Rashid

“You all know I’m not much for words. I hate public speaking. I panic when I think about our probate show—if we’re still having one, that is. But I want everyone in this room to know a few things.

“First, I have wanted to be a Beta since I was twelve years old. The only teacher I had in middle school who gave a damn about me was a Beta. He was young, fresh out of college and determined to save young black boys in Shaker Heights. He taught English all three years I was there, and he was so successful that they just kept looping him up with the classes.

“Because of him, I knew what to expect out of the process. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. So I stood there and I took it. I took the verbal shit with no problem. I knew it was a game and I could take it. And I took the physical shit, too. I knew that just because I took it didn’t mean I had to be that kind of brother if I crossed.

“But now I see there is no end to it. No matter what, I’m going to do the same things that were done to me. I survived, so why not, right? It’s just the way things are, right?

“I don’t think so. My teacher, Mr. Nelson, taught me better than that. I know that much of what we were going through was wrong and didn’t make any sense. We weren’t getting to know you all like we should—hell, half the things we were learning in set were neither accurate nor universal. What’s the point of learning ‘Excuses’ when every chapter does it differently? What’s the purpose behind these challenges if they are specific to Sigma chapter? It’s like I’m not even pledging Mr. Nelson’s fraternity at all.”

–Rick Brown, Epiphany

***

According to Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. and Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., yesterday (September 6, 2012) was the first annual National Anti-Hazing Awareness Day.  “On National Anti-Hazing Day,” the Sigmas said, “Sigma chapters, Black Greek-lettered organizations and organizations all over are encouraged to host sensitivity training workshops on campuses using the newly developed anti-hazing sensitivity training curriculum material.”

It seems as though the Sigmas have created what they consider to be cutting edge, trailblazing materials to help stop hazing.  They can be found here.   Joining their constitutionally bound brothers, the Zetas came up with Finer Women Don’t Haze.

In press releases posted on each organization’s respective websites, the day was conceived by a coalition of organizations including Sigma Frater Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.  Curiously, the National Action Network did not seem to post anything on their website or facebook page commemorating this day.

Most Black Greek Letter Organizations have been ardently opposed to brutality against their prospective members from the earliest days of their existence.   Indeed, the 1990s brought in a new era known to most as “MIP” or Membership Intake Process.  MIP among most Greeks outside of the chapter room is a four-letter word, while the word “pledge” remains a slur among the party faithful.

Books have been written about hazing among people of color: Black Haze by Ricky Jones, and of course Lazarus, Covenant, and Epiphany by yours truly.  Obviously, I suggest that you buy them all.

Anyway, I’m just going to put it on out there:  National Anti-Hazing Awareness Day was an abject failure.

I did a search of my facebook friends (as you can imagine, many are Greek), and just two Zetas posted about Anti-Hazing Awareness Day.  No Sigmas on my friends list helped make this effort viral.  No other NPHC organization participated nationally in this event, which may explain why none of my Pan-Hellenic brothers or sisters posted anything.

But that’s not why National Anti-Hazing Awareness Day failed.

It didn’t fail because the coalition’s national theme is the utterly unbrandable “LET’S NOT BEAT THE LIFE OUT OF A BEAUTIFUL LEGACY.”  Nor did it fail because of the questionable administrative support that each effort receives outside of the national elected officers who volunteered to lead the effort.  (And let’s face it, if you are on the national board of a BGLO, you better be about the business of governance, not the administration of a flimsy advocacy effort.)

No, National Anti-Hazing Awareness Day failed because it misses what needs to be the true target of any effort against hazing:

Middle school students.

Why middle school?  Because this is an age where many students first experience more ritualized bullying than what they may have experienced in elementary school.  It also may be the first time that young people begin to think of college as a very real opportunity for their futures.

I totally made that up.  But I still believe it.  I am not a social scientist, so I need for the scholars out there to really do research into this.  Or if you’ve done the research already, consider submitting your findings to “Bullying and Hazing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.” Email Hank Nuwer at hnuwer@franklincollege.edu for details.

In order for National Anti-Hazing Awareness Day to have been a success, it needs to look at changing the culture of hazing over a period of time by investing in middle school students, high school students, and the college brothers and sisters.

First, every NPHC organization needs to engage children and families as they navigate their middle school years.  Yes, I know, most BGLOs already have mentoring programs in middle schools.  Well you know what?  Do more.  And do them better.

This article at the National Education Association’s website, written by Peter Lorain, states that “Middle school students are concerned about values, right and wrong, and the behavior and unfair treatment of others. Classroom and school activities should promote this emerging social awareness and concern.”

So, Greek teachers, why not encourage your students to learn about hazing and why it is wrong?  Middle schoolers are smart.  Many will immediately make the connection between bullying and hazing and they will wonder why college students make even dumber mistakes than the bullies in middle school.  And we know that middle school students are already oversaturated with messages about bullying in the first place, so let’s step it up a notch.

NPHC organizations themselves should develop a hazing prevention lesson for the middle school level.  And I don’t mean just for the kids who opted to be in the special programs of our organizations like Guide Right, GEMS, or a beautillion.  I mean really make honest attempts to present a hazing prevention lesson to every middle schooler in your city or town.  It can be done.

By the time these students reach high school, the problem of hazing will already be in the back of their heads.  Therefore, the next thing NPHC organizations must do to stop hazing is for the graduate NPHC chapters in every city and town to present a workshop for graduating seniors and their parents about what to expect when they go to college when it comes to fraternities and sororities.  The consequences of hazing need to be reiterated to them.  Their parents – many of whom will undoubtedly be inactive fraternity and sorority members themselves – will also need a refresher on what is currently allowed and what is not.  How many stories have we heard about the dad who was insistent that his son be made “the right way” only to be horrified that being “made right” now resembles something a lot more like torture at Guantanamo Bay than the pledging scenes we know from School Daze?

Teenagers leaving home for the first time need to know that they don’t have to submit to hazing. The “old school” Greeks back home will respect them more if they refuse to be hazed.  This needs to be said and it needs to be meant.

By the time the student has reached college, NPHC organizations have invested in them from sixth grade to twelfth grade, teaching them about hazing in middle school as a social studies project, welcoming them into their various mentoring programs to teach them positive values, and giving them the facts about hazing as they leave high school.  By this time, we should be invested enough to trust that they will refuse hazing.  Attention then turns to how a chapter can learn activities which are alternatives to hazing.

But first, organizations need to know what exactly is happening on college campuses today.  They need to know precisely what people think constitutes a pledge process these days.  We cannot afford to wait until after the most brutal hazing occurs in order to study it.  We need to know the steps which led to it.  Therefore, Black Greek Letter Organizations must offer full amnesty to those members who step forward in an effort to change the hazing cultures in their chapters.

Yes, I am suggesting that hazers out themselves.  And yes, I am suggesting that NPHC organizations forgive them and let it go, so long as everyone is committed to moving forward.   Our organizations are so focused on doling out the consequences of hazing that the cloak of discretion now obscures even the smallest of warning signs.

Just as bullies are often stereotyped as kids from broken homes with self-esteem issues, “hazing chapters” often seen as lazy, thuggish, ne’er-do-wells.   In all actuality, bullies are often quite smart, articulate, and charismatic – that’s how they get away with it at school all the time.  Knowing this, I’d bet good money that many chapters that have been busted for hazing have won national awards and campus awards and have more than a few members who have been leaders on campus.  Just as we don’t want hazers to “beat the life out of a beautiful legacy” we want to reform and rehabilitate these otherwise good and decent campus leaders who have gotten caught up in a culture they didn’t create and have never been given a way out from.

Yes, let the hazers have a semester when they can come to safe spaces with their chapter advisors, grad chapter presidents, task force members – whoever – so that they can put it out in the open and ask for solutions.  Most hazers know what they’re engaging in isn’t the right way, but they don’t know how to change the culture of their chapter.

We already know the consequences of hazing.   With apologies to True Blood, we all know that hazing is a one way ticket to The True Death – for your own membership and for your chapter’s charter.  We get it.  Hazing is bad.  It can cost you your letters.  In some states, it can cost you your professional license and your freedom.

But let’s focus on the brotherhood and the sisterhood by allowing those who want to change the opportunity to do so with a helping hand.  Let’s help our own members understand that they have already been seasoned to be hazers because they survived middle school and high school bullying, but that they can break this cycle if they want to.

Let’s say farewell to these puffed up national initiatives and focus on the fortification of our own communities, starting with the youth and the re-humanization of our college brothers and sisters.  They are our legacy.  Just as we attempt to protect adults from abuse at the hands of other adults, we have to put energy into giving young people the tools they need to make the correct decisions in the first place.

So friend from undergrad and compatriot in ratchetness asked, regarding “My Country t’is of Thee” and “God Save the Queen,” “Why did we poach the song of the colonizer?”

I don’t have the answer to that.  All I know is that Americans remainded unoriginal for years and years after, and it seeped into Greek Life!

Example #1:  Why the Alpha Phi Omega toast song to the tune of “Alma Mater” which is basically the tune of a whole bunch of school songs, including Cornell:

But here’s something else to blow your mind.  Ever heard this song?

Betcha didn’t know:

!!!!!!

Let’s be clear:  I do not watch Basketball Wives.

One of my greatest failings in my life is that I have a hard time maintaining the appropriate boundaries between acquaintances and friends.  This was easier when I was much younger.  I don’t know what happened along the way, but I will try to hammer it out.

In high school, it was much easier learning who your real friends were.  You were either connected by your neighborhood or your previous schools.  For me, experiencing the trauma of a closed junior high school and being forced to start high school in 9th grade rather than 10th led to a great, small cadre of friends early on.  Later, participating in other activities helped me meet new people and gain different friends, like a summer job at the National Library of Medicine, being a cheerleader, or FBLA.  Even though every person I met along the way was not necessarily a friend, there are several who are still in my “circle.”

College changed things, but just a little.  Being black in a mostly white college helped narrow down the field, so to speak.  I was from a black city, went to a black high school, and had black friends.  I knew I would encounter others, but when it came to my circle, I knew (or thought I knew) who it would consist of.  Certainly every black person at Georgetown wasn’t my friend, and there were many non-black people I came to admire, respect, and love.  But from the outset, I knew where I would be welcomed without much explanation, as a black man.*

I later pledged Alpha Phi Omega in an effort to feel more like I was part of the overall Georgetown experience, and I did.  Suddenly, I was connected to all types of people racially, culturally, economically, and more.  I felt not only part of Georgetown, but like I could actually befriend someone of a different culture because we had things in common aside from the accident of living on the same floor in the dorm.

(For more insight into the Georgetown experience during that time period, please pick up my buddy Thomas Chatterton Williams’ Losing My Cool.  Although I was not “in” this memoir, I was present during the time period he writes about and much of it rang true for me.)

All this as a preface… I am basically saying that until I graduated college, it was pretty clear who my friends were and why.  It wasn’t until after college that things got muddled and complicated.

***

I often tell people that I didn’t learn how to curse anyone out until I became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha.

In APO, there were definitely moments when brothers hated each other and got into fights and whatnot.  Indeed, there was a moment when I did a wall-slide (literally!) and broke down into tears after a chapter meeting.  But Alpha was different.

In my chapter of APO, even though you had to earn the chapter’s vote, anyone was allowed to start the process.  There was no “competition” so to speak as much as satisfying the requirements while being liked by the chapter.  Some APO chapters are more competitive, expecting that you “make line” like an NPHC organization, and others are not competitive at all, barely requiring that you do anything.

Alpha, of course, was different.  It was far more expensive, time-consuming, and downright scarier.  You had to constantly prove that this was for you, that this was the right for you, that you could afford it, that you just plain belonged there.  Even though I pursued an alumni chapter, there was always the suspicion that I could be hazed, either the old fashioned way of straight brutality, or in sophisticated, old geezer ways of running errands, menial labor, and other servitude.  Also, needless to say, there was a lot more information to learn:  history, people, poems, projects, etc.  And whether you were in another fraternal organization or not, you sort of just know going in that becoming a member will be an intense experience.

Along the way, you meet others who also want to be down.  Some of them never considered Greek life until one day, the looked up and noticed that all of their friends were in fraternities and they were missing out.  Other people always knew they wanted to be in a fraternity but couldn’t in undergrad because of their grades, expression of sexual orientation, general lameness, or the chapter was on suspension.  And there were people like me, who always wanted to be part of something but took a long time to figure out what.

I love Alpha very much.  And I loved my chapter dearly at one time in my life.  But I believe that forcing people together who wouldn’t ordinarily be friends has done some damage to me that I’m only just now able to start repairing.  And it’s not just Alpha – it’s also APO to a different extent.

I was 23 when I became an Alpha.  My line brothers were 31, 40, and 43.  That’s an alumni chapter for you.  It’s far less likely that you will come in with people in your age group.  Rather than go into the details which would either be boring or too personal, I’ll say that I never clicked with one of my line brothers at all.  He was toxic from the start.  I was close with the other two, but ended up pulling away from them after about a year.  They were nice, generally, and meant well, usually, but for various reasons, I knew my heart wasn’t in our relationship.  It doesn’t give me pride to say I am not close with my line brothers, but I feel it’s necessary to be honest about our relationship.

Subconsciously, I’ve tried to supplant these negative fraternal experiences with my line brothers into positive experiences and new memories with “specials” or “specs” [speshes].  In one case, my spec was someone I sponsored for membership in the Boston alumni chapter.  In two other cases, they were people I took a shine to, but did not sponsor.  In all three cases, I took the young brothers under my wing, taught them everything I knew, confided in them, was hard on them, and at the end, gave them the best crossing gifts ever.  EVER.

But as time goes on, the black t-shirts fade and the paddles get dusty.  Again, rather than bore you (further) or get too personal, just as I realized I had to let go of a relationship with my line brothers, I also have to let go of one with my specials, too.  I can’t expect devotion just because I made them nice things and made fusses about each of them.  Maybe for some of them, they just don’t see our relationship being what I wanted and hoped it could be.

***

I apologize for that interlude.  It seemed sadder than I had hoped and strays far from the ratchetness of the animated gif of Evelyn Lozada up above.

My point:

Being an Alpha has complicated my perception of who is in my circle.

The “line brother” dynamic expects the individual to put the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the self.  This is counter-intuitive to human nature.  How can I expect to take care of the group if my mind, body, and spirit are not already in tip-top shape?  Further, what if I have embraced the mentality of being on-line but my brothers have not?  Having line brothers (or line sisters) is often romanticized as being a phenomenal thing, usually because the adversity and hardship of being on line is supposed to bring you together.  Maybe my line and I didn’t go through enough hardship to truly trust each other.  I can own that.  But to what end is a line brother or line sister relationship if not friendship?  Do we pick our other friends based on bad things happening to us?  Of course not.

It’s also likely that I’ve romanticized what it means to have a special.  I think I tried to codify the friendships I had with brothers when I was on-line into a more official relationship which proclaimed ownership of some sort:

• You’re my spec.
• I named you.
• I chose you.
• Look at these nice things I gave you.
• Has anyone else done that for you?

I don’t have a lot of answers right now but I suppose there’s time to figure it out if I want to.

I know that becoming an Alpha was a choice and paying my dues every year is also a choice, regardless of the circumstances I’m faced with as an active member.  And like I said, I love Alpha and I enjoy Alpha.  And regardless of my complicated relationships with my line brothers and my specials, I still have some awesome friends in the fraternity who don’t need a title.  They number less than ten and they are worth the price of admission.

But I also have to face facts:  being a member of a fraternity forces me into relationships with people I would not ordinarily choose to be around or associated with.  If you are not a fraternity member, you really need to consider this fact before you join.  Your life can be just as enriched without membership in a fraternity if you know how to make friends with people – and know how to be a good friend in the first place.

If you love having a small circle, know that membership is the opposite of that.  Be prepared to either fake it or be known as that evil, surly frat brother that nobody likes.

I feel this will need a Part II because I didn’t even get to touch on the notion of what happens when people who don’t share your values think they’re in your circle.  And that has nothing to do with being in a fraternity.

*As a gay man, it would be two years into my Georgetown experience before I would become comfortable enough to officially be out of the closet to the black community.  Perhaps that warrants another diary entry at a later date.