HAZING IN BLACK FRATERNITIES

Dr. John A. Williams

Executive Director, Center for the Study of Pan-Hellenic Issues

If you wanted to make a case for hazing in Black fraternities, you have lots of buttons you can push to make a new member accept being "made right" as the phrase goes. You can appeal to his manhood, by reminding him that "only the strong survive". You can appeal to his sense of racial pride by reminding him that the pressures he is expected to endure from "the brothers" is nothing compared to what the "real world" will put on him. And if you wanted to appeal to his spiritual being, you could challenge him with Scriptures such as Psalms 66:10-12 :

"For Thou hast tested us O Lord; Thou hast tried us as silver is tried. Thou didst bring us into the net, Thou didst lay affliction on our loins, Thou didst let men ride over our heads. We have gone through fire and through water; Yet Thou hast brought us forth to a spacious place"

If you wanted to make a case for hazing, these are but a few of the options you have to convince a pledge to accept what they are being asked to endure before "crossing the sands" to come into the frat. But there are some questions you have to ask yourself if you have any sense of history and any sense of racial pride. How do you explain to him that after slavery is abolished for over a hundred years, a pledge should submit to being treated worse by his "brothers" than his ancestors were by their "masters"? How do you justify beating a brother into submission with boards, belts, fists and other instruments to teach him that he is becoming a "man" by allowing himself to be punished like a child?

There is much we do in Black fraternities that we attempt to justify by saying "it's a Black thing, you wouldn't understand". But in the final analysis, even the Blackest of us still don't understand why it is necessary to haze a prospective member in the name of "making him right".

If we want a brother to be smarter and tougher so he can succeed "in the real world" then why don't we make sure he gets to class on time, refreshed instead of exhausted from all-night pledge sessions? Have we given in to the racist views of our oppressors who only judge a Black man's manhood by the stripes he can endure from the whip and not by the mental prowess he can display in the classroom? Or is that just being soft?

Hank Nuwer, the author of "Broken Pledges" and "The Wrongs of Passage" has said that hazing is for cowards. I prefer the term punks. If we in Black fraternities reject that notion, then why do we deny our participation when "all hell breaks loose" and someone is injured? Why did Michael Davis' murderers lie and say he had been injured playing football when they had slapped, hit and body-slammed him into unconsciousness? Their failure to step up and be Black men when their behavior was questioned cost Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity $2.25 million dollars in 1997. And yet that is what it is be Black men? I don't think so!

When Joseph Snell was driven to near suicide by the brothers of Omega Psi Phi at the University of Maryland in 1993 after he had been beaten with hammers, whips, brushes and broken pieces of furniture, he landed in the hospital. Joseph's crime was that he wasn't "Black enough" so some idiot decided to place a space heater next to his face to make him darker. That display cost their fraternity nearly $400, 000 in damages. All in the name of "making a brother right"!

We all know that undergraduate members of Black fraternities have pretty much ignored the no-pledge policy for new member intake. Underground pledging has replaced a system designed to eliminate hazing and reduce the liability pledging and/or hazing places on Black fraternities. No one wants to be a paper brother. No one wants to let someone "skate" into the frat. No one wants to be accused of being "soft", and so the madness continues.

If this is what it takes to be a Black man, then why not be a real man when the "accident" happens. Don't run around looking for some story for the other brothers to memorize. Don't hide behind the shield because you know others in the frat "have your back". Pick up the phone...no better yet, get in your car and go to his mother's house and tell her. "I just broke your son's ribs, bloodied his lip, crushed his skull and kicked his Black a-- until he collapsed in the basement. He was trying to skate into the frat, you know? And we wasn't having any of that. But you know something? He went out like a true brother! He took it like a man!"