Hazing. It's every where you look from the Kappa to the AKA's even on to non-devine 9 org's. This is getting out of hand people are dying and getting injured. Others are losing chapters and membership. What have our greek organizations turned into. The main reason for us building these institutions was for the betterment of African American men and women. How is getting our **** beat bettering you.. Have we lost sight of our purpse? Will it ever end. Or are we to be extinct.
I think those who really want to be greek will just go through a graduate chapter to avoid the hazing. There are graduate chapters who haze as well but one can only hope that their goals an aims would be different through their membership intake process.
Technically, hazing has been illegal since the 1990, and therefore anyone that has participated in a "pledging process" since then, did so in an illegal manner. Then, you have people that do not know what pledging means, and has demonstrated a morbid view of pledging. Also, you have people that do not know how to act when they perceive themselves to be in power.
Most people probably equate extinction with a failure to adapt.
Quite frankly, campus Greeks (and many of their alumni counterparts) have all-too-frequently failed to adapt not only to legal changes, but also to the surrounding culture's expectations for Greek-letter societies.
After (and in anticipation of) joining my own Greek-letter society, I was greatly frustrated to learn how widespread hazing had become at each respective organization, and how zealously both young and older members guarded their so-called "traditions." Much of that zeal was misdirected, because Black-on-Black **** actually had little to do with any of these organizations' beginnings. Instead, each organization had as its beginning purpose a role of liberating Black America through its most intellectually-gifted sons and daughters.
The hazing phenomenon that eventually ensured was a by-product of a second and third generation of Black collegians who misguidedly emulated the misbehavior of white Greeks, complete with paddling and emotional cruelty. Why Black Greeks chose that course is a subject that would take far more space than is reasonable for this forum to contain. But suffice to say that its roots are antithetical to the Black experience. After all, it was our ancestors up to the 1860s who were forced against their will to suffer physical **** and beatings as part of American-style enslavement.
In this new millennium, it makes no sense for African-American collegians to risk being beaten as a prerequisite to forming a lifetime bond with their fellow organization members. That is plain idiocy. Our common stake in each other's wellbeing dictates just the opposite. If we are ever to be true to the purposes of each organization's founders, we must insist not on beating new members into submission, but instead upon a new standard of personal excellence.
Male Black initiates need to be groomed into being *men*. Female Black initiates need similarly to be mentored for live-changing and life-giving womanhood. These kinds of manhood and womanhood fully honor our ancestors' struggle, and propel our next generation's possibilities.
There is no need for anyone to associate extinction with Greek life, unless Greeks themselves choose it for themselves. But this society has made it clear that it has no more patience for college students who continue further into dysfunctional excess under a guise of organizational screening. Instead, we can expect the society - if it hasn't already done so - fully to consider these proud organizations' claims of relevance to be nothing but hot air.
We just need to ask ourselves whether our typical day-in, day-out agendas have any real connection with the liberation of Black people. If not, then we must consider ourselves already societally irrelevant.
That's certainly not what the founders envisioned.
