College is often described as a wonderful institution, a place in which many people have the best experiences of their lives. Students like me forge lasting friendships, take a leap into independence, and even sometimes learn.
College is also a place to make lifelong connections. If you're destined to be a future Wall Street businessman and your roommate an important politician - good things can happen.
Greek fraternities and sororities are particularly good at this. Take the University of Alabama. Its Greek organizations run The Machine, a secretive organization which effectively controls campus politics.
Since student government was initiated in 1915, the Machine's choice for the SGA Presidency has lost a grand total of seven times - the last of which occurred in 1986. That's a century of unchallenged Greek dominance.
Machine candidates often go on to have shining political careers. In 2000, The New Republic reported that:
When the Machine's members leave Tuscaloosa, they typically go on to Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile, and Montgomery, and join Machine alums in Alabama's political and business elite. Machine members work in Alabama's most prestigious law firms and businesses; they have been state legislators, state party chairmen, congressmen, presidents of the state bar, members of the Public Service Commission, and federal judges. For most of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, both of Alabama's U.S. Senators, Lister Hill and John Sparkman, were Machine alums. Alabama's current governor, Don Siegelman, was the Machine-backed SGA president in 1968; Senator Richard Shelby is also said to have been a member of the Machine (although his office has denied this). As one former member of a Machine-affiliated sorority explained to the student newspaper The Crimson White, "The goal is to run campus politics, but the real reason they want to run campus politics is so they themselves can run politics in Alabama."
The meat of The New Republic article, however, does not dwell upon University of Alabama politics - but instead on a rather different theme. It tells the story of one Melody Twilley, a sophomore student at the University of Alabama attempting to join a Greek sorority. Like many of her fellow students, Ms. Twilley "blended right in to the roiling mix of social ambition and social privilege." Compared to her peers, however, Ms. Twilley was unique in two interesting ways:
For one thing, unlike the vast majority of rushees, who are admitted into sororities as freshmen, this wasn't Twilley's first time through. She had tried-and failed-to join a sorority the year before. Which may have had something to do with the other thing that set Melody Twilley apart: She is black.
...Indeed, when Melody Twilley stood in front of the Delta Zeta house last September, it was believed that no white fraternity or sorority at the University of Alabama had ever offered membership to a black student.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
- Invisible Man (prologue), Ralph Ellison
More than 50 years after Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man appeared, a black man may well be poised to become President, and yet, Black America as a whole still remains virtually invisible, describable in exactly the same terms that Ellison used:
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
You make think this is an exaggeration. If so, this diary is a challenge to think again.
Let's cut right to the chase: This year, we can expect anti-affirmative action initiatives to placed on the ballot in certain key swing states with the intention of generating white backlash to defeat the Democratic candidate-particularly if that candidate is Barack Obama. Yet, at the same time, it's been shown that employers, on average, will hire white ex-felons more readily than they will hire similarly-qualified blacks with no prison record. The notion of hordes of Black workers taking jobs from more qualified Whites is sheer fantasy-the exact opposite of what happens every day of the week, all across America.
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