The Banality of Evil

The weight of my guilt, my self-disgust, has dragged me down for going on seven years now. Here I am, Bob Marley, warning Scrooge of the chains that await him if he doesn’t change. And this is why: For three years, I participated in a system that excluded others based on their race. I paid dues, thousands of dollars in fact, to maintain a blatantly racist institution. I transferred to the University of Alabama my sophomore year. I didn’t know too much about Greeks, sororities, or fraternities, when I made my plans to move from Spanish Fort, AL to Tuscaloosa. But as I began to announce my plans to transfer to UA, I kept hearing the same refrain. “Are you going to join a sorority?” “You, know, you’re going to have a hard time making friends there if you don’t join a sorority. Greek life is, like, required at Alabama.” No friends? Hadn’t I survived high school so that I could finally leave that sinking feeling of rejection behind? Did I really want to spend three (more) years excluded from the “in crowd”? No! my 19-year-old self answered resoundingly. So I did what I figured anyone in my position would do. I participated in sorority rush the fall of my sophomore year. The experience was harrowing (some people say they love Rush; there is something either seriously wrong with them or with me, perhaps both). It was so harrowing, in fact, that at first I couldn’t quite place what was off about the whole thing. Finally I asked, “Where are the Black girls?” I for the life of me don’t remember who answered that question (I tend to block out traumatic events, sorority rush falls easily into that category), but I do remember what the answer was: The Black girls have their own sororities. They do their “own” Rush. In the spring, I think she said. Well THAT was weird, I thought. There wasn’t one Black girl who was interested in joining a mostly (ok ALL) White sorority, or vice versa? I had gone to a majority White school, where the minority Black population got along just fine with everyone else, but there, too, people of other races, for the most part didn’t mix socially. It was something that (seemed to be) accepted by all parties. So, you have to understand (you who are not from the deep South) that I had already developed a schema that made such an answer seem plausible, and therefore easy to accept. That, and I wasn’t in the business of social justice then. I was just concerned with surviving a college social atmosphere that proved to be (impossibly!) even more cliquiesh, judgmental, and oppressive than my prototypical high school experience had been. Now, instead of “what brand are you wearing”? It was, “What sorority t-shirt are you wearing?” and “What fraternity is your boyfriend in?” Of course NONE OF IT MATTERED, but try telling that to a 19-year-old who had spent her whole life trying to fit in. None of these are excuses. Nothing excuses this kind of thing. These are merely the pathetic circumstances that clouded my easily influenced judgment and general sense of morality. So, ok, I survive Rush and get a bid. Fast forward two years later, and Carla Ferguson, a Black freshman, participates in Rush with the “traditionally White” sororities. It was a big story, at least, on our campus. I don’t think anyone really cared at the national level because our football team sucked at the time. This is when I really learned about what was going on. Because sororities were indirectly and, when necessary, directly told not to even THINK about pledging her. I didn’t meet her. I didn’t see her come through her house. I didn’t vote on her. I only know that she didn’t join our sorority. She didn’t join any sorority at first. The rumor was that the sorority who accepted her did so in exchange for swaps with “good” fraternities or some other such arrangement, so that the issue would quietly “go away.” I don’t know if that is true; either way, none of us were in a position to judge, considering that they were the only sorority with the balls to make any kind of step forward in history. All I know is that no one on campus at the time considered it a “true” integration of the Greek system, because, well, 10 years later, the same system is still considered segregated. And what about me? I could claim naivete before, but at this point everyone knew what was going on. My sorority was no more or less guilty than the others. I don’t remember any blatantly racist statements being made at the time. It was, from what I remember, a quiet affair, a decision made behind closed doors. I excused myself from any guilt by announcing to anyone who cared that I would not vote against her. Plenty of people felt the same way. But one person couldn’t make a difference within a sorority, much less within the Greek system, I thought. So, here was the moment of reckoning, when even the naïve girl from a socially segregated school could no longer pretend that she was not involved in a blatantly racist system. Yet, I didn’t see myself as guilty. I don’t remember considering, seriously or otherwise, quitting the sorority on moral grounds. I’m not a quitter; I never have been. This would have been a great time to break that rule. Because, for the rest of my life, my participation in this system will be a scourge on me, on my character, on my history. It is something that I have tried to cover up with the acquaintances and friends I’ve made since then. Following graduation, I joined Teach For America in Greater New Orleans and met, for the first time in my life, people my age from all over the country, mostly the East and West coasts. My upbringing was, shall we say, unique to my corps. I remember revealing the information previously described (sans guilt) and receiving a reaction that I’m sure to this day paints those individuals’ view of me. But I just didn’t understand their disdain. I’m the good guy in all this, I thought. Did you not hear the part when I said that I didn’t AGREE with it? That I said I wouldn’t vote against her? So in my mind, I not only did not deserve contempt, I also deserved accolades for my brave behavior! What a pioneer for social equality I was! I won’t walk you through all the small realizations that took place as I taught in a low-income, mostly Black community, as I made friends for the first time with people of color, finally free of a place that in so many ways was (and still is) frozen in time. You can imagine how these experiences will change a person. But one important lesson I learned occurred on a drive home with a fellow TFA teacher who was complaining about the state of education in general in the community in which we taught. It went something like this (I will generously paraphrase here): “It’s the banality of evil,” he said, “it’s not an active act of ill will to fail to provide kids with a good education. It’s simply the act of doing nothing, of assuming people will just take care of it themselves, that somehow kids will magically learn while no teaching actually takes place.” And this is what my crime was, so many years ago. I didn’t actively campaign to keep the Greek system segregated, to sit at a different lunch table in high school, I didn’t laugh at racist jokes and certainly didn’t make them. I just didn’t do anything. What a boring yet efficient path to Hell I paved for myself. It is the banal evils that destroy our world. At least blatant acts of evil rally the opposition. But “nice” people like I was just quietly pay their dues, cluck their tongues at the blatant acts of evil, saying “what a shame” and feeling good that we aren’t Klan members, or serial killers or white-collar criminals, all the while allowing (indeed, in my case funding!) a racist system that continues to thrive 50 years after the Civil Rights Act supposedly made such things worthy of federal interference. I’m not going to go into what I’ve done since, what my career path is, or how my outlook has changed, because in this context it doesn’t matter. I can’t ask for anyone’s approval or forgiveness, because honestly, what I do now does not, and never will, erase the past. The one thing I do ask is for anyone who is reading this now and recognizes themselves in the words I’ve written, to reconsider your current actions (or, more importantly, your inactions). You don’t want to be stuck on the wrong side of history 10 years from now. That may seem like a lifetime away, but it is sooner than you think. This does not just apply to exclusion based on race. Let’s talk about sexual orientation, socio-economic status, religion and ethnicity (several sororities also automatically “drop” you from Rush if you are Jewish, at least when I was there); all of these are points of consideration in the Greek Rush process. I’m not telling you what your actions should be; I’m only asking you to take action, in whatever situation you find yourself in. There’s no redemption awaiting you “later” down the road, so don’t compromise now between the right thing and the popular thing. To do so is to allow Banal Evil to continue, until one day its bored yawn stretches wide enough to show its fearsome teeth, and you realize, too late, what you have (not) done.