Posted on 03/18/2015 7:06:13 PM PDT by massmike
Hoop skirts will go the way of Confederate uniforms as special-event attire for Greek organizations at the University of Georgia — into the past.
The hoop skirt ban came after UGA Student Affairs administrators met Monday with some UGA fraternity and sorority leaders, including representatives of the UGA chapters of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Kappa Alpha fraternities, both of which have deep roots in the Southern Confederacy.
The ban comes a week after the University of Oklahoma expelled two SAE fraternity members and shut down the university’s SAE chapter because of a racist video made by members. In the video, SAE members chant about lynching, and using a racial slur, vow that there will never be a black member of the fraternity. The video went viral on the Internet and soon found its way to University of Oklahoma administrators. Talk during Monday’s UGA meeting at UGA was about presenting the university and Greek organizations in a good light, and not inviting negative attention, said Victor Wilson, UGA’s vice president for student affairs.
Part of the talk was about dress at such events as KA’s “Old South Week” and SAE’s “Magnolia Ball.” The discussion included hoop skirts, and the messages conveyed by such dresses or other articles of clothing, Wilson said.
“The discussion was about more than dress, but about how you present yourself, and dress was part of that,” he explained.
It wasn’t administrators who made the ultimate call on attire, it was the fraternity and sorority leaders, Wilson said.
“A standard aspect of event planning for Greek organizations is that costuming for events must be evaluated as to its appropriateness,” read an email sent out Tuesday by Ashley Merkel, president of UGA’s Panhellenic Council, and Alex Bosse, president of the Interfraternity Council. “The student leadership, staff and advisors agree that Antebellum hoop skirts are not appropriate in the context of some events. We will continue to review costuming and themes for future events to ensure their appropriateness for our organizations.”
Some other symbols, like the Confederate soldier uniforms once worn by members of some fraternities on special occasions, were banned years ago, Wilson noted Tuesday.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Wilson said. “This is just one more step. We applaud our students for being courageous and making a tough call.”
The presidents of the university’s KA and SAE chapters did not return phone calls Tuesday.
Both SAE and KA have deep Southern roots. SAE was founded even before the Civil War, at the University of Alabama in 1856.
Kappa Alpha was founded in late 1865 at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. Its national office is in Mulberry Hill in Lexington, where Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee slept when he became president of Washington and Lee following the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Lee did not found the Kappa Alpha Order, but the group calls the gentlemanly general its “spiritual founder.”
SAE and KA’s UGA chapters have curtailed their use of Confederate symbols in recent years. At one time, UGA’s KA chapter staged a springtime parade in Athens in which members rode on horseback, dressed in Confederate soldier uniforms. The national KA fraternity banned the uniforms in 2010, after its chapter at the University of Alabama paraded in front of one of the university’s black fraternities. The UGA KAs had put the uniforms away four years before the national action, and have since discontinued the parade, Wilson said.
Not only are these evil times; these are downright silly times!
They look like typical prom gowns, to me.
This is totally asinine. I went to high school in Nebraska and we wore hoops under our full circle skirts every day to school - had nothing to do with the south.
Would hoop skirts be racist if a homosexual cross dressing transgendered freak wanted to wear one?
The idiocy never ends
(Please DO NOT REPLY. It's a rhetorical question. Political correctness has done more to erode the foundations of our blessed Republic than any machete-wielding raghead ever could.)
Well, fiddle-dee-dee!
They can’t destroy Western Civilization fast enough. Destroying tradition is a necessary part of that. They have to outlaw our tradition, among many other things, to destroy our culture. The West is being dismantled one stone at a time. The UN commie tyrants are winning.
I find nothing more offensive than Political Correctness (formerly known as Lenin’s Cultural Marxism).
Are you sure it wasn’t a petticoat you wore? So did I.
Hoops, no.
Gone with the Wind fans will not approve ,LOL
Black women wore Hoop skirts too! As soon as they got some money—they bought what was in fashion . Its silly caused by anything linked to the Civil War era as racist.
It is times like this that make me wish I were a lawyer.
I would take that school’sleadership to the cleaners.
Whites aren’t allowed to remember the “old South”. They want the whole history of the south just to be about lynching and slavery and the 1960s racism. I’m sick of these idiots. I love KA Old South, it’s not racist it’s just celebrating our southern heritage-which is not allowed.
Do they have a ban on boys (they’re not men) walking around with their pants down? I am offended seeing another person’s,azz in public.
We wore tons of petticoats which we used to starch and stand in the corner of the basement to dry, but it all started in our school with just hoops and full circle skirts. I remember practicing how to sit down at home and always had to make sure the hoop was slid under me and backwards or the entire contraption would be up in the air in front of me. Exposing ones undies back in the day wasn’t considered at all ladylike.
Ban universities.
Dixie ping!
Guess we should skip studying the civil war. Don’t want anyone to see pictures of hoop skirts or now banned uniforms.
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