Black in a White House

In a room to the right of Delta Gamma's brownstone's entrance on 114th Street, five girls gather around a table. It pushes towards the edges of the room, fighting for space with boxes of DG shirts and tubes of posters. On the left-most wall hangs a composite of a 2010s sorority class, allowing hundreds of DG faces to peer over the room. The five girls represent a portion of Black-at-DG, affectionately nicknamed Bleegee, one of the sorority's affinity groups that brings together all its Black members.

"It was joy," says Jessica Thompson (CC' 27), referring to the recruitment room where she first met DG. Other girls around the table, from Rachelle Armstrong (CC' 27), the current president of DG, to Kayla Haile, a DG sister from Seattle (CC' 27), jump in to agree. Each describes, respectively, how it "was pure giggles" and that they "actually laughed" with the DG sisters during recruitment.

Across from Armstrong and Haile sits Ifeoluwapo Kolade (CC' 26), the room's only senior. In the small space, her spirit dominates. She feels like the quintessential older sister, a source of DG myths and uncensored opinions. "Guys, I'm unc[le] in spirit," she asserts after a sister points out she's older than Kolade. "How many interviews for full-time jobs have you guys had? Exactly."

Between Armstrong and Kolade, the familial connection is more literal. Kolade is Armstrong's 'Big sister', a custom in sororities in which an older, already initiated member is paired with a new member to provide guidance and support. Whenever Kolade is asked about DG, the stories inevitably link back to her littles, her "two reasons for DG." The bond goes both ways. When Kolade wonders aloud if she got a DG shirt for an upcoming event, Armstrong immediately reassures her that she did. For both, their connection has shaped all of their DG experiences. "Randomly, a way that DG has shaped my dressing and my fashion is by giving me my little, because she's a fashion queen," says Kolade. As Kolade exemplifies, the DG girls end up talking about each other in every story they tell. Thompson first noticed the trend during recruitment. "It was very interconnected," says Thompson. "Every time I had a conversation with one of them, they would always bring someone else up in the conversation naturally."

The welcome many of the DG sisters felt during recruitment is not a universal trend, however. The process, documented by intense social media posts and horror stories that circulate college campuses, is often labeled as a nerve-wracking process. "I didn't even want to rush," says Kolade. "That's the story of everyone," adds Armstrong. "Especially the Black girls," affirms Kolade. Early in her freshman year, Kolade describes how Sydney Bambardekar, the DG president during the 2022-2023 year, asked her whether she knew about DG. Bambardekar began introducing her to DG sisters and inviting her to events, like DG formals. Kayla Haile, another member of Black in DG and a current junior at Columbia College, was similarly urged to go through recruitment. In her orientation group, a sibling of a DG sister encouraged Haile to look into DG. Sensing her hesitation, he reassured Haile, "no, like there's actually Black people in it."

An initial lack of interest in rushing for Bleegee members translated into an ambivalence towards the entire process of recruitment. Thompson came to her first day of recruitment in jeans. Most of those at recruitment are expected to wear more formal attire, like dresses, making the jeans an unofficial sorority recruitment dress code violation. However, as the weekend progressed, Thompson describes how she became steadily more invested in the process. Of all the sororities she spent time with, she felt the greatest connection with the girls in DG. She remembered thinking that they "are here for the people who are in it, rather than for the name and the brand that comes with it." Thompson decided to rank DG, and only DG, at the end of recruitment. The act of only ranking one sorority, if you have been given multiple offers, is known as suicide bidding and is extremely discouraged by those who organize recruitment.

For many of the Black members, DG felt like the only sorority for them. As Kolade puts it, it was "DG or die," or referencing DG's emblem of an anchor, "anchor down or drown." DG has been able to cultivate a unique atmosphere that is welcoming without making the sisters feel tokenized. "It's the same as being anybody else, giving us the space to be who we are fully and celebrate that identity," says Nia Tomalin (BC' 26).

Columbia's chapter of DG was formed in 1989 to serve a gender-integrated and multiracial collegiate population. However, its relatively young age doesn't mean it has been able to avoid the discriminatory foundations of American sorority life. After her induction in the spring of 2023, Kolade heard from other sisters about a blackface incident that had rocked Columbia Greek Life a couple of years before her bid. Despite information remaining vague, Kolade recalls being told how the incident had sparked backlash and forced changes within Greek Life.

Within recent history, DG is part of a greater pattern composed of other Columbia sororities. In 2014, Kappa Alpha Theta dressed as racial stereotypes of various countries, from sombreros to hachimakis, for an Olympics-themed party. In 2022, former president of Alpha Omicron Pi (AOII), Samar Iqbal, was asked to disaffiliate from the sorority after experiencing months of racial discrimination. Other members called her "aggressive," "unwelcoming," and "psychotic" through AOII's anonymous submission form and an "aggressive bitch" in person, according to an article by Columbia Spectator. Two years earlier, after mass movements against anti-Black violence across the United States, 60 members disaffiliated from AOII and Sigma Delta Tau (SDT). As the SDT leaders of the movement told the Blue and White, the move to disaffiliate originated from dissatisfaction with SDT's handling of racial issues, exasperated by the mishandling of an anti-Black Lives Matter Instagram post by a new SDT member. The exodus fell into a greater national movement at the time, Abolish Greek Life. As the Instagram account @abolishgreeklifecu describes, the movement pushed students to share their stories about Greek life, consider disaffiliation, and discuss disbanding within their Greek organizations. The movement was predominantly led by Greek life students, like the SDT and AOII disaffiliation leaders and DG sisters on Columbia's campus.

DG, SDT, and AOII fall under the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC), which organizes 26 different "women's only" sororities across the United States and Canada. During their formation in the 1700s, NPC sororities reflected the collegiate population at the time, which was white and upper-class. Informal and formal laws continued to regulate access to campus organizations, such as sororities, barring the students of color who were able to enter universities. Black students were not permitted to join historically white sororities, forcing the creation of their own spaces. Formed during the rise of Jim Crow laws, the Divine 9 is a coalition of nine Greek-letter organizations created by and for Black students. The D-9 was founded under the principles of "personal excellence, racial uplift, community service, civic action, and kinship," as described by the American Museum of African American Culture and History. Columbia's first chapter of a D-9 sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was founded in 1921. AKA was first established at Howard in 1908, the first Greek-letter organization founded by Black collegiate women, where it still exists to this day. Given the deeply American racial roots of D-9 sororities, some Black international students struggle with the idea of entering such organizations. "I don't want to go into a Black American safe space and try and force myself into that," says Kolade, a Nigerian from Lagos.

Though Kolade may have found a place in DG, she still finds the sorority's racial history is still "kind of a hush-hush thing that doesn't want to be addressed" by DG national leadership. "When did Columbia DG start accepting black people?" says Kolade. "'They're like, 'Oh, we don't know.' You can actually tell. You can actually just open the flip book." The flip book refers to a book of photographs from each DG class, creating a visual representation of the chapter's racial integration. As a national organization, DG works to address the historically white and exclusive nature of sororities through a practice of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), which is taken very seriously at the Zeta Theta chapter. "DEI is a common thing that happens in workplaces, universities, everywhere, but DG focuses on DEIB," says Tomalin. "It doesn't really mean much to include people or to have diversity if people don't feel like they belong."

The issue of belonging in sororities within a greater Black identity remains complicated for many sisters. The night she received her bid from the sorority, Armstrong, originally from Kingston, Jamaica, posted on her Snapchat story to celebrate her acceptance. Written across the story was "home friends please don't judge me."

"Oh my God, the judgment from Black people," says Kolade, recounting "heated back and forths" that included anti-Black slurs. To some in the Black Columbia community, joining an NPC sorority, instead of one from the Divine-9 or none at all, feels like a betrayal of the Black identity. For many Black sisters, interactions with those outside of sorority life often feel influenced by their fraternal affiliations, a tension DG junior Maya Sheppard highlights in earlier interactions with her girlfriend. "Before we were dating, she would talk to me about how she thought my being in a sorority was a red flag," says Sheppard. For some, even the forced proximity to white people creates pause. "Someone told me the other day, 'How do you feel comfortable raising your voice at white people?" says Kolade. After Kolade asked her what she meant by the question, she continued, "How do you beef with a white girl? I feel like they're just so evil."

Many of the Bleegee sisters don't deny the fact that they are supporting a historically white institution. In an interaction with a University of Virginia student who had voiced her desire to join AKA, Armstrong shared that she was in DG. "I could tell she judged me," says Armstrong. "I got why. I thought that was so fair of her." Armstrong and the other sisters understand the oppressive legacy that sororities have and continue to have in many parts of the United States. But members like Sheppard wouldn't describe their experience as upholding a white institution. "It isn't really how I feel at all."

To them, Columbia is different. The specific environment, from the more relaxed view of sororities to the large population of Black sisters, makes Columbia DG incomparable to other schools. And to many, Bleegee is just one community among many in sorority life. "Black-at-DG is community, it's family," says Kali Taleck (BC' 27). "But there's family everywhere."

Despite trying for years to set up an official affinity group, the DG girls don't think it ever worked. Instead, they have a friend group. Bleegee is "organic," says Kolade. She recounts a story from the juniors' bid night, an evening of celebration for new DG inductees after recruitment. "There's a picture from your bid night of all the Black girls in DG together," says Kolade. "We didn't say, 'Oh, Black girls stand here,' but [you] just recognized it." Around the table, the sisters represent an ever-growing family tree that comprises Bleegee.

The choice for the DG girls is not between being in a sorority or being Black. One does not contradict the other; it creates new identities while redefining the institutions that govern them. In the words of Kolade, "Not to be like 'Oh we can change the system from the inside,' but really, that's all you can do."