http://www.africana.com/articles/dai...05greekbts.asp
Voices: In Defense of Pledging
I'm not defending hazing, but rituals are important!
By Tanu T. Henry
I was more disgusted than angry. So disgusted I felt somebody had just sucker punched me and gotten away with it. How could any black Greek worth just one iota of just one of the three Greek letters she swore on the Bible to defend the night she crossed — write the crap I just read in the email?
As horrific as those extreme cases are, they remain poor excuses for a ban on pledging, as some have advocated. I soon learned the email was written by an angry young woman hurt by a negative incident with a sorority sister. Sour on black Greek life, she sought revenge by sending out a letter spitefully exposing the treasured and time-honored secrets of all nine historically black fraternities and sororities. Bogus, I thought. One saving grace was the letter's errors: its author was mistaken about several facts in her ranting expose, including the details of my own frat's secret handshake.
As I pondered the letter-writer's betrayal, I had an insight. For years I've been debating (both with others and with myself) a question: Should fraternities and sororities keep pledging intakes even though the alarming details about recent hazing deaths and injuries strongly argue against the pledge process?
After reading this letter, my answer is: Absolutely.
Before you get mad, let me explain. No sane frat boy or sorority girl advocates the kind of hazing that ends in serious bodily harm or death. Sometimes things do go wrong and sometimes old heads forget their own pledge processes and take their antics beyond the limits of acceptability, harming the very people they are trying to imbue with all the positives their organizations represent. I mean, really, what does a face swipe and chest thump or licking someone's cracking, dusty, funky, spray-painted boots have to do with remembering the day any organization was incorporated by the federal government? And these excesses are mild in comparison to those that end in injury or death.
But as horrific as those extreme cases are they remain poor excuses for a ban on pledging, as some have advocated.
Pledging is the process that prevents our organizations from collapsing onto themselves. Pledging is what saves us from sketchy, infidels like the embittered young woman who sent out that destructive email.
I can't speak for the national pan-Hellenic council, but I know I don't want any fraternity brothers who have not mastered the history, legacy and importance of our fraternity, or who cannot cherish its symbols and secrets.
Who wants to belong to a group of people like that? Pledging builds the willpower and mental mettle required before a man or woman merits the respect of a Greek letter organization.
I pledged. I'll never forget the night I crossed the burning sands, scrunched in the back of a minivan — wet, blindfolded and tipsy — and heard a mob of brothers intimidate in their gruffest chanting bases, "somebody's trying to sneak in my frat and it ain't gonna be no sh-t like that!"
I pledged. And it was long and difficult. But my college memories are all the richer for it. My recollections of those grunt days and nights are more rewarding and inspiring to me today than I ever thought they would be when I was under the specter of the paddle. Sleepless nights. Sore muscles. Paddle bruises. Morning and midnight runs around the track. Memorizing pages and pages of organizational history. Calling every member of my organization on campus "big brother" for months. Passing other Greeks and whispering, "greetings noble Greek" the day before I crossed with the uplifting prospect, of course, of hordes of T-shirts, trinkets and other Greek paraphernalia when I finally made it over to the other side.
This process means too much to me to fathom how today's undergrads only read handbooks and sign papers to join their fraternities and sororities. Just a few years ago, "sneaking into the frat" or "going paper" was tantamount to treason. I'm not suggesting that some of the "paper folks" don't bring passion, great ideas and dedication to their organizations.
What I am saying, though, is that without undergoing the intense pressure of the pledge process, no one can forge a substantive level of loyalty with their surrogate siblings. Without the pain and suffering, the resulting sense of membership is diminished.
Before our five-month official pledge process began, my three sands (Greek slang for the guys you come into the organization with) and I hardly knew each other. But once we got "on line," our loose bond of friendship quickly tightened into the cohesive allegiance of lifelong brotherhood we now share. We quickly learned each other's birthdays and parents' names, life histories, campus "creep moves," class schedules, pet peeves, favorite cars and future ambitions. We also learned how to rely on each other to share the burden when collectively punished. We threw out the letter "I" from our vocabulary for months and only used the third person plural "we" or "our," an exercise that underscored the unity of our line.
The challenges we faced forced us to develop a working group intelligence, a psychic sum total of all our individual weaknesses and strengths. We called upon this shared and reliable system of knowledge and responsiveness to accomplish every physical and mental task presented us.
These days we live in different parts of the country and have lives of our own. But whenever we get together it's like a family reunion. We begin where we left off. And the dedication we have to our organization and each other could never be damaged by any misunderstanding — no matter how deep or divisive.
That's why I believe in the pledge process. Sure, the pledge rituals need to be softened (not cheapened) and foolproofed to safeguard against any possibility of harm. I don't want to see anyone injured or, worse, dead. But if black sororities and fraternities intend to play the central role that they have in African American higher education and post-collegiate life as they have for nearly a century now, we need to hang onto the challenging process that produced the caliber of national leaders we have had on our rolls for the past century.
First published: September 5, 2003
About the Author
Tanu T. Henry is a staff writer at Africana — who (just for the record) didn't go paper.
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