Should African American Fraternities be Banned?
I feel that black fraternities should be banned because there are too many hazing tragedies. When I looked up information about black fraternities I found some interesting journals. I found that over the past ten years, black fraternities have often been in trouble because of hazing. Although fraternity hazing is outlawed in 39 states, the ritual of physically branding Pledges continues on some campuses.
According to, the officials of Alpha Phi Alpha, the world’s largest and oldest black fraternity sued six of their members because they were carrying out violent acts of hazing while using the fraternity name and letters. The estimates of beatings throughout fraternities since 1978 show that over 65 students died.
According to Officials with Omega Psi Phi fraternity, recently agreed to pay one million to the university of Louisville student, who pledged the house, and suffered a beating with a wooden paddle. Many feel that Black fraternities still use this practice of pledging, but fail to realize that pledging ended ten decades ago. Instead of pledging, they now have what they call a membership intake program. But, in most cases people say that the membership initiation is a failure because they are continuing to haze. But fraternity membership intakes did not end pledging; it just forced fraternities to pledge underground
Today however, these groups, which claim at being one million strong, suffer many debatable problems. Some of these include problems with an increasingly poor image, as well as with ongoing debate over their continued relevance. They also face criticism on and off college campus and about being elitist, exclusionary and separatist, and in some cases, little more than gangs because of their documents pledging rituals. However, 20 precious college students, or in other words, 20 brilliant minds have been killed in the amount of black collegians. The educated society each year still doesn’t justify or make up for one of these lives. And why any organization that seeks to align itself with black culture would mimic so closely the institution of American slavery down to the whipping, beating, verbal humiliation, forced servitudes, sleep deprivation, and even branding of the flesh, is any one’s guess, Perhaps it’s all in the name of brotherhood or the sense of it, as they say. Or maybe it’s because one’s popularity supposedly increases once he crosses or becomes a full member. Either way it is hard to see how any impression of brotherhood is cultivated considering the following nationally reported incident of recent years and months.
My opinion is that I feel that Greek organizations should be banned because the hazing is getting out of control. I feel that black fraternities is about having leadership, brotherhood, and community service. You should not have to prove that you could take pain that given to you. Black fraternity goals should be about doing good deeds. If you are hazing, then what kind of deeds are you putting upon people when you kill or injure them? Black fraternities don’t understand that parents send their kids to school for an education not to be killed by a peer, and many fraternity members don’t understand the pain that parents have to go though when somebody just told them that their child has been killed in the result of a hazing incident. One reason why they don’t understand is because they don’t have kids of their own and won’t probably understand the pain until they are in the parent’s shoes.
Black fraternities are putting bad stereotypes on the black community because of what they do. The black community already has things to deal with about the media and their stereotypes and now we have to deal with black fraternities killing each other just because they want guys to prove themselves. I feel that fraternities are thoughtless and they need to be banned, and then it would give every university, who has a black fraternity, a chance to think about what it means to have a brother and to be a brother.