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Abstract Although law prohibits de jure race bias in US college fraternities and sororities, racial separation prevails de facto through custom, tradition, and preference. While historically Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs) are typically depicted as racially 'closed' and 'exclusive,' this article explores the social history and meaning of those instances when non-blacks have crossed that specific racial boundary. If Greek organizations act as a dominating influence upon campus life, the possibility exists that cross-racial Greek membership promotes intimacy, tolerance, and understanding, while also feasibly promoting the continued tokenism of "others" as a theme that earns the host organization multicultural credentials in a politically correct society. Specifically, this study adds nuance to the predominant account of diversity within US college fraternities and sororities by identifying, describing, and constructing a picture of an often-ignored aspect of cross-racial contact. To achieve this goal, qualitative approaches are employed including extant literature review, document gathering, and sociological analysis.
Keywords Race * Black * White * Fraternity * Sorority * Color-line * Boundary
"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line-the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men..."
-W. E. B. Du Bois (1903). The Souls of Black Folk, p. 12.
"Negro Greek letter societies arose as a result of the refusal of white Greek letter societies to admit colored people."
-E. Franklin Frazier (1957). Black Bourgeoisie, p. 94.
"I try to be myself and not try to be down and talk all the B-boy language and all that," said Everett Whiteside, a white member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, a historically Black Greek Letter Organization (hereafter BGLO), in 1994. "One of my friends told me the other day that I sound very white...! go, 'Well, that's good. 'Cause I am.' I don't want to fake the funk. I don't want to pretend that I'm something I'm not" (Stains 1994, p. 72). A young white man, Everett Whiteside, entered college and did not find white fraternities amenable to his personality or what he was looking for in a tight-knit collective organization. Everett's story is not commonplace. While there has been significant strides in racial "progress" that are manifested in contemporary US jurisprudence that prohibits de jure membership bias and exclusion based upon race,...