Cuz i'm young and i'm black and my hat's real low?: A critique of black greeks as "educated gangs"

Black Greek-letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 385-418

  Hughey, Matthew W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84898083020     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (131)

1. It is important to mention that I concentrate mainly on black Greek fraternities, not sororities, because the critique of BGLOs as educated gangs is usually directed at male members. However, this does not discount or exclude female members. I recognize the gender dynamics that make the fraternity and sorority lived experiences very different from each other, although they are still lived within the overarching context of blackness. Still, one must acknowledge, "From the very beginning of the sociology of deviance, women had been neglected, treated as biological entities to whom sociology did not apply, reduced to appendages or confined to the home. Their absence from the field is nothing short of spectacular. It is a silence so stunning that it demands examination for what it reveals." Colin Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (New York: Continuum, 1994), 94.
2. Walter Kimbrough, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities (Cranbury, N.J.: Rosemont, 2003)
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6. Peter M. Blau and W. Richard Scott, Formal Organizations: A Comparative Approach (Scranton, Pa.: Chandler, 1962), 1.
7. Deborah Lamm Weisel, Contemporary Gangs: An Organizational Analysis (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2002), 3, 34.
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18. Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 119-48.
19. W. E. B. DuBois, "The Talented Tenth," in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of Today, ed. Booker T. Washington et al. (New York: J. Pott, 1903).
20. Stuart Hall quoted in Issac Julien and Kobena Mercer, "De Margin and De Centre," in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 443.
21. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 72.
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24. Marcos Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs to Investigate and Compare" (masters thesis, University of Colorado, 2001)
25. Carol J. Pinkerton, "Fraternities, Sororities, and Gangs: A Grounded Theory Comparison" (masters thesis, State University of West Georgia, 2000).
26. Thrasher, The Gang.
27. William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943)
28. Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971)
29. Joan Moore, Homeboys (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978)
30. James D. Virgil, Barrio Gangs (Austin, Tex.: University of Austin Press, 1988).
31. Irving Spergel, Violent Gangs in Chicago: Segmentation and Integration (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983), 19.
32. Jane M. Goettsch and Michael A. Hayes, "Racism and Sexism in Greek Events: A Call for Sensitivity," NASPA Journal 28, no. 1 (fall 1990).68.
33. Irving A. Spergel, The Youth Gang Problem (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 80.
34. Elizabeth C. Fine, "Stepping, Saluting, Cracking, and Freaking: The Cultural Politics of African-American Step Shows," Drama Review 35, no. 2 (summer 1991).48.
35. Richard Bauman, "Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore," in Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972), 31-41.
36. Fine, "Stepping, Saluting, Cracking," 56.
37. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 8.
38. Robert A. Rhoads, "Whales Tales, Dog Piles, and Beer Goggles: An Ethnographic Case Study of Fraternity Life," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1995).306-23
39. James Diego Virgil, Barrio Gangs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988)
40. James Diego Virgil, "Street Baptism: Chicano Gang Initiation," Human Organization 55, no. 2 (summer 1996).149-53.
41. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 9.
42. Pinkerton, "Fraternities, Sororities, and Gangs," 46-50.
43. Hank Nuwer, Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing (Athens, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 1990)
44. Hank Nuwer, The Hazing Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004)
45. Hank Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)
46. Ester Wright, Torn Togas: The Dark Side of Campus Greek Life (Minneapolis: Fairview Press, 1996)
47. Kimbrough, Black Greek 101
48. Ricky Jones, Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004)
49. Gregory S. Parks and Tamara L. Brown, "In the Fell Clutch of Circumstance: Pledging and the Black Greek Experience. African American Fraternities and Sororities, 437-64.
50. R. A. Schroth, "Brotherhood of Death," America 177 no. 11 (1997).6.
51. M. Geraghty, "Hazing Incidents at Sororities Alarm Colleges," Chronicle of Higher Education 43, no. 41 (1997).38.
52. Parks and Brown, "In the Fell Clutch of Circumstance," 444-45.
53. G. D. Kuh, E. T. Pascarella, and H. Wechsleer, "The Questionable Value of Fraternities," Chronicle of Higher Education 434, no. 4 (1996): A68.
54. G. D. Kuh and J. C. Arnold, Brotherhood and the Bottle: A Cultural Analysis of the Role of Alcohol in Fraternities (Bloomington: Center for the Study of the College Fraternity, Indiana University, 1992), 97.
55. J. L. Baier and E. G. Whipple, "Greek Values and Attitudes: A Comparison with Independents," NASPA Journal 28, no. 1 (1990).53.
56. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 5.
57. R. M. O'Conner, S. E. Cooper, and W. S. Thiel, "Alcohol Use as a Predictor of Potential Fraternity Membership," Journal of College Student Development 37, no. 6 (1996).669-76.
58. Wright, Torn Togas, 53.
59. Nicholas J. Hennessy and Lisa M. Huson, "Legal Issues and Greek Letter Organizations," in New Challenges for Greek Letter Organizations: Transforming Fraternities and Sororities into Learning Communities, ed. Edward G. Whipple (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 61-77.
60. S. Copenhaver and E. Grauerholz, "Sexual Victimization among Sorority Women: Exploring the Link between Sexual Violence and Institutional Practices," Sex Roles 24, no. 102 (1991).31-41.
61. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 4.
62. Craig T. Palmer and Christopher F. Tilley, "Sexual Access to Females as Motivation for Joining Gangs: An Evolutionary Approach," Journal of Sex Research 32, no. 3 (1995).213-17
63. Rhoads, "Whales Tales, Dog Piles, and Beer Goggles," 306-23.
64. Tyra Black, Joanne Belknap, and Jennifer Ginsburg, "Racism, Sexism, and Aggression: A Study of Black and White Fraternities, African American Fraternities and Sororities, 386.
65. Nancy Boyd-Franklin and A. J. Franklin, Boys into Men: Raising Our African American Teenage Sons (New York: Dutton Books, 2000), 145.
66. S. B. Boeringer, "Associations of Rape-Supportive Attitudes with Fraternal and Athletic Participation," Violence against Women 5, no. 1 (1999).85.
67. Richard Majors and Janet M. Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 8, 29.
68. Greg Dimitriadis, Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs: Young Black Men Coming of Age in Urban America (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2003), 18.
69. Majors and Billson, Cool Pose, 86.
70. Dimitriadis, Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs, 18.
71. Baier and Whipple, "Greek Values and Attitudes," 43-53
72. Ronald Huff, ed., Gangs in America, III (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002)
73. Rhoads, "Whales Tales, Dog Piles, and Beer Goggles," 306-23
74. Jean-Marie Lyon, Scott Henggeler, and James A. Hall, "The Family Relations and Criminal Activities of Caucasian and Hispanic-American Gang Members," Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 20, no. 5 (1992).439-49.
75. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 10.
76. Mitchell Dunier, Slims Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
77. Ron Suskind, Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (New York: Broadway Books, 1998).
78. Dimitriadis, Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs, 33.
79. Jonathan Scott Lee and Fred L. Hord, eds., I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 5.
80. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, "Gender and Outlaw Capitalism: A Historical Account of the Black Sisters United Girl Gang," Signs 23, no. 3 (1998).687-705.
81. Anne Campbell, The Girls in the Gang (New York: Blackwell, 1984), 687.
82. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 6.
83. Martin S. Janjowski, Islands in the Streets: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
84. Boyd-Franklin and Franklin, Boys into Men, 187.
85. W. E. Sedlecek and G. C. Brooks, Racism in American Education: A Model for Change (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1976)
86. J. Burt and G. Halpin, "African American Identity Development: A Review of the Literature" (paper presented at the meeting of the Mid- South Educational Research Association, New Orleans, 1998).
87. Walter Kimbrough and P. Hutcheson, "The Impact of Membership in Black Greek-Letter Organizations on Black Students Involvement in Collegiate Activities and Their Development of Leadership Skills," Journal of Negro Education 67, no. 2 (spring 1998).96-105.
88. Tresa Mitchell Saxton, "The Hazing Practices of Black Fraternities Located on White Campuses: The Interplay of Racism, Masculinity, and Male Violence" (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2003).
89. Deborah Prothrow-Stith and Michaele Weissman, Deadly Consequences: How Violence Is Destroying Our Teenage Population and a Plan to Begin Solving the Problem (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
90. Joseph White and James Coñes, Black Man Emerging: Facing the Past and Seizing the Future in America (New York: Routledge, 1999).
91. bell hooks, Art on my Mind (New York: New Press, 1995), 211.
92. Martínez, "Analyzing College Fraternities and Gangs," 9.
93. Boyd-Franklin and Franklin, Boys into Men, 193.
94. Nathan Hare and Julia Hare, Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood: The Passage (San Francisco: Black Think Tank, 1985).
95. Jawanza Kunjufu, cited in Boyd-Franklin and Franklin, Boys into Men, 217.
96. Boyd-Franklin and Franklin, Boys into Men, 192.
97. Sandra Mizumoto Posey, "The Body Art of Brotherhood," in Brown et al., African American Fraternities and Sororities, 269-93.
98. Sandra Mizumoto Posey, "Burning Messages: Interpreting African American Fraternity Brands and Their Bearers," Voices 30, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 2004).1 also available at http://www.nyfolklore.org/pubs/voic30-3- 4/burnmsgs.html.
99. Pinkerton, "Fraternities, Sororities, and Gangs," 58.
100. Posey, "The Body Art of Brotherhood," 289.
101. Marcella L. McCoy, "Calls: An Inquiry into Their Origin, Meaning, and Function," in Brown et al., African American Fraternities and Sororities, 295-313.
102. C. William McKee, "Understanding the Diversity of the Greek World," in Fraternities and Sororities on the Contemporary College Campus, ed. Roger B. Winston Jr., William R. Nettles III, and John H. Opper Jr. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), 27-28.
103. Venkatesh, "Gender and Outlaw Capitalism," 694.
104. Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3.
105. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 310.
106. Rudyard Kipling, "If - ," in Rewards and Fairies (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910).
107. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 16.
108. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty - San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966).
109. See Gordon MacInnes, Wrong for All the Right Reasons: How White Liberals Have Been Undone by Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
110. Kenneth B. Clarke, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965)
111. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
112. For instance, Princeton sociologist Devah Pagers recent study sent evenly matched pairs of black and white job applicants to 350 interviews for entry-level positions. The only difference was that some applicants listed an eighteen-month prison sentence for cocaine possession on their résumés. For the black applicants, the callback rate was 5 percent for those with criminal records and 14 percent for those without. For the white applicants, it was 17 percent for those with criminal records and 34 percent for those without. Therefore, whites with felony records were more than three times as likely to be hired than blacks with felony records, and white applicants with clean records were more than twice as likely to be hired than black applicants with clean records. See Devah Pager, "Walking the Talk: What Employers Say versus What They Do," American Sociological Review 70, no. 3 (2005).355-80
113. Devah Pager, "Double Jeopardy: Race, Crime, and Getting a Job," Wisconsin Law Review 2 (2005).617-60
114. Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 5 (2003).937-75
115. Devah Pager, "Blacks and Ex-Cons Need Not Apply," Contexts 2, no. 4 (2003).58-59. In another study by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, stereotypically white and black names were affixed to résumés and sent to employers. White names got about one callback per ten résumés
116. For an excellent critique of the culture of poverty thesis, see Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981).
117. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York: Scribners, 1992).
118. Pierre Bourdieu, "Cultural Power," cited in Lyn Spillman, Cultural Sociology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), 72 (emphasis in original).
119. William M. Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 66.
120. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Palladin, 1973), 9.
121. Pat Jackson and Cary Rudman, "Moral Panic and the Response to Gangs in California," in Gangs: The Origins and Impact of Contemporary Youth Gangs in the United States, ed. Scott Cummings and Daniel J. Monti (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 259.
122. Simon Cottle, Ethnic Minorities and the Media (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2000), 11.
123. Richard C. McCorkle and Terance D. Miethe, Panic: The Social Construction of the Street Gang Problem (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001)
124. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clark, and Bryan Roberts, Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1978), 323.
125. Regina Austin, "Left at the Post: One Take on Blacks and Postmodernism," Law and Society 26, no. 4 (1992).752.
126. bell hooks, "Postmodern Blackness," in Yearnings (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 23-31.
127. West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," 129.
128. Adolph L. Reed Jr., "Black Particularity Reconsidered," in Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. E. S. Glaude Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).51.
129. Steven R. Cureton, "Introducing Hoover: Ill Ride for You, Gangsta," in Huff, Gangs in America, 3, 100.
130. Paul Ruffins, "Greek Pride and Pain," Black Issues in Higher Education 16 (August 1999).103-4.
131. Conspicuous consumption is a term used to describe lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such displays are a means of attaining or maintaining social status. See Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899).