Talk:College fraternity

Racism
You gonna cover the many, many racism scandals? 19:10, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I could use some help with this article obviously. I'm getting ready to move it into mainspace soon. Bongolian (talk) 19:17, 22 May 2019 (UTC)
 * That's a two sided coin. At least when I was in college - late 1970s, early 1980s - fraternities and sororities were optional excrescences for White students, and the main shaft and driving wheel of college social life for the Black students.  You'd occasionally see a Black person pledge a 'White' fraternity, especially if it was one of the less preppy and pretentious ones; at Ball State that meant ATO.  No White person ever pledged the Black fraternities.  They made demands of the pledges that were far greater than the White frats could hope to enforce; too much competition, I reckon.  They were conspicuous in ways the White ones were not, enacting public rituals of dancing and chanting.  This may have been because none of the Black organizations had a frat house to keep that sort of thing out of the public eye, so they did this stuff in public areas of the campus.  I hold no particular brief for Greek college life, but the article seems a bit negative, and especially if we're going to introduce race to the portrait, the role played by the 'historically Black' frats especially may want a bit more nuance.  Then again, this was more than forty years ago and campus society in general may have changed. I do suspect that part of the problem is that college administrators tend to be drawn from the class of people like me, who turned up our noses at the whole rigmarole way back when. Smerdis of Tlön, wekʷōm teḱs. 20:38, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
 * African American frats have not been without their problems, including hazings-related problems, including deaths. If you want to add nuance, I don't have any problem with that. Bongolian (talk) 20:50, 23 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Also,, while I do welcome any nuance that you think is worthy of putting in. If you're saying (and I'm not sure you are) that things have changed since then or somehow administrators just don't understand, do read the 2014 article "Every Rape Reported at Fraternities This Year", the list of all known hazing deaths through 2019, and some of the stupefyingly stupid things that still happen at frats. Bongolian (talk) 03:17, 25 May 2019 (UTC)