Moving Culturally-Based Sororities and Fraternities Forward

Foreword

On February 6, 2020, Drs. Crystal Garcia and Antonio Duran congregated and facilitated the first meeting with all the contributors of this book. For some of the scholar-practitioners who agreed to contribute to the text, this was the first time meeting each other, while for others this convocation was an opportunity to reconnect. On this date, the group celebrated their individual and collective accomplishments and also commemorated Crystal and Antonio for bringing into fruition this book proposal, which brought together a number of experts in sorority and fraternity life (SFL) research and practice in the same room. Moving Culturally-Based Sororities and Fraternities Forward: Innovations in Practice provides a deep overview of the history and current landscape of culturally-based sororities and fraternities, as well as opportunities and challenges for growth and change within postsecondary education. This work facilitates a rich overview of the missing histories and experiences of culturally-based sororities and fraternities, as they have often been forgotten and buried in mainstream SFL and higher education. This book is long overdue.

Crystal and Antonio define culturally-based sororities and fraternities as:

… social organizations that were founded to serve marginalized student populations, such as Students of Color and individuals who identify as part of the LGBTQ community. More specifically, culturally-based sororities and fraternities include, but are not limited to, historically Black sororities and fraternities situated within ←xiii | xiv→the National Pan-Hellenic Council as well as sororities and fraternities typically grouped within Multicultural Greek Councils (e.g., those created for Asian American, Latinx/a/o, LGBTQ, Multicultural, and Native American communities) (see Chapter One for more).

As I engage in reading and unpacking the scholarship of Crystal and Antonio, I recognize they are making a difference in our field, and the world. They offer a careful critique to how SFL has segregated and oppressed Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. They complicate the SFL experiences of students by placing a race and ethnicity analysis at the center of this conversation, alongside sex assigned at birth, gender, and sexuality. All which start creating a social movement for justice and transformational change for and with Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color in culturally-based sororities and fraternities. This book situates, humanizes, and empowers many Black, Indigenous, and People ←xiv | xv→of Color, and other minoritized communities (e.g., LGBTQ people) who are or have been part of culturally-based sororities and fraternities in research, practice, and leadership.

Before engaging in the practical context provided by all practitioner-scholars in each chapter, and with the help of bell hooks, Daniel Solórzano, Miguel Ceja, Tara Yosso, Iris Marion Young, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Kathleen E. Gillon, Cameron C. Beatty, Michelle Espino, James Barber, Daniel Bureau, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Monica Miranda, Manuel Del Real, Stephen John Quaye, and Shaun R. Harper, in this foreward I contextualize and theorize racism and culture in context to culturally-based sororities and fraternities. The importance of theorizing racism and culture rests in “presuppose[ing] specific structural and institutional background conditions … how they affect distribution—what there is to distribute, how it gets distributed, who distributed, and what the distributive out is” (Young, 1990, p. 22).

Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color have not received an equitable distribution of resources in higher education due to racism. Racism is manifested in all aspects of society, from which, overt and covert racist policies have given greater access to white students in higher education. Solórzano et al. (2000) defined racism as “one group believes itself to be superior, 2) the group that believes to be superior has the power to carry out the racist behavior, and 3) racism, affects multiple racial and ethnic groups” (p. 61). Racist policies and practices have also recreated and reproduced oppression through sororities and fraternities. For example, since the establishment of Greek-letter organizations in the United States, these societies were organized by settler-colonial European notions of a gender construct as binary, and “White as a racial category was often linked to Christianity as a way to refuse membership to Jewish students” (Gillon, Beatty, & Salinas, 2019, p. 11). Furthermore, Gillon et al. (2019) explained that while white sororities and fraternities were expanding in higher education, “the participation of Students of Color in higher education continued to be regulated by racist laws that excluded them from attending college or segregated them into specific colleges and universities” (pp. 9–10). This form of racism and segregation creates a dystopic canon wherein “cultural images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of Whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color [sic]” (Tatum, 2013, p. 65).

Cultural racism has played a significant impact on sororities and fraternities’ history. Black, Indigenous and Students of Color were not allowed to join white sororities or fraternities. Therefore, Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color created their own Greek-letter organizations as a form of racial uplifting. Racial uplifting is manifested through the “aspirations to find activities in higher ←xv | xvi→education to empower, uplift, and support [Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color] while receiving an education motivated them to create organizations for themselves” (Gillon et al., 2019, p. 11). Similar to Gillon et al., in the introduction to this text, Crystal and Antonio expand that culturally-based sororities and fraternities continue their racial uplifting by giving “attention to serving and lifting up Communities of Color and other marginalized populations” through their service, leadership, academics, and philanthropy.

Culturally-based sororities and fraternities have created their own cultural perspectives to develop their own sense of belonging and validation. These cultural perspectives are rooted in how Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color often experience cultural stereotypes, isolation, alienation, oppression, and marginalization from whiteness on- and off-campuses. Reflecting on the new cultural perspectives that these organizations bring to higher education can help one understand and define culture as a new form of critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009). Culture as critical hope embraces inclusion of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color histories, epistemologies, beliefs, values, symbols, traditions, practices, meanings, leadership, habitual components, and stories of individuals and groups in an institution that express their experiences, and communicate with one other. With this definition of culture in mind, Young (1990) suggested that “Culture is ubiquitous, but nevertheless deserves distinct consideration in discussion of social justice” (p. 23). Therefore, the following questions should be asked to challenge the cultural perspectives of white sororities and fraternities: Who holds the status quo? Who is being oppressed, and what are the root causes? What factors shape the values and beliefs of organizations and institutions? How is prejudice and bias created? And what are people’s individual biases, values, and beliefs towards culturally-based sororities and fraternities?

Higher education institutions have capitalized from Black, Indigenous and Students of Color, and now, they are trying to capitalize on culturally-based sororities and fraternities. For example, higher education institutions have benefitted from the contributions of service, philanthropy, and academic engagement from Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color and LGBTQ students, bolstering institutional success, but have failed to critique this political and cultural labor. Moreover, students push higher education institutions to actualize their set goals as a form of performativity to gain funding and prestige. Institutions set goals all the time, and students hold them accountable so that goals are not performative but become a reality (Quaye & Harper, 2015). Furthermore, institutions must practice effective methods of cultivating belonging and validation in order to maintain and affirm that culturally-based sororities and fraternities are spaces where various nationalities, races, ethnicities, sexual and gendered boundaries ←xvi | xvii→offer a space for students’ development and experiences. One must acknowledge that not everyone within a culturally-based sorority and fraternity is a Student of Color or shares the same experience. Instead, culturally-based sororities and fraternities symbolize the breaking away from homogenized notions of sororities and fraternities as white spaces. To identify a part of a culturally-based sorority and fraternity is to identify with, and advocate with other students who have been rejected in mainstream higher education spaces. Culturally-based sororities and fraternities play a significant role for students’ sense of belonging, retention and graduation.

Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color continue to resist erasure. In hooks’ (2010) words, in order

… to resist this erasure, we must do all we can to document, to highlight, to study, to celebrate, and most importantly to crate work that is cutting-edge, that breaks through silences and the different walls that have been erected to block our vision, of ourselves and our futures. (p. 174)