The letters we choose to carry make us proud. The letters we choose to carry are supposed to represent our core values, and the letters that we choose have flaws. The Greek Panhellenic at Saint Louis University is the biggest organization on campus. This is also a campus that prides it self on its diversity. It is inevitable to question the validity of both of these statements when white middle-upper class men and women noticeably dominate its biggest organization.

Each one of these individual Greek life organizations holds recruitment at least once a year, and each year the number of bids given out increases. If the number of Greek members are increasing shouldn’t the diversity and intersectionality in these organizations increase as well?

Going through regular recruitment was never on my radar; neither was actually joining a Greek Letter organization, but what I encountered during the process was highly predicable. I was expecting to have the same conversation, seeing their faces of amusement when I told them I was not from the United States. Questions such as “How did you learn English?” And congratulations because my accent was not as thick as they would have expected it to be. The three-day process fulfilled the expectation, and my little Caribbean island was believed to be the South American country of Peru.

This introduction to Greek life discouraged me from being part of the community and raised new questions as to why should I join an organization that is supposed change strangers into sisters. I was supposed to be a sister when not a single one of the people I was introduced to during recruitment were people that neither looked nor spoke like me, and most importantly could not see the world through my eyes. I was skeptical to carry Greek letters because it is a community steeped in white privilege. The community showed very little interest in accepting the presence of that privilege and removing the glasses of privilege to see the world from another perspective.

The excitement of the recruiters gave me an impression of being seen as an exotic individual who would be a great asset to their organization, not because of who I was, but because it would cover that unspoken quota of diversity. Shaking the feeling of becoming tokenized by one these organizations, in my case becoming that one Latina girl that makes the sorority “diverse,” is an issue that keeps many minority people from joining these organizations. Some African-American men and women have the opportunity to join a chapter and have the Greek experience many love off campus as member of a Black Greek Letter Organization (BGLO), but many minorities simply miss out on the opportunity of carrying letters they love.

One of my sisters described joining a sorority as those twenty seconds of courage where you make a decision that will be with you for a lifetime. It is saddening that many people do not take those twenty seconds because even though Panhellenic has verbalized the concern of the lack of diversity in our organizations, there had been little action to educate these organizations in diversity and cultural sensitivity to make this possible.