Derby Days is the first convergence of Greek life on campus during the fall semester. It is your introduction to the Greek life competition, and it must be taken seriously. At dinner, some of the girls who will be participating in the lip sync competition tonight start to arrive. Someone tells you that they will be lip-syncing to some rap song. You can’t help but laugh because you can only imagine how funny it will be to watch a group of skinny white girl’s rap. You’ve just finished clearing your plate when you exit the kitchen and see something you’ve only ever seen in pictures. You see Sister S, in full blackface. Sister S is wearing baggy blue jeans, a wife-beater, an oversized button-down tied around her waist, a bandana wrapped around her head, and chunky skater sneakers. You don’t realize that you’ve been frozen staring at her until she comes up to you.

“What do you think Kristin?” She asks you with such pride in her voice. She does a spin so you can see the whole outfit. “I am supposed to be Drake!” She continues to explain the outfit to you. She is pulling at her pants which are dragging on the floor. Her chains clink against each other. “You don’t think I went overboard with the make-up, do you?” Finally, you break out of the trance you are in from analyzing her outfit. You truly don’t know how to respond to this question. “I asked Mimi, and she said it looked fine.” You wonder why Mimi, Black sister number two of five, would say that. Was it because Mimi was a part of Sister S’s sorority family? Did Mimi truly think there was nothing wrong with this makeup? You start thinking about Mimi more than Sister S.

“It’s fine,” is all you are able to get out of your mouth before you quickly walk away toward the first-floor bathroom. Your hands shake while trying to type in the pass code for the hallway doors. In the bathroom, you splash water on your face and contemplate the events that just took place. Did you really just see blackface? Did she really just ask you if she looked okay? And why did you say, “It’s fine”? It’s clearly not fine. You recall the other racist event that happened just a few months back and wonder if this will be the last racist incident in the sorority.

Imagine you are one of only five Black women in your sorority. You knew you would be a minority even before you joined, but you need friends after moving back home to attend your local college, so you join a sorority because you’ve always wanted to. Mom told you stories from her time in a sorority. You know some of the girls from high school and notice the whiteness of these sororities but aren’t surprised because these are not multicultural sororities. This is the National Panhellenic Conference. Most Black girls don’t join sororities, and if they do, they join Black sororities.

You move into the sorority house, so you won’t have to live in your childhood home, and immediately get paired with a crazy roommate, one of many to come. Because making friends is hard for you, you seek out the other quiet girls in the sorority. Quiet girls make the best friends. Eventually, you get a sorority big sister—your “big.” She is a mentor and a friend who guides you through the crazy world of the sorority cult. You call it the sorority cult because of its numerous cult-like attributes: chants and speeches, secret handshakes, and ritual songs honoring a goddess. You’ve never had girlfriends before the sorority cult. You find girls to be mean and difficult to connect with, so you are shocked that for the first time in your life, you feel as though no one actively hates you. You come to realize that not all girls are mean, shallow, and self-obsessed, although those do exist, too, and settle into a routine.

You learn the sorority girl uniform and wear it every day: jeans, a sorority tee shirt, and Birkenstocks. You grab your North Face backpack, your Hydro Flask, which is covered in stickers, and your coffee tumbler. This is the sorority girl uniform.

On a Monday evening not too long before the blackface incident with Sister S, you had your normal Monday night new member education meeting. In these meetings, all the new members of the sorority met to learn the history, traditions, and rituals of the sorority so that you can become an initiated cult member. You would meet for an hour before dinner and before active chapter, for initiated members only. You come downstairs to the red couches early this Monday night. The red couches are the meeting spot for most non-chapter events. The couches were, in fact, bright red and took up most of the TV room. This couch is by far the most comfortable couch you have ever sat on, but getting up from the couch was always a two-person job, requiring a forceful tug in order to dislodge yourself from your seated position.

You noticed one of the other new members is already downstairs waiting, Mary-Lynn. Mary-Lynn is on the phone with someone when you walk into the TV room. You place your new member handbook, Hydro Flask, and phone on the coffee table and sit down next to her. It is important to claim a spot on the red couch early because otherwise you will be stuck sitting on the floor for an hour. As you take your seat next to Mary-Lynn, you think that, once she’s off the phone, you two could talk. Initially, you don’t pay much attention to what she is saying on the phone. Everyone in the house knows that Mary-Lynn is a little unhinged and likes to make up stories. She tells stories about the guns her dad bought her and how she can’t sleep with her bed next to the wall because of spiders. Instead, you mindlessly scroll on your phone waiting for the rest of the girls to show up for meeting. As you sit there minding your own business, Mary-Lynn shouts into her phone, “You n****r!” and then continues her conversation as if she said nothing at all. You are understandably shocked, having never heard anyone say that word out loud, especially in front of you. You’ve only ever read that word in textbooks and when you had to read Heart of Darkness in your high school English class. You stare in shock at Mary-Lynn. You have, of course, heard the N word with the ‘soft A,’ in just about every rap song, and you are already deeply uncomfortable with this version of the word, but you want the world to swallow you up when you hear the ‘hard R’ version. You leave the TV room so that you don’t have to sit near her during new member meeting. You go to the first-floor bathroom and think, Why would she say that? Did she know she had used that version of the word? Why didn’t I say anything?

Back in the bathroom on the night of the Derby Days lip sync battle and sister S’s blackface, you stare at yourself in the mirror wondering why Sister S thought her make-up was okay. As you contemplate Sister S, you wash your hands with no real conviction, but rather as a way to distract yourself. Sister S then walks into the bathroom, and you think she must be following you. You keep washing your hands, trying to appear preoccupied so you can subtly stare at her through the bathroom mirrors and notice the other sisters used eyeliner to draw her eyebrows five times bigger than they naturally are. You think she must be wearing Mimi’s foundation because it’s even darker than the shade that you use. A mascara mustache is drawn on her face and she’s added a backwards baseball cap to the look. You dry your hands. She pulls up her saggy jeans, which have started to travel south down her legs revealing the biker shorts she wears beneath them.

“These damn things won’t stay up,” she comments out loud, presumably to you. You don’t reply and slip out of the bathroom. Back in the dining room, everyone is getting ready to walk up the hill to the Student Union where the Derby Days opening ceremony will take place. You meet up with your group of friends.

“Have you guys seen Sister S?” You must know if others are as offended by this blackface as you are, or if they are even aware of it at all. They all say, no, they haven’t seen her. “Wait until you do, she is dressed as Drake,” you look around then lower your voice, “in full blackface.” They don’t seem to understand you until Sister S then emerges from the bathroom and they see her. As a group, you stare at Sister S as she swaggers around the room. Everyone leaves the house to walk up the hill to the Sigma Chi Derby Days opening ceremony. No one at the ceremony says anything when Sister S gets on stage with other girls and lip syncs to Drake in blackface. They don’t say the N word with a ‘soft A’ when it comes up in the Drake song they are performing because it would be inappropriate to do that in public. You watch the crowd cheer for blackface.

Despite the racism, you stay in the sorority for the rest of your time in college. The friends you make and the experiences you have seem to slightly outweigh the horror of the racist environment. You compartmentalize the bad times and focus on the good times you have. Yet, you look back on the time you spent in the sorority and wonder why you didn’t speak up more. Would it have made a difference? The conclusion you reach is that you should have said something about the blackface and promise yourself to speak up in the future, even if it’s uncomfortable.

*

How many times have we read on the news or Twitter that another sorority blackface picture has emerged? And how many times have we said, “This is awful. They shouldn’t do that,” only to immediately dismiss it? We publicly condemn these incidents, then move on with our lives. While racism is often prevalent in sorority houses, this is not to say that all sorority girls are like Sister S and Mary-Lynn. After all, the sorority girl who is writing this found these acts deeply offensive. I often think about how these two events that happened early on in my sorority life have affected my view of modern-day racism. I never thought I would experience blackface. It always seemed like an antiquated racist practice, but there it stood in 2018 in my sorority dining room.

Why didn’t I say anything? It’s a valid question. For a while, I wasn’t completely sure. If these events happened now, I think I would say something, at least I hope I would. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I was afraid. Afraid that I would be labeled as the girl who cried racism for the rest of my time in the sorority. About two years after this, Mimi and I discuss developing a racism course for the sorority as a way to stand up and take action. But our fear restricts us, and we never get around to creating this course.

I was so afraid that I wouldn’t fit in, so I said nothing. My fear of being the odd one out again kept me from speaking my mind. I feel considerable guilt about my inability to stand up to these two girls. Mary-Lynn dropped out of the sorority, but Sister S stayed for another year until she graduated. After Sister S graduated, she wrote a Facebook post in which she defended the cops who killed George Floyd in the summer of 2020. This time I chose to speak, engaging in a lengthy and heated Facebook argument with her and another sister. This helped assuage some of my guilt.

-Kristin Crocker

Kristin Crocker is a Washington D.C.-based creative writer, script writer, educator, and activist. She currently works in publishing. As a recent creative nonfiction MFA graduate at Emerson College, she is working on a memoir that tackles the issues of familial dynamics, race, societal constrictions, and personal identity.