Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities

Notes

PREFACE 1. King himself was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha. 2. J. P. Olsen, “Blood Brothers,” Swing (February 1995): 49. 3. Robert Harris, “Grand Polemarch’s Message,” Kappa Alpha Psi Journal (December 1994). 4. Hank Nuwer delivers a good recount of Harris’s death in Broken Pledges: The Deadly Right of Hazing (Marietta, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 1990). 5. Paul Ruffins, “Are the Black Fraternities Beating Themselves to Death?” Black Issues in Higher Education (June 12, 1997): 25. ONE: THE PROBLEM AT HAND 1. Several articles by journalist Christopher Shea illustrate this trend. In 1994 alone Shea wrote “Two More Alumni in Fraternity Charged in Hazing Death,” for the New York Times (February 24, 1994) and two pieces for the Chronicle of Higher 129 Notes Education: “Brutal Hazing Death Shocks Missouri Campus” in March and “Wall of Silence” in June. The fraternity pledge process and the hazing that usually accompanies it are not new phenomena. For partial historical documentation of “reported” hazing incidents, injuries, and deaths, see Hank Nuwer, Broken Pledges, as well as the appendix of this book. Public concern with the brutality of the BGF pledge process increased after Joel Harris was killed in 1989 and, as mentioned, intensified after Michael Davis’s death at Southeast Missouri State University. For another account of the Davis case, see William Cox, “Joining a Fraternity Should Not Result in Death,” Black Issues in Higher Education (March 1, 1994). The finest recount of the Davis case is probably J. P. Olsen’s “Blood Brothers.” 2. Nuwer, Broken Pledges. 3. Ibid., 62. 4. Ibid., 63. 5. Ibid., 63. 6. To preserve anonymity, BGF members are not referenced by name, but fraternal affiliation. Anonymity was guaranteed to interviewees and focus group participants to prompt as much honesty as possible about their views on their organizations and behavior. 7. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 258. 8. Louis Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt, Institutional Racism in America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969). 9. This is what I see as a broad and powerful definition of politics advanced by Harold Laswell in Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian Books, 1958). TWO: OLD PROBLEM, NEW APPROACH 1. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Deadly Consequences: How Violence Is Destroying Our Teenage Population and a Plan to Begin Solving the Problem (New York: Harper Collins, 1993). 2. Emile Durkheim, “Social Facts,” in M. Broadbeck (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science (New York: MacMillan, 1968): 247. 3. Ibid., 248. 4. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Assassination of the Black Male Image (Los Angeles: Middle Passage Press, 1994). 5. See James Carey, “Abolishing the Old Spirit,” Critical Studies in Mass Communications (March 1, 1995) and Christopher Sharrett, “Movies vs. the Media,” USA Today (March 25, 1995). 6. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Boston: MIT Press, 1991). 130 Notes to Chapter 2 7. Many examinations of Habermas are available to those interested in such engagements. Although it is impossible to cite every, or even most of the studies , two which were quite beneficial for my purposes are Craig Calhoun’s Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), and Maeve Cook’s Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’ Pragmatics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). Joan Alway’s Critical Theory and Political Possibilities (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995); Jay Bernstein’s Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Jane Braaten’s Habermas’ Critical Theory of Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991) are also fine works. 8. Grossberg, We Gotta Get Outta This Place (New York: Routledge, 1992): 217. 9. Examples include Johanna Meehan, Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1995). 10. Studies that engage the theme of historical black alienation are widespread. For example, see Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1990); Price Cobbs and William Grier, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968); George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, Conn.: University Press of New England, 1971); and Haki Madhubuti, Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (Chicago: Third World Press, 1990). 11. Craig Calhoun, Critical Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995): 215. 12. Ibid., 215–216. 13. Lisa Hoshmand gives a fine synopsis of...