Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities and Sororities

By Matthew W. Hughey, Gregory S. Parks and Theda Skocpol

At the turn of the twentieth century, black fraternities and sororities, also known as Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs), were an integral part of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “talented tenth.” This was the top ten percent of the black community that would serve as a cadre of educated, upper-class, motivated individuals who acquired the professional credentials, skills, and capital to assist the race to attain socioeconomic parity. Today, however, BGLOs struggle to find their place and direction in a world drastically different from the one that witnessed their genesis.

In recent years, there has been a growing body of scholarship on BGLOs. This collection of essays seeks to push those who think about BGLOs to engage in more critically and empirically based analysis. This book also seeks to move BGLO members and those who work with them beyond conclusions based on hunches, conventional wisdom, intuition, and personal experience. In addition to a rich range of scholars, this volume includes a kind of call and response feature between scholars and prominent members of the BGLO community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781628467567

Book preview

Part I.

INTRODUCTION

1. PUBLIC REALISM

Propounding a Critical and Empirical Black Greek Scholarship

MATTHEW W. HUGHEY AND GREGORY S. PARKS

In 2005, Tamara Brown and colleagues published a unique book. African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision, became one of the first scholarly books on black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs). To date, it is one of only three multidisciplinary works on the black fraternal tradition. The second appeared three years later in 2008. Gregory Parks’s Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the 21st Century: Our Fight Has Just Begun picked up where Brown and colleagues left off. Not only did Parks tackle a wide range of new substantive issues in his book, he also called for something that heretofore had not yet been pressed—a critical scholarship of BGLOs. In direct terms, Parks argued for such scholarship and delineated what the parameters of it should look like and what direction it should take.¹ Herein in the third work, we add to this dialogue—focusing on the role of critical and empirical scholarship as they reasonably relate to BGLOs. In doing so, we employ an approach similar to that of Laura Roberts and Lynn Wooten’s positive organizing analysis of BGLOs.² Roberts and Wooten did not simply employ a particular methodology, they applied an entire analytic framework from the field of organizational behavior. In this vein, we examine how the fields of legal and sociological philosophy find pragmatic application toward the study of BGLOs.

Currently, studies of BGLOs from without, and their own organizational practices from within, are severely limited by several dominant practices and critical assumptions. In the former, a great deal of scholarship on BGLOs fails to find relevance to pragmatic issues with which BGLOs are now faced. While it has been fashionable for some time to argue that academic disciplines are either old-fashioned or out-of-touch with real-world phenomena, we do find some credence in the argument that as BGLO scholarship matures into an academic subject field, it is hampered by parochialism endemic to the Ivory Tower. No doubt conditioned by the growing behemoth of publish or perish cultural logic and the political economy of customer service undergraduate education, the production of BGLO-related knowledge largely fails in its applicability to the modern-day problems such as financial burdens, hazing, elitism, and BGLOs’ relevance to social justice activism—at least explicitly.

Yet in the latter, we find many BGLO rank-and-file members and leadership either unwilling or unable to take the suggestions of empirical and critically driven social science. Instead, many demonstrate a Philistine-like approach to social science and legal philosophy; favoring conventional social values and dominant ideologies uncritically if not reverently. While academe may constrain some conversations, they also enable, structure, and guide sound inquiry. The growing ad hominem attacks on BGLO scholars qua BGLO scholars seem motivated by an assumption that removing academic voices, methods, and analytic frameworks will somehow simply reveal a structure of pure and unsullied knowledge ripe for the picking.

As a sociologist and a legal theorist, and in sharing a combined membership that spans almost three decades in two BGLOs, we neither serve as apologists for BGLOs nor do we saddle them with blame. Rather, we seek a meeting ground in which the insights of jurisprudence and social inquiry can capture the attention of BGLOs so to assist in problem-solving key issues in ethical, self-determinative, and democratic fashion. In order to lay out our program in this chapter, we take a multipronged approach.

First, we outline the development of certain elements of the field of jurisprudence that is bookended by two strands of legal philosophy, formalism and realism. In this section we show how the philosophy of formalism encouraged the adoption of a rule-based system of law that is abstracted from the actual material conditions of people and which defines the social uses and effects of law as extralegal, ancillary, and out of bounds. Contra-formalism, realism regards the intersection of social science and jurisprudence as a necessary step toward the creation of laws that are sensitized to people’s actual lived experiences.

Second, we provide an overview of a tension that has long plagued the development of sociology, the strain between professional and public social thought. While the former provides conceptual frameworks and bodies of knowledge, it is often restricted to academic venues in which one can enter only after substantial training. As the dominant form of sociological practice, many professional sociologists do not interact directly with the public, but concern themselves with tackling abstract puzzles and philosophical quandaries. Public sociologists seek to transcend abstract musings of the academy and engage a wider audience. Rather than being defined by a particular method, theory, or set of political values, public sociologists attempt to make accessible the tools and findings of intellectual inquiry for the betterment of the world. We cover these two historical trajectories of law and sociology to demonstrate that while the formal production of knowledge is a contested field, it is not one dimensional. Rather, there exist various intellectual modalities that are open to engagement with the problems of the everyday.

In so doing, we segue to the third section of this chapter whereby we argue that a public-realist BGLO scholarship is not only possible, but is also necessary, and already underway. In order to articulate our vision, we explore the formalist/realist and professional/public tension by way of an apt example: the issue of hazing, pledging, and membership intake processes. Hence, we argue that realist and public scholarship that is both empirical and critical is neither a simple shift in disciplinary boundaries nor a discursive sleight-of-hand toward the creation of nouveau jargon, but is a method for the incorporation of knowledge into the daily operations and long-term viability of BGLOs.

BGLOs must become open to the tools of scholastic inquiry if they are to remain relevant in the day and age of the cultural contradictions of race. That is, it is common to hear the folk-tale narrative that we now live in a color-blind or post-racial society, yet the material realities of race, illuminated by the methods and paradigms of legal realism and public sociology, show that housing segregation has nearly doubled since the 1980s,³ the black-white pay gap (24 cents on the dollar) has remained the same since 1975,⁴ and whites with felony convictions do better in their search for employment than blacks with no criminal record.⁵ In this still-racialized milieu, BGLOs’ ability to fight de facto segregation, to serve as vehicles for the attainment of education and equitable economic recompense, and to challenge the hegemony of the hyper-incarceration of young black men and women, is crucial. It is our hope that this chapter, and those that follow, may guide the reader to draw from multiple academic disciplines in ways that echo Cornel West’s call for a future-oriented instrumentalism that tries to deploy thought as a weapon to enable more effective action…. a plebeian radicalism that fuels an antipatrician rebelliousness for the moral aim of enriching individuals and expanding democracy.⁶

JURISPRUDENTIAL SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

There are several axes upon which to analyze jurisprudential schools of thought. The debate between formalists on one hand, and realists on the other, concerns how law should solve problems.⁷ The rise of legal formalism in the nineteenth century resulted from the confluence of three factors in antebellum America. First, the law was seen as an objective, apolitical system. Second, there was a convergence of interest between powerful commercial and entrepreneurial interests on one hand and the elite of the legal profession on the other. Third, these interests wished to freeze legal doctrine and conceive of law as a fixed system of logically deducible rules.⁸

The influence of Harvard Law School within this deliberation cannot be underestimated. Harvard is credited with establishing the first modern American law school. From 1870 to 1895, Christopher Columbus Langdell served as its dean, and was highly influential in shaping the structure and content of other American law schools.⁹ Langdell focused on appellate court case analysis,¹⁰ which emphasized the connections between rules of law and case holdings,¹¹ thereby reinforcing the notion that law was a self-contained system where decisions flowed from a finite number of discoverable and seminal concepts.¹² In 1873, the appointment of James Barr Ames as an assistant professor at Harvard Law School helped transform this method into a sacred faith.¹³ Harvard’s size and influence had a tremendous impact on other university-affiliated law schools.¹⁴ As such, many law schools emulated Harvard’s academic approach.¹⁵

Langdell and Ames helped to create a conservative mode of thinking that suggested innovations must be reconciled with existing legal principles.¹⁶ In this formalist approach, legal problem solving takes place, in total, within the realm of law. As such, formalists demarcate the realm of the law from that of other disciplines and bodies of knowledge. It is this line-drawing in epistemological sand that pushes the formalist to posit that legal rules are the sin qua non of problem solving.¹⁷

In contrast, legal realism sets forth three general maxims. First, it articulates that the boundaries of law should not be rigid. Rather, law is a multidisciplinary enterprise. Toward that end, other disciplines, namely the social sciences, are indispensable to legal problem solving. Second, legal realism holds skepticism toward the value of rules. From this standpoint, rules are of limited value in predicting what problem solvers will do or prescribing what they should do. Hence, rules may be abstracted from the real world in ways that do not cohere with actual experience, thereby undermining problem-solving efforts. Third, legal realism is more holistic in the analysis of context—many issues outside of formal legal contexts are germane to the outcomes of legal theorizing.¹⁸

There were several precursors to the realist movement. Oliver Wendell Holmes highlighted the real world aspect of the law when he noted that the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.¹⁹ Holmes also emphasized how extralegal factors hold tremendous bearing on the law. Holmes did not simply contend that social science was important in order to understand the law,²⁰ rather he contended that contemporary pupils’ focus on black-letter law would give way to a legal field wherein the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.²¹ Benjamin Cardozo was the first to speak to the various modes of judicial thinking that were not wholly consistent with traditional, formalistic logic. Among them, according to Cardozo, was the sociological approach—a gap-filler,²² insofar as he believed the judge should employ the law as a means to an end—for the good of the collective body.²³ Roscoe Pound became the immediate precursor to the realists.²⁴ Generally, Pound believed in an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the law.²⁵ In 1905, he called for a philosophy of law founded on social and political science.²⁶ In 1910, he pled for law students to be trained in sociology, economics, and politics in order to fit new generations of lawyers to not simply render good service but to lead the people.²⁷ That same year, he urged scholars not only to study law on the books but also to study law in action.²⁸ In the 1911 and 1912 issues of the Harvard Law Review, Pound announced and defined a vision of Sociological Jurisprudence.²⁹ Not surprisingly, Pound is described as one who emphasized the social effects of law and to relate legal thinking to the social sciences.³⁰

In 1916, Thomas Swan assumed the deanship at Yale Law School, and by November of that year, he proposed to Yale’s president that the law school should expand into the Yale School of Law and Jurisprudence. The proposal seemingly reflected the views of Arthur Corbin and possibly Karl Llewellyn—professor and student, respectively.³¹ Both of these men became the chief architects of legal realism. Their work, and the work of others at Columbia and Yale law schools during the early to mid-twentieth century, helped to define a new agenda for legal education and practice.³²

Legal realism is not a monolithic school of thought. In broad strokes, three schools of thought typify legal realism: (1) the critical oppositional variant that sought to expose the contradictions in classical legal formalism; (2) the social scientific variant that employed the insights and methods of the empirical sciences; and (3) the practical political variant that designed, made, and enforced reform policies.³³ The major thrust of legal realism was to undermine Langdell’s idea that the law was an objective science based on clear-cut realities and rules.³⁴ Harkening back to Pound’s distinction between law in books and law in action, the realists sought to determine what the law actually does to people and for people.³⁵ As a result, they saw law not simply as an end in and of itself but as a means to various ends.³⁶

The legal realists gave birth to several other movements; first among them was the law, policy, and science movement. Harold Lasswell and Myers McDougal advanced two elements of realism—the intersections of social science and law as well as law and public policy. McDougal and Lasswell viewed realism as a useful tool to debunk the law’s old myths and lame theory, but the two doubted that realism offered much to take its place.³⁷ They noted:

[T]here is a limit beyond which the laborious demonstration of equivalencies in the language of the courts cannot go: eventually the critic must offer constructive guidance as to what and how courts and other decision-makers should decide the whole range of problems importantly affecting public order.³⁸

Thus, they set out to develop an affirmative jurisprudence that would both incorporate law and the social sciences and embody democratic values.³⁹ Together, they attempted to synthesize legal realism and empirical legal scholarship, which would be capable of formulating, promoting, and critiquing policy.⁴⁰

In 1964, Harry Ball, coordinator of the University of Wisconsin’s Sociology and Law Program, took the lead in advancing what would come to be known as the law and society movement. During the American Sociological Association (ASA) annual meeting, he invited all attendees who were interested in the intersection of sociology and law to a breakfast. Approximately ninety individuals attended the breakfast.⁴¹ From that effort, sociologists and law professors developed the Law and Society Association as a forum to promote the rigorous interdisciplinary study of law.⁴² Generally, the law and society field is the study of law in its social context.⁴³ More specifically, the law and society movement’s goal is to employ a social scientific study of the law.⁴⁴ However, if one is to study law as a social science, one must define law as more than a mere set of rules and principles. Thus, law and society sought to define law as a social institution, as interacting behaviors, as ritual and symbol, as a reflection of interest group politics, [and] as a form of behavior modification.⁴⁵

Out of the law and society movement, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) emerged in the second half of the 1970s through the 1980s.⁴⁶ Many of the CLS scholars ultimately disagreed with their law and society colleagues in two respects.⁴⁷ First, CLS scholars put little faith in social science, whereas the realists endorse social science and employ its methodologies. Second, the ethical relativism endorsed by most CLS scholars is different from, and more coherent than, that of the realists.⁴⁸ In the end, CLS is based on three propositions. First, law is indeterminate. Second, law is more accurately understood by paying attention to the context in which it is made. Third, law is politics.⁴⁹

SOCIOLOGICAL SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

Anyone who has taken an introductory sociology course should remember the three formal schools of sociological thought: structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and social conflict, often credited to Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, respectively. Rather than delineate the three analytic and methodological approaches of each—a task well rehearsed in diffuse and varied circles—we aim to illuminate a different divide in the production and use of sociological knowledge: that of the tension between professional and public sociology.

To begin, Western sociological thought has its genesis in the middle of the nineteenth century as a dialogue between reformist and philanthropic groups on the one side, and intellectuals like Auguste Comte, who wished that the study of social life would mirror the supposed value neutrality of disciplines like mathematics and physics, on the other. From an early concentration on the study of modernity, industrialization, urbanization, social disintegration, and cohesion, post–Civil War sociologists began to explore various social problems via the collection and analysis of labor and poverty statistics. Sociologists demonstrated the plight of abject poverty that became a movement unto itself, thereby laying the foundations of a concern for the socially marginalized in early sociology.

However, as the forerunner of the present American Sociological Association, the American Sociological Society (founded in 1905) began to implement the shift from sociology’s engagement with marginalized publics to that of private foundations and the state.⁵⁰ As the Roaring Twenties began, the Rockefeller Foundation supported the Institute for Social and Religious Research, the University of Chicago, and the University of North Carolina. Simultaneously, President Herbert Hoover relied upon the work of sociologist William Ogburn to write Recent Social Trends in the United States.⁵¹ Federal influence continued during the Second World War when Samuel Stouffer was commissioned to write the 1949 multivolume study of morale in the army.⁵² After the war, corporate financing of survey research increased; typified by the work of Paul Lazarsfeld and the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. As sociologist Michael Burawoy writes,

whether in the form of the brilliant and lucid erudition of Robert Merton (1949), the arcane and grand design of Talcott Parsons (1937, 1951), or the early statistical treatment of mobility and stratification, culminating in the work of Peter Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (1967) [sociology became insular and specialized]. Reviewing the 1950s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil Smelser (1961: 1–8) could triumphantly declare sociology’s moral prehistory finally over and the path to science fully open. Not for the first time [Auguste] Comptean visions had gripped sociology’s professional elite.⁵³

However, such insularity was resisted from within the discipline. In 1951 the Society for the Study of Social Problems (informally known as the soul of the ASA) was created, birthing the journal Social Problems in 1953. The development of a scientifically rigorous, yet morally directed, imperative within sociology was mutually reinforced by C. Wright Mills’s thesis of the sociological imagination. Moreover, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism, Jane Addams’s focus on an international peace movement, and Robert Lynd’s chastisement of sociology’s narrow vision and claims of value neutrality, led to the ASA annual meetings of 1968, which were highlighted by Martin Nicholaus’s assault on fat-cat sociology.⁵⁴

The 1970s saw the publication of Joyce Ladner’s Death of White Sociology in 1973, which questioned many of the white normative assumptions dominant in the field,⁵⁵ and in 1976, then ASA president Alfred McLung Lee’s address entitled, Sociology for Whom?⁵⁶ (which piggybacked off of Robert Lynd’s 1939 question, Sociology for What?),⁵⁷ asked whether sociologists were simply talking to themselves, or were committed to addressing an extra-academic audience. However, it was only recently in an address by Herbert Gans in 1988, that the term public sociology was first introduced.⁵⁸ It was even more recently in 2004, that ASA president Michael Burawoy’s speech For Public Sociology advanced eleven theses (modeled after Karl Marx’s Eleven Theses on Feuerbach) that inspired a great deal of attention and tenacious debate.⁵⁹

These debates have not been kind, and one’s support of public sociology can yield animosity or praise. For instance, the sociologist Sharon Hays stated, If we aren’t doing public sociology, we’re just talking to each other. To claim to study society and to say that you needn’t bother to make your work relevant or accessible to social members—well, that seems to me just plain insane.⁶⁰ However, others take a different tack such as David Brady’s Why Public Sociology May Fail, Francois Nielsen’s The Vacant ‘We’: Remarks on Public Sociology, and Charles R. Tittle’s The Arrogance of Public Sociology.⁶¹ There have been symposia on public sociology in journals like Social Problems (February 2004), Social Forces (June 2004), and Critical Sociology (Summer 2005), departmental foci on public sociology like that of Berkeley and Minnesota, and the publication of The Public Sociologies Reader edited by Judith Blau and Keri Iyall Smith, Public Sociology: The Contemporary Debate edited by Larry Nichols, and Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century edited by Dan Clawson and colleagues.⁶² These varied actions show that sociologists are wrestling with the issue of sociological knowledge in the public sphere.

Taking these debates as a starting point, we believe that there are significant limits to engaging in only a professional scholastic project about BGLOs that speaks only in elitist circles or with methods that are impenetrable to those without rigorous scholastic training. Furthermore, such limitations betray a significant aspect of the purpose of BGLOs: to promote justice, equality, and education. Our interpretations of these debates seem at odds with the direction of much of academe. While many sociologists reiterate jargon that emphasizes an ever-widening chasm of inequality and entrenched domination, we are ironically overwhelmed by the fact that very few show how their scholarship can be put to work for the subjects they study. In this vein, following the sociologist Dorothy Smith, we advocate sociology for people rather than of people.⁶³ Yet, some seem threatened by our proposal. Let us be clear. Embracing public sociology does not mean abandoning standards, discarding practices of merit, or exploiting BGLOs for personal gain. It might be easy to use a BGLO soapbox to grasp public acclaim, to anoint oneself as the BGLO expert, to engage in polemic discourse for the sake of igniting controversy, or to offer rhetorical flourishes and sound bites if one is a clever wordsmith. We distinguish between the masses and the public, just as C. Wright Mills did; in the former are those who seek affirmation for what they are already doing, while in the latter are those who seek civic engagement around important social issues. Moreover, we do not collapse the scientific enterprise into moral idealism. While some believe that a public approach will pollute the objectivity of science, we assert that all scientific findings and analyses are inescapably intertwined with the economic, political, and cultural systems and interests in which they are embedded. This is not a new debate, the objectivity/value dispute rages on elsewhere and shows no apparent signs of ebbing. All this is to say, we find no requirement to dumb-down scholarship or to popularize it within a dominant fad. Rather, lucid analysis, accessibility, sincerity, and candor in scholarship are what matters. And they matter for pragmatic reasons.

Over the past quarter century, gains in civil rights have been heavily counter-acted and reversed by huge market expansion and the normalization of a take-no-prisoners, neoliberal economic logic. Moreover, a growing politically conservative ethos is viciously attacking human rights and their guardian organizations, such as BGLOs. In sum, a public sociology is in order. Such a paradigm is based on five propositions: (1) the development of rigorous, empirical, critical, and accessible publications; (2) the growth of teaching opportunities that can be implemented at various levels that transcend the traditions of town and gown; (3) the dissemination of ideas that result in scientific and cultural literacy that in turn contribute to a growing democratic discourse; (4) programs that result in relevant policy in advice that can be pragmatically implanted in order to better the subjects of study; and (5) better functioning institutions, such as university departments, professional associations, and scholastic books and journals.

IS A PUBLIC-REALIST BGLO SCHOLARSHIP POSSIBLE?

BGLO formalistic and professional thinking is best seen with regard to the debate—or lack thereof—surrounding the topic of hazing, pledging, and the membership intake process (MIP). In 1990, the traditional patterns of pledging were replaced by the MIP when the leaders of the individual members of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) laid down a relatively undemocratically promulgated decision. In brief, the long-standing tradition of pledging was replaced with a three-day to three-week MIP composed of classroom-like settings of instruction and tests. Many BGLO members are of the attitude that the move should be followed blindly, while others remain decidedly opposed and have vowed to continue the pledging process as a collectively secret tradition that most know occurs, but of which few openly speak.

As a result, many in the former camp argue that the issues of BGLO hazing would resolve themselves if members simply abided by the rules unquestioningly, without attention to why these rules and methods are manifest in their present fashion, in whose interests they really serve, what the policy goals of MIP are, and whether those goals have actually been met. Such members, BGLO administrators, and a large contingent of nonmember academic sectors—let us call them professional formalists—do not consider, or at the least do not act on their consideration with any great effect, whether MIP actually undermines the ultimate goals and mission of BGLOs. More broadly, BGLO professional formalists are disinclined from making connections with vast bodies of knowledge from a variety of disciplines that can be used to advance a critical knowledge of BGLOs.

In contrast, BGLO public realists are interested in (1) how a variety of disciplines may help them advance the interests of their organizations and those for whom they advocate, (2) analyzing policy goals behind the rules within the organizations to determine if the rules help actualize those goals, and (3) critiquing not only the professional formalistic approach but also BGLOs themselves in an effort to strengthen these organizations. These elements are important within the framework of such democratic institutions. Members serve the legislative branch of BGLOs through their delegates. And an informed body of members, like an informed legislature, makes for a more effective government.

An example of a public-realist approach to the MIP issue might be observed along a number of axes. Formalists argue against a broad debate and revisiting the issue; public realists seek public dialogue and resolution. Formalists believe dialogue need not occur, because there is a rule in place prohibiting further revision of the process. The rule is the end-all, be-all, the ultimate direction of problem solving. Formalists articulate a rationale that organizational leadership has the last say on the rule and that rules were instituted to stave off litigation and protect initiate safety. Public realists look behind the rule to determine if it comports with a rational understanding of organizational rules that have more primacy—that is, does it comport with the respective organization constitutions? Is it democratically promulgated? Furthermore, does it cohere with higher ideals of the organization—development of personal excellence, fictive kinship ties, and commitment to community uplift? For the public realists, empirical observation and informed theorizing can help answer this question. As to whether MIP may actually stave off litigation and saves lives, public realists eschew wishful thinking and pronouncements absent data. They look, instead, to how litigation, injuries, and deaths have been altered by MIP: whether MIP remedied, left unaltered, or exacerbated the issue. Formalists hide from inconvenient truths and those that reside outside of their intellectual and experiential comfort zones. Public realists seek answers anywhere they may lay.

Our research on hazing rests on a burgeoning body of scholarship that deals with the intersection of hazing, identity, and culture, and does not simply pathologize those who fail to adhere to laws that they had no voice in implementing in the first place. Moreover, the public-realist study of BGLO violence was itself inspired by landmark studies of other public realists such as the insights of the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas in Ricky Jones’s Black Haze as well as various psychological and cultural theorists in Jones’s profound essay in The Hazing Reader. Public-realist studies took place via the insights of the theorist Michel Foucault in Matthew W. Hughey’s critique of the claim that BGLOs are little more than educated gangs, and in the deep historical analysis that traces pledging to both ancient African and European traditions in the work of Tamara Brown, Gloria Dickinson, Sandra Posey, and Carol Branch.⁶⁴ Such scholarship is motivated by the concern for meaning and process endemic to the cultural turn, that was itself a partial result of the public-realist influence upon the academy. The fact that literature on this topic neither falls into a romantic conceptualization of BGLOs, nor simply pathologizes their actions for failing to jettison traditions and practices crucial to their identity, means that a public-realist BGLO approach is not only possible, it is already underway. The question is whether it will take root within BGLO’s everyday practice.

Drawing from legal and sociological frameworks, we dedicate a great deal of our scholarship to addressing topics vital to BGLOs in order to contribute to the growing academic discourse and developing modes of scholastic inquiry dedicated to BGLOs.⁶⁵ Moreover, we have brought many of the insights gleaned in academic studies to various public venues, such as Perspectives and Essentials, the Association of Fraternity Advisors’ two official outlets, Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Ebony, The Black College Wire, and even the official organs of BGLOs themselves.⁶⁶ A robust public-realist approach to BGLOs that manifests itself in the continued critical and empirical studies of BGLOs will help to strengthen the voice to BGLOs while critiquing their shortcomings; it will also demand that a mainstream public take them as the serious political and human rights vehicles that they can be. Without such a public intellectual framework, BGLOs will become further marginalized in today’s social order, emerging only as commodities for the marketing of poorly constructed and caricatured films about stepping or over-priced retail specialty shops that trade in the promotion of Greek-letter license plates and line jackets.

While the public-realist paradigm is instrumental in helping to constitute BGLOs as self-determinative entities in their own right, we have also prompted young BGLO members’ self-consciousness as embattled survivors of a society that would say they are unimportant today or even worse, never were and never will be. More than that, we can say that the broader publicity given to BGLOs and their struggles with the violence of hazing have helped other organizations, writers, and activists to focus their attention on the problems of hazing and abuse. Together, we are starting to open up a dialogue that is a bit more sophisticated than simply passing a law and expecting legal dogma to work like a magic wand.

WITHIN THIS BOOK

We are proud of the authors and contributors assembled herein. For many of them, their works were labors of both love and patience. In what follows, we briefly cover each of the chapters and alert the reader to the distinguished contributors who have read each of the chapters and written about how and why each chapter contains significance for us today. Their remarks are placed at the end of each chapter.

Marybeth Gasman provides us with an overview of how BGLOs made significant contributions to the civil rights movement, as well as how they embodied substantial contradictions. She argues that while the BGLOs helped to promote economic empowerment, community service, and a sense of racial pride, they also reproduced much of the same class elitism that wreaked havoc on the black lower class, which they were supposedly serving. While historical in substance, her words find poignancy in our contemporary moment. Moving from the macro to the micro, Yolanda Y. Johnson interrogates the life of Loraine R. Green, the second national president of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Her life stands as an excellent example of early public sociology and fits well with our previous discussion of how one merges academia with activism. Chapter 4 explores the resurgence of religion and its intersection with BGLO organizing. In this vein, Kenneth I. Clarke Sr. and Tamara L. Brown demonstrate how BGLOs stand as diverse theological-political institutions that destabalize the claim that they are either incompatible with a Judeo-Christian belief system or that BGLO principles and practices emerged whole cloth from the same.

In shifting gears to examine the gender politics of black fraternalism, T. Elon Dancy II affords an examination of the intersection between student identity, masculinity, and the processes by which black male Greek students labor to construct a meaningful identity. In particular, and despite dominant discourses concerning black fraternities, Dancy does an excellent job of showing how black fraternities operate as important sites of production for a kind of black masculinity that neither collapses easily into that of a thug, nor becomes that of an aloof and apolitical student. In the following chapter, Reynaldo Anderson, Paul M. Buckley, and Natalie T. J. Tindall take up the very fraternity stereotypes that Dancy’s subjects must navigate. Examining the tropes of the Man’s Man, Ladies’ Man, and Gentleman as they relate to Omega Psi Phi, Kappa Alpha Psi, and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities, they demonstrate how these relatively newfound cultural images are partially propelled by the racist imagery of black men as animals. In so doing, the authors provide a clarion call for a reexamination of such imagery and in whose interests such iconography may work.

As a bookend to that section, chapters 7 and 8 move to the topic of racial identity and racism. Edith Wen-Chu Chen examines the rather taboo topic of nonblack members of BGLOs through a case study of Asian American women in a black sorority. Also, Shanette C. Porter and Gregory S. Parks offer a treatise on unconscious antiblack bias held by BGLO members. In the former, Chen argues that white racism and supremacy drove Asian American women to seek membership in black sororities, while these women also must deal with the effects of white supremacy as manifest in social cleavages aligned with class and skin-color divisions. In the latter, Porter and Parks show the surprising results of an important study. Despite the hopes that BGLOs would afford some protection from the effects of antiblack ideology, Porter and Parks empirically demonstrate that BGLO members adopt many of the same pro-white biases as nonmembers. Accordingly, such a finding begs the question: what should BGLOs do to more directly confront the social and psychological effects of white supremacy on the members and others to whom they are to serve?

In moving to the arena of popular culture production and reception, Robin Means Coleman examines the Delta Sigma Theta sorority’s attempt to counter society’s antiblack biases through their production and release of Countdown to Kusini in 1976. Resulting in a series of victories and tragic defeats, the story of Kusini now stands as a testament to how BGLOs might endeavor to confront racism via popular culture in the future. Following in the theme of silver-screen productions, Matthew W. Hughey interrogates the recent film Stomp the Yard. Bringing critical sociological analysis to bear on sounds and sophistication of stepping as exemplified in the film, Hughey argues that the film perpetuates a set of mythologies about race, class, urban settings, schools, and the memory of the civil rights movement. In so doing, the film transforms these identities and memories into a kind of shallow and hallow commodity that dulls the sharp edge of BGLOs’ past and present activism. Shifting from cultural production to the everyday reception and performance of identity, Marcia Hernandez aptly demonstrates how black sorority women engage in appearance enforcement to challenge the negative images of black womanhood that are propagated throughout popular culture. Yet, such resistance is particularly double-edged—in refusing to succumb to the dominant images of black women as either mammies or jezebels, many employ harsh class distinctions and entrenched us versus them worldviews.

The next section addresses what is arguably one of the most important topics endemic to the present, and future, of BGLO life and organizing—hazing and pledging. In a debate drowning in vociferous and emotional opinions on every imaginable dimension of the issue, both Dwayne J. Scott and Dara Aquila Govan bring empirical social science and legal reasoning to bear on the issues. In this sense, both chapters represent a refreshing change from the dominant opinion-driven tone and timbre of the conversation. Their chapters stand as a testament to why we should bring diverse empirically driven answers to bear on a literal life-or-death problem for BGLOs. First, Scott illuminates how both undergraduate and alumna members interpret hazing as either a positive or negative practice depending on whether such activities will support their organizations’ principles of brother/sister-hood, leadership, scholarship, achievement, and community service. This finding throws into relief the common claim that those who haze are doing so because of bad values or a pathological penchant for power. Moreover, in questioning the connection between such vice and virtue, Scott’s work shows that BGLOs must do a better job in not just forbidding hazing but also in allowing for differing forms of praxis to achieve those principles. Hence, the solution may not be a shorter membership intake process, but a longer more intensive process that teaches adherence to principles through nonabusive means. Second, Dara Aquila Goven, a legal scholar, argues that BGLOs should return to pledging, but a much more enlightened kind. Goven shows that without addressing these issues pragmatically, with the knowledge that the current membership intake system is not working and that many still pledge and haze underground, BGLOs may soon reach financial ruin, a crucial preamble to closing their doors. To avoid such an end, Goven argues that BGLOs must (1) engage in more dialogue about membership intake, (2) perform organizational studies to gauge acceptable components of the process, (3) share such information with the general bodies of each fraternity and sorority in order to reach democratic consensus, (4) revisit and possibly raise the standards for membership selection, and (5) strengthen the current anti-hazing policies and procedures. We agree that such steps are, at the least, a necessary beginning.

In the last section of the book, Terrell L. Strayhorn, Fred McCall, and Stephanie M. McClure examine the heart of BGLOs—their everyday life on college campuses. First, Strayhorn and McCall compare and contrast BGLOs at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In examining data from publications and students’ own words, we learn about how intrinsic/extrinsic motivations, knowledge acquisition, investments, and benefits all vary when compared to joining a BGLO at a PWI or an HBCU. By illuminating the contexts surrounding why people join, we learn a lot about how students may be socialized differently and seek different means and ends in regard to their choice of BGLO. McClure analyzes survey and focus group data in regard to how Greek membership impacts student satisfaction for both black and white students. Despite the fact that BGLO members have a support system, McClure finds that African Americans are in dire need of academic support systems. This gestures toward an important realization, that the trials and tribulations of BGLOs do not occur in a vacuum, but are connected to the support systems, or lack thereof, made available to students.

CONCLUSION

Black Greek-Letter Organizations 2.0: New Directions in the Study of African American Fraternities and Sororities presents a map of BGLOs’ lived responses to the social exigencies of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the turn of the twentieth century, BGLOs were birthed in the shadow of freshly new post-emancipation and reconstruction national projects that were characterized by retrenched white nationalist and supremacist movements and Jim Crow policies that disenfranchised African Americans via poll taxes and literary requirements.⁶⁷ However, BGLOs paradoxically grew even while members enlisted in and supported the United States in the First World War and they flourished during the Harlem Renaissance that no doubt would have failed to occur without BGLO members such as Alain