About a week ago, the blogosphere picked up on the story of the Delta Zeta sorority that purged its membership:
The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members.
Allow me an aside. Once a year, I indulge in the purchase of People Magazine. Yep, I buy the post-Oscar double issue. So I was reading said double-issue, and I come across a story on the Delta Zeta fiasco. Which reads that every girl who was overweight or “not glamorous” was kicked out. No mention of race. I re-read it more closely. Not one mention. None. Race, it seems, didn’t factor into the People version.
Is it me, or is it racist to blip over this important fact?
Not me.
This is what comes to mind.
I noticed the word “dehumanized.” For quite some time now, we’ve been up to our eyeballs with wars on various things/nations as well as our reproductive education, rights, and options. Dehumanizing to many. Along with that came many very controlling attitudes towards women and their bodies. Dehumanizing to many. Women often internalize and hurt each other in an environment like that. It’s a vicious cycle and a very powerful one to alter. Altering such vicious cycles would alter many of the family values and other raging polarized debates. That would in turn result in changing foci, and changing foci affect power, fortunes, and wealth…things the Power Elite would like to keep a tight reign on. The Power Elite control major media. Hence, major media lets a lot of things “slip.”
Prejudice. With all the power and control struggles going on, it’s become acceptable to define people by which side of a dividing line they’re on (rather than on character, issues, and choices) — white, black, male, female, Christian, Muslim, Christian, Pagan, Christian, Atheist, Republican, Democrat…
Sigh. What they did in the sorority is very sad but not as surprising.
I read the People article, and I immediately thought of Animal House, when the “undesirable” pledges Mohammet, Jugdish, Sidney and Clayton are all sitting off to one side…..
What occurred to me when I read your post was “Would it have been racist to specifically mention the race of those expelled?” Because it wasn’t race that was the overall factor – it was undesirability. In some cases it was the race of the person that made them “unfit”, in other cases it was weight, and probably in some cases it was facial attractiveness – based on a specific “look”. So I wonder – if race had been mentioned in the article would it have been perceived as the primary factor rather than just one factor among others….
I think if you expunge every non-white member, and every overweight member, and an article only mentions the weight issue, then the article is slanting away from weight in order to soften the blow. And the blow does not warrant softness.