed to stay,” or is this speculation on your part? If it is something you know for a fact, can you please state your source of information?

I suspect all of the women asked to stay were white. If any women asked to stay were POC, it seems odd that Delta Zeta’s official statement denying racism doesn’t mention that. But I admit I don’t know for sure.

Even if a POC was among the dozen asked to stay, however, that doesn’t prove that race isn’t relevant here. As Joe points out, it’s quite possible to adhere to beauty standards (or other standards) that are racist in that they arbitrarily favor attributes more likely to be held by white students.