University of Alabama - “ peak neo-antebellum white Southern culture” - NYT

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's an OPINION EDITORIAL. You know, Op-Ed.

One's. Person's. Opinion.

There's a ton of Op-Eds I don necessarily agree with.

Such is life.

Sure - and we are also expressing OUR opinions. Surely you don’t think people write opinion pieces without expecting reaction, commentary, and criticism?

The problem is your opinion sounds pretty uniformed to the extent you are demanding she give equal treatment to black sororities or prove empirically that all white sororities perpetuate racial power structures. That’s not the kind of thing she is doing.

Wut? Now it’s “uninformed” to demand poor Dr Cottom provide evidence for her claims of discrimination in racial power structures? Or that she show she’s sincere about her call to dismantle the entire Greek system by doing more than just bashing a few white women’s sororities?

Let us weep for the state of US education.

— no, I don’t support the Greeks either

yeah honestly, you are missing the boat.

More ad hominems. You have no arguments.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gawd, the obsession that some people have with a bunch of college kids who just want to make friends and have fun (and yes, meet boys…how shocking that college girls want to do that!). It’s not that deep. If you don’t like it, don’t participate.

I mean exactly. I have no kid at Bama or in a sorority but come on, the girls are very attractive. Stop making like it is a bad thing to be attractive.

This is true through sororities including Black ones. The conformity about beauty and behavior is the same.

Dr Cottom as an intersectional thinker would have lots to say about how gendered/racialized/class beauty standards play out at black sororities. However this article is not about black sororities and black sorority rush is not a Tik Tok global trend.

Intersectionality is fine.

You still can’t make claims about your corner of the world (“white sororities perpetuate the white patriarchy”) without at least trying to get us from point A to point B using facts and evidence.

And you still can’t generalize to sweeping claims about how all Greeks are bad after you’ve peered at a handful of white sororities.

This is the NYT, not the UNC student newspaper.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gawd, the obsession that some people have with a bunch of college kids who just want to make friends and have fun (and yes, meet boys…how shocking that college girls want to do that!). It’s not that deep. If you don’t like it, don’t participate.

I mean exactly. I have no kid at Bama or in a sorority but come on, the girls are very attractive. Stop making like it is a bad thing to be attractive.

What's interesting to me is that although the girls are attractive, the dancing itself is often trashy. Basically looks like pole dancing without the pole. Yeah, I'm old but I don't think girls would dance like that in my day.

"Dance like a stripper in order to perpetuate white patriarchy" - there is a PhD thesis in there somewhere.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's an OPINION EDITORIAL. You know, Op-Ed.

One's. Person's. Opinion.

There's a ton of Op-Eds I don necessarily agree with.

Such is life.

Sure - and we are also expressing OUR opinions. Surely you don’t think people write opinion pieces without expecting reaction, commentary, and criticism?

The problem is your opinion sounds pretty uniformed to the extent you are demanding she give equal treatment to black sororities or prove empirically that all white sororities perpetuate racial power structures. That’s not the kind of thing she is doing.

Wut? Now it’s “uninformed” to demand poor Dr Cottom provide evidence for her claims of discrimination in racial power structures? Or that she show she’s sincere about her call to dismantle the entire Greek system by doing more than just bashing a few white women’s sororities?

Let us weep for the state of US education.

— no, I don’t support the Greeks either

yeah honestly, you are missing the boat.

More ad hominems. You have no arguments.

How is that an ad hominem? I’m not saying you’re stupid. I’m saying you are deliberately or unknowingly creating a strawman because this is not a piece of empirical research. If your position is “any claims that the phenomenon of all-white sororities in Alabama is in any way connected to race must be supported with data” then … yeah, you have missed the boat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gawd, the obsession that some people have with a bunch of college kids who just want to make friends and have fun (and yes, meet boys…how shocking that college girls want to do that!). It’s not that deep. If you don’t like it, don’t participate.

I mean exactly. I have no kid at Bama or in a sorority but come on, the girls are very attractive. Stop making like it is a bad thing to be attractive.

What's interesting to me is that although the girls are attractive, the dancing itself is often trashy. Basically looks like pole dancing without the pole. Yeah, I'm old but I don't think girls would dance like that in my day.

"Dance like a stripper in order to perpetuate white patriarchy" - there is a PhD thesis in there somewhere.

that’s where the intersection of gender & class get interesting as well as the sexual politics …

[Anonymous]

"neo-antebellum" is such a silly term.

It's a better fit for the crazies actually trying to start a civil war for largely the same motivations as the original.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gawd, the obsession that some people have with a bunch of college kids who just want to make friends and have fun (and yes, meet boys…how shocking that college girls want to do that!). It’s not that deep. If you don’t like it, don’t participate.

I mean exactly. I have no kid at Bama or in a sorority but come on, the girls are very attractive. Stop making like it is a bad thing to be attractive.

This is true through sororities including Black ones. The conformity about beauty and behavior is the same.

Dr Cottom as an intersectional thinker would have lots to say about how gendered/racialized/class beauty standards play out at black sororities. However this article is not about black sororities and black sorority rush is not a Tik Tok global trend.

Intersectionality is fine.

You still can’t make claims about your corner of the world (“white sororities perpetuate the white patriarchy”) without at least trying to get us from point A to point B using facts and evidence.

And you still can’t generalize to sweeping claims about how all Greeks are bad after you’ve peered at a handful of white sororities.

This is the NYT, not the UNC student newspaper.

yes you can make claims that all-white sororities in Alabama have something to do with race without using data. now you ARE being stupid.

[Anonymous]

Some of this reaction has to do with people being offended at the notion of a “white culture” being described at all.

[Anonymous]

I would invite the poster who finds this piece so threatening to look internally at why they are having this reaction.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would invite the poster who finds this piece so threatening to look internally at why they are having this reaction.

tbh I had an initial bad reaction to the headline because I AM tired of all the “Karen bashing” that is somehow acceptable speech now. However when I actually read it, I found it thoughtful and interesting. I guess I’m a little sympathetic to the argument that “any cultural critique of black women’s institutions would result in cancellation!” but that’s not really Cottom’s responsibility. And as far as I know she has not been on the barricades calling for cancellation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would invite the poster who finds this piece so threatening to look internally at why they are having this reaction.

Multiple posters think this piece is garbage. Garbage isn't threatening.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gawd, the obsession that some people have with a bunch of college kids who just want to make friends and have fun (and yes, meet boys…how shocking that college girls want to do that!). It’s not that deep. If you don’t like it, don’t participate.

I mean exactly. I have no kid at Bama or in a sorority but come on, the girls are very attractive. Stop making like it is a bad thing to be attractive.

This is true through sororities including Black ones. The conformity about beauty and behavior is the same.

Dr Cottom as an intersectional thinker would have lots to say about how gendered/racialized/class beauty standards play out at black sororities. However this article is not about black sororities and black sorority rush is not a Tik Tok global trend.

Intersectionality is fine.

You still can’t make claims about your corner of the world (“white sororities perpetuate the white patriarchy”) without at least trying to get us from point A to point B using facts and evidence.

And you still can’t generalize to sweeping claims about how all Greeks are bad after you’ve peered at a handful of white sororities.

This is the NYT, not the UNC student newspaper.

yes you can make claims that all-white sororities in Alabama have something to do with race without using data. now you ARE being stupid.

You're being deliberately obtuse.

Cottom is making two implied claims. I say "implied" because she doesn't provide facts or evidence for either of them.
(1) These white sororities DISCRIMINATE against black women. It should be obvious to you that it's impossible to argue there's a racial power imbalance without showing black women can't join these white sororities.
and
(2) these white sorority women actually get power of their own via the sororities, instead of "branding" or marrying it.

Cottom provides zero evidence for either claim. Re claim (1), transparently side-steps the whole affinity-group thing that some of her defenders here claim actually make black women want to AVOID these white sororities. In fact Cottom concludes with "who would want to integrate that?", effectively underscoring the idea that black women want nothing to do with these white sororities.

So it's quite a leap to conclude that all white sororities (all white fraternities too?) should be abolished because black women don't want to participate in them. That makes zero sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some of this reaction has to do with people being offended at the notion of a “white culture” being described at all.

Try again. It's fine to describe white culture, but if you're writing for The NY Times, you need to provide some stats, not just your feels.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gawd, the obsession that some people have with a bunch of college kids who just want to make friends and have fun (and yes, meet boys…how shocking that college girls want to do that!). It’s not that deep. If you don’t like it, don’t participate.

I mean exactly. I have no kid at Bama or in a sorority but come on, the girls are very attractive. Stop making like it is a bad thing to be attractive.

This is true through sororities including Black ones. The conformity about beauty and behavior is the same.

Dr Cottom as an intersectional thinker would have lots to say about how gendered/racialized/class beauty standards play out at black sororities. However this article is not about black sororities and black sorority rush is not a Tik Tok global trend.

Intersectionality is fine.

You still can’t make claims about your corner of the world (“white sororities perpetuate the white patriarchy”) without at least trying to get us from point A to point B using facts and evidence.

And you still can’t generalize to sweeping claims about how all Greeks are bad after you’ve peered at a handful of white sororities.

This is the NYT, not the UNC student newspaper.

yes you can make claims that all-white sororities in Alabama have something to do with race without using data. now you ARE being stupid.

You're being deliberately obtuse.

Cottom is making two implied claims. I say "implied" because she doesn't provide facts or evidence for either of them.
(1) These white sororities DISCRIMINATE against black women. It should be obvious to you that it's impossible to argue there's a racial power imbalance without showing black women can't join these white sororities.
and
(2) these white sorority women actually get power of their own via the sororities, instead of "branding" or marrying it.

Cottom provides zero evidence for either claim. Re claim (1), transparently side-steps the whole affinity-group thing that some of her defenders here claim actually make black women want to AVOID these white sororities. In fact Cottom concludes with "who would want to integrate that?", effectively underscoring the idea that black women want nothing to do with these white sororities.

So it's quite a leap to conclude that all white sororities (all white fraternities too?) should be abolished because black women don't want to participate in them. That makes zero sense.

That’s quite an interpretive leap you made there

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some of this reaction has to do with people being offended at the notion of a “white culture” being described at all.

Try again. It's fine to describe white culture, but if you're writing for The NY Times, you need to provide some stats, not just your feels.

I mean she has some stats and cites to legal investigations