There's a meaning behind the whiteness, and traditional femininity, of the Bama Rush phenomenon.
By Anna Marks Editorial Assistant, Opinion |
This summer I was accosted by RushTok — the TikTok craze that follows the sorority sisters and prospective pledges at the University of Alabama — and found myself unable to avert my eyes. If you told me a few years ago that I'd spend my free time watching 50 or so women (mostly spray-tanned, bottle blond and robed in coordinating pastels) dance in sync on the porch of an antebellum-style mansion, I would have said you were crazy. But after the first RushTok video graced my feed, I unwittingly became one of millions of people swept up in the cinematic universe of Bama's historically white sororities. |
The more of these videos I saw, the more unsettled I became. I couldn't figure out why the summer obsession of so many was wrapped up in traditional ideas about womanhood, beauty and status. I began to wonder what, exactly, the phenomenon of RushTok reveals about the impulses of American culture. |
To find an answer, I turned to the Times Opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist whose work often examines the way social codes shape our culture and communities. She just so happens to live and teach in North Carolina, a place where the long arm of the Deep South still informs daily life. |
In her column, Tressie examines the way RushTok — and the sororities it captures — puts "peak neo-antebellum white Southern culture on display." |
She argues that when thinking about the university's comfort with RushTok alongside its lukewarm attempts to integrate historically white sororities, all this rushing business begins to look like a master class in "the social reproduction of the entire region's cultural, economic and political elite." |
In Alabama, Tressie writes, that elite derives its power from traditional ideas about womanhood, an old-boys network of power and the relics of segregation. When we're watching Bama Rush, Tressie says, we're royal-watching, albeit "through Mason-jar-tinted glasses." |
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