White Fraternities and "Civil" Society
Rot Feder
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • November 13-27, 1991 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1 No. 2 (pp. 3,12) | ||
| • August 24, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
When the Greek system is debated on this campus it is often over the question of whether the Greeks form an elitist and cliquish society. This question, however, is seldom asked about the university community itself. The concern, it seems, is over which relatively privileged members of the ”campus community“ will have access to the resources Greek organizations offer their members. When these are the stakes, the attempts by activists to change the terms of the debate by charging that fraternities systematically perpetrate (and perpetuate) sexist, racist and homophobic violence can only be seen as an irrational cry from the extremist left.
This is why, when a group of activists put up posters this past Spring alleging that ”Phi Delta Theta Gang Rapes,“ a snarl of outrage arose from the Greek organizations, S.U. administration, and the host of ready conservative ideologues on campus. This much abused and long-suffering conservative coalition employed the expert services of S.U.‘s Dean of Student Relations -- the dean who relates better, it seems, to some students than to others -- Edward Golden, to reassert their cultural and political authority. It was Golden who saw to it that lesbian activist and feminist Pat Chang was singled out for special punishment as a warning to other would be transgressors (much in the same way he earlier harassed then SAS president Quintin Stith in order to check the courageous activism of that organization).
Before it is really possible to adequately answer the question of why activists resort to such measures of protest, we have to ask a more basic question: What role does the Greek system play in our society? Because of somewhat limited space, I must focus primarily on the system of ”white“ fraternities.
Fraternities perform their most basic and important function in acting to resecure the oppressive social relations of late capitalism (the current social order) through their reproduction and valorization of sexism, homophobia, racism and class domination as acceptable modes of social behavior. They perform this general cultural role in two principal ways.
First, they act as ”pre-professional“ societies which coordinate and concentrate their activities, providing a network of social relationships and contacts that will insure (by in large) their privileged entry into and monopoly over commanding roles in the world of business, media, law, and government: that is, in bourgeois (i.e., capitalist) ”civil“ society. Yale‘s secret fraternal Skull and Bones society is a good case in point, with its secret handshakes and mutual vows to promote the careers of other Skull and Bones alumni to the highest echelons of business and government whenever possible. And since ”our“ kinder and gentler (though apparently not uncorrupt) president is something of a prominent member, it is hardly surprising that many Bush appointees are also Skull and Bones alumni.
Anyone who doubts this connection between fraternities and business and government can examine statistics compiled by the fraternity system to promote itself:
All but two U.S. presidents (since 1825 when the first fraternities were founded) have belonged to a fraternity (95 percent)
41 of 48 Supreme Court justices appointed since 1910 have been fraternity members (85 percent), including just-confirmed Clarence Thomas
71 percent of those listed in Who‘s Who in America have belonged to fraternities
85 percent of Fortune 500 executives have belonged to a fraternity [and how many of these, we wonder were people of color, or gays, and how many of the remaining 15 percent were women?]
Of the nation's 50 largest corporations, 43 are headed by fraternity men (86 percent).
There is, of course, a pecking order within the white fraternity system, and some fraternities and fraternity branches are more successful in the competition for these top jobs than others.
If fraternities can help to insure individual success after college, then why don‘t all students join? Women, of course, are barred. They can join sororities, but sorority women don‘t fare well in direct competition for jobs and benefits with fraternity men. As you might guess they are more ”successful“ in competition with other women. This relative benefit, in fact, is one of the ways sorority women are compensated for their general collaboration with and defense of the fraternity system (despite the fact that sorority women are most likely to be victims of fraternity sexual assaults).
According to professional fraternity apologist, Lorraine Corcoran, there is a place for everyone in the Greek system. This is simply not true. Fraternities must rely on their exclusivity: they have a pledging process through which they can regulate their numbers, exercise ”quality control,“ and maintain their overall desirability among specific target populations (drawn from the already generally privileged population having access to a four-year university education). However, if they were to let in everyone, class, race, and gender conflicts of interest would quickly tear the fraternity system apart. More than this, they would find that, just as not everyone has ”the right stuff“ to be a member of Fraternity X, there are likewise severe limits on the number of high-paying, fast-tracked, influential jobs awaiting students upon graduation.
Presently, conflicts of interest within the fraternity system are regulated by exclusion, internal differentiation, and suppression. Pledging aids in the exclusion process by allowing a fraternity to screen potentially transgressive supplicants. The ”pecking order“ both within and between fraternities and fraternity branches maintains a fairly rigid hierarchy through which conflicts of interest may be settled, generally to the benefit of the ”higher ranked“ party.
This hierarchy is further strengthened by the internal suppression of its members coded in the concept of fraternal ”brotherhood.“ Pressures for conformity in certain key behaviors, attitudes, and practices can be enormous, and yet remain largely invisible except when these fraternal codes are transgressed. The ultimate offense involves ”betraying“ the fraternity. Punishment can take the form of (non)verbal harassment, physical abuse, and (in the worst case) exclusion from the holy fraternal order itself. This internal policing mechanism contributes to the ”quasi-fascist“ character of the fraternity system.
Nationwide, fraternity men comprise less than ten percent of the general adult U.S. population. This means that they monopolize 8 to 10 times their ”fair“ share of the most lucrative and influential jobs in the country: that is, more than their share if everyone were granted equal opportunities for advancement, as bourgeois democracies like the U.S. promise. Undoubtedly many Greeks would have us believe that it is simply due to their hard work, dedication to excellence, and intelligence! In fact, the oversized influence of fraternity alumni in our society is ultimately due to the fact that fraternities are an integral link in the chain of institutions (both ”public“ and ”private“) that comprise and actively work to reproduce bourgeois society.
We can, for instance, glimpse a fore-shadow of the future fraternal ”old boys network“ of Congress (76% of which are fraternity men) in the ”boys will be boys“ antics of campus fraternal organizations. This is the same Congress, by the way, which recently torpedoed the tame attempt to draw attention to sexual harassment in the workplace in order to secure a ”good old (white) boy“ in black skin on the Supreme Court so that civil rights gains (i.e., gains toward the democratic control of society by the vast majority of the people) might be more effectively overthrown. While Congress is often accused of inefficiency, with wasting the money of those they represent (i.e., big business), here they proved capable of killing several birds with one stone, though they nearly split over how to do it. Fraternities, in other words, provide in embryo some of the most important networks by which future ”business as usual“ will be done.
Second, fraternities act as an advanced guard, disciplining those who pose a threat to the continuance of the system by example and through intimidation. In the Phi Delta Theta ”gang rape crisis“ -- which was a crisis not because of sexual impropriety, but because of the possibility that the truth might be told -- Pat Chang was threatened by S.U. administration with numerous charges ranging from fines for property damage to expulsion. If she ”gets out of line“ again she can be expelled rather easily, thus effectively strangling her ability to engage in political work. The fraternity, however, was ultimately -- and only after great pressure was exerted -- slapped lightly on the wrist and charged with ”creating the conditions under which sexual harassment is likely to occur.“ Where Phi Delts are banned from throwing parties for a year, Pat Chang is forbidden effective social activism. Silencing tactics like these, so visible in this collaboration between fraternities and S.U. administration, reveal the real regime of ”political correctness“ we should be worried about.
What the S.U. judicial body should have said -- if it were the impartial social arbiter it claims to be -- is that fraternities promote the general conditions under which sexual crimes, homophobic attacks, and racist violence will occur as is necessary for the continuance of class rule. These conditions tend to naturalize behavior in which the needs of the vast majority of people are subordinated to the ”needs“ of bourgeois white men; such conditions also tend to discipline those who challenge their authority to do so.
It is often argued that frats can‘t be judged by the unfortunate actions of ”a few“ (a few?!) bad individuals. This is a little like claiming that, just because L.A. cops (pick any U.S. city) routinely use excessive violence against African-Americans and Hispanics as a form of social control, we can‘t hold the police department accountable. When it is found, at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, that fraternity men -- a quarter of the male student population there -- were responsible for 63 percent of student sexual assaults, this argument is unconvincing. This is made clearer when we recognize that sexual assault remains one of the most underreported class of crimes because of the judicial system‘s brutal treatment of victims of sexual violence.
While not all fraternity men are misogynist, homophobic and racist to the same degree, sexism, heterosexism, and racism are not just ”unfortunate“ attitudes among some men who just happen to belong to fraternities. They are endemic features of fraternity organizations themselves. But what is their stake in these social forms of domination? To answer this adequately would take much more space than I have here, so I will limit myself to a brief account, more suggestive than definitive.
The fraternal reproduction of patriarchy (the most extensive form of sexism in our society) helps to insure that in general the needs of men will not only take precedence over the needs of women, but that women will be coerced into producing and yielding as tribute the resources necessary to meet those needs. Heterosexist sex, for example, is always a form not simply of domination, but also of regulation and production. Under these conditions it is continuous with other forms of sexual harassment, whether it occurs as rape, incest, or in some even more socially accepted form (like the widespread practice of infantalizing women by calling them ”girls“). Under these general social conditions, solidarity between men and women in attempts to transform society becomes difficult.
Patriarchy insures a grossly unfair gendered distribution of resources. It insures, as I have suggested before, the fraternity member‘s insertion into bourgeois society over the heads of over half the human population of the United States. Fraternities help to insure that women will continue making less than men for equal work, that women will have little access to public decision-making, and that women will continue to do far more than an equal share of unpaid ”domestic“ labor.
This should also give us a clue to the usefulness of homophobia to fraternities. The deep revulsion that many fraternity men feel toward homosexuals has social (and not biological) roots. In reasserting heterosexuality as the only legitimate form of sexual orientation, homophobia preserves traditional reified gender distinctions -- in which ”men are men“ and ”women are women“ -- and all other social forms dependent on them: the nuclear family, the male (professional/cognitive) and female (domestic/emotional) division of labor, etc. Homosexuality, both gay and lesbian, poses a great threat to fraternity behaviors and culture -- and for politically self-conscious homosexuality, this is even more the case. This is one reason gay and lesbian activists are routinely subject to fraternity harassment. Disrupting these forms of activism allows fraternity practices to remain unquestioned and unchecked, safeguarding all the other benefits we‘ve spoken of.
Fraternities can do this because they are provided with a culturally ”accepted“ and validated space, sanctioned by the university as an organ of bourgeois society, where relatively privileged members of society (largely white, straight, bourgeois men) can gather to concentrate and coordinate their forces. The white fraternities become a site in which racist, sexist, and homophobic assumptions will not be called into question -- will in fact readily be naturalized as ”common sense.“
Thus some Alpha Chi Rho members produced a virulently homophobic tee-shirt in which a gay man lies prone and unconscious under the spiked club of a crow, while an applauding seal looks on. It proudly celebrates the freedom of fraternity men to declare that they are ”Homophobic and proud of it,“ and continues with the suggestion that we ”club faggots, not seals.“ The shirt was sold by Crows on street corners and worn around campus by Crow ”brothers“ without it ever being called into question by other Crows or other fraternities. While the S.U. administration found the posters protesting gang rape to be illegal and punishable, the same is not true of the homophobic tee-shirts. The rules in the student handbook were even changed to make it harder to charge the Crows with harrassment.
Fraternities provide the space in which it will be acknowledged that ”boys will be boys“ -- and perhaps that, while obnoxious, such behavior is a natural function of maleness and youth, and therefore quite unavoidable (after all, they have to sow their wild oats someplace). To the extent that the university sanctions fraternities, the university also provides a general license for their activities and attitudes (within bounds determined by what they can get away with). The university -- as a cornerstone of bourgeois society -- is, in return, compensated by the general support of fraternities for the university administration‘s aims and practices.
So why then would leftist activists resort to the ”illegal“ posting of fliers, ”defacing“ university property with the claim that ”Phi Delta Theta Gang Rapes -- We Know What You Have Done“? Should they have gone through the ”proper channels?“
These activists put up fliers, despite the very real possibility that they could become direct targets of fraternity violence -- and we have seen that they were also subjected to the violence of the university judicial process that was opportunistically manipulated by Dean Golden and his judicial advisor Ben Baez. People only put themselves in this position if they have been deprived of every other effective avenue of protest. It is little wonder that, backed up by all the apparatuses of the state and ”civil“ society -- the police, courts, media, campus administration, and the legislative branch -- Greeks can proceed with the great ”can-do“ confidence of a Tom Cruise in Top Gun that they bring to all their activities.
In the face of actual resistance, the Greek organizations sputter in ”surprise,“ injured innocence, and indignation. As Greek damage control specialists like Brad Lockwood are eager to point out, Greeks donate much of their time to philanthropic causes. They are good-deed-doers, by their own estimate contributing seven million dollars and one million ”man“ hours to charities per year nationwide. It must be noted that charity in general is a practice that presumes the acceptability of the status quo and sees the need for only incremental reforms rather than a systematic transformation of the entire basis of our society. To make matters worse, the Greek system tends overwhelmingly to support the most conservative and inefficient charities.
Like the great robber baron, Carnegie, one of whose libraries graces ”our“ quad, they give to charities to produce an ideological screen that obscures (and yet also a part of) their social function. They are as much ”humanitarian“ organizations as Exxon and ITT, which give a small percentage of their vast wealth to charity to cover the fact that they have skinned their great fortunes off the thin hides of the rest of us.
Because fraternities play this repressive role both on campus and in society more generally, they should be stripped of their association from the university. Unfortunately, for now this must be done piecemeal because university administrators will not ban campus fraternities of their own will. They benefit greatly from the policing force of fraternity activities, and of course from financial contributions from fraternity alumni. Former S.U. chancellor Melvin Eggers, in his ”Message from the Chancellor“ on the fraternity system, celebrates the fact that ”some of the University‘s most loyal alumni [read: alumni who make the largest monetary contributions] have credited their experiences in fraternities with the development of their close ties to the institution.“
Universities like S.U. will have to be forced to ban campus fraternities through public pressure: and this means that ”extreme“ forms of ”guerrilla“ activism must be increased rather than decreased. At the same time, activists and radical pedagogues must formulate longer term strategies. Guerrilla wars which are not guided by a principled and flexible strategy and supported by corresponding organizational forms have little chance of success. S.U. will have to be brought to recognize that their continued support of the fraternity system will cost them dearly in bad publicity and loss of revenue in times of severely diminishing resources. Of course, when fraternities are thrown off campus, the administration will claim all the credit for the blood and sweat of activists like Pat Chang.
Such a move cannot be seen as a panacea by any means. It is only one battle among many we will have to fight, and win. Such a victory would break only one link in the very long and multi-strand chain of apparatuses upholding our ”civil“ society. But it is an important link.
