COLLEGE RULES

Lock Haven University

 I don't think I was any happier than I was the day of my high school graduation. It felt like the racist chains that the school had ahold of me by were finally broken. I was so excited to finally leave my town and go into college and finally experience a large population of diversity. I ended up attending a college in Pennsylvania called Lock Haven University. It was a smaller division 2 school, with  African Americans being the second largest population of the school.

I was assigned my roommate, who was also a student of color. She was from a area with high diversity in it. I also became close friends with another girl of color, who much like my roommate came from an area of high diversity. It was so crazy to see how much different we all grew up. For them, there wasn't as much racism during their middle school and high school experiences. Like I said, they were constantly surrounded by a diverse group and grew up in a black family.

As I met more people in college, different people would consistently comment on how I acted. Within the first couple of weeks, I had a hard time figuring out where I fit in. I had a bit of an identity crisis. I realized the groups around me didn't necessarily intermix with each other unless they were on a sports team together. The white individuals only really hung out with other white individuals, the black students only ever hanging out with other black students, and so on. I know that not every single person did this, but a majority of them did. There was a social divide between the groups and I wasn't sure where I fit in.

I was always told by other POC that I was too "whitewashed" to be considered "black", but I was too "black" or "ghetto" to a lot of the white people to be able to hang with them. I had such a hard time figuring out who I was within the first couple weeks when I got to school. However, I found myself intermixing with a lot of different groups.

A couple weeks into college I considered joining a sorority to create closer bonds with people. Whenever I walked to class, members of different sororities sat at tables along the walkway. They were there in an attempt to recruit new members. Every day I would walk by, waiting for them to say something to me, but they never did. However, they would say something to the stereotypical "white girl" behind me. At first I didn't think much about it, but then I started to take a look at the diversity within the sororities, and realized there was little of it. 

Members of Greek life all over the country talk about the discrimination within these organizations. For example, The University of Alabama was in hot water after students of color were denied bids from historically white sororities. 

Now I don't know if it was just a coincidence that Lock Haven didn't have much representation of POC in these organizations, but it's still weird to see. In my personal opinion, I don't believe that the sororities in Greek life are as inclusive as they are said to be. I believe even when there is POC in these organizations, there's still a racial divide. At the end of the day, I believe that universities need to do a better job of promoting diversity within these organizations.