If mostly white people like it, then it’s racist.
Via College Fix:
Writing in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Boyd, a research associate in American Studies at University of Maryland, says it’s time to “remove the Southern belle from her inglorious perch.”
“Southern belle performances routinely staged on campuses across the South,” she writes, “constitute choreography of exclusion.”
In such campus productions, “young white women serve as signs of nostalgia for a bygone, segregated South and all its attendant privileges,” she adds.
In highly stylized renditions of femininity (which differ markedly from their day-to-day routines and visage), otherwise thoroughly contemporary collegians demonstrate their ability to “do” white Southern womanhood: the attire, the manners, the demeanor, the shared references and, above all, the lineage. Such performances stun with their continued ability to consolidate privilege and fly under the representational radar where masculine symbols have all but vanished. Discounted but powerful, these belle performances may not stem from conscious ill intent, but they are surely racial symbols as much as any noose or flag. And they can be plenty intimidating.
Just think about mainline sorority rush as practiced on most Southern college campuses: from the demure dress code and insider skit scripts to the clubby decor and Old South embellishments to the carefully rehearsed patter about home towns and family trees, the choreography of sorority rush — typically performed large and loud against a backdrop of faux plantation architecture— practically screams to minority applicants, “NOT YOU!”