Resistance Through Praxis

Each year students attending higher education institutions, which recognize fraternity and sorority chapters, can choose to engage in the process as part of their involvement on campus. However, their participation is often reliant on chapter practices which may traditionally be rooted in exclusion. The struggle to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusivity practices within these organizations has become evident given the changing tides of our institutional climate. This chapter will address the process taken at California State University, Fullerton's Fraternity and Sorority Life (FSL) area to bridge the gap of developing both inclusive conversations and environments for Historically White Fraternal Organizations (HWFO) on campus. Consequently, this chapter aims to demonstrate how change and resistance to the dominant narrative can be accomplished through implementation of intentional, thought-provoking rhetoric, curriculum, and conversation to change the perspective of students and how they can act as agents of change to create inclusive environments.

College Fraternal Organizations Offer Experiential Civic Learning and Engagement Opportunities

Fraternal organizations are a valuable component of the American higher education experience. Among the many benefits promised by fraternity and sorority organizations is that a student may be connected to a network of powerful leaders in business and politics. As self-funded organizations with democratic processes pulled from the U.S. system of government, fraternal organizations can serve a unique role in preparing college students for a life of civic engagement and democratic leadership. This chapter explores the potential for fraternities, sororities, and inter-fraternal organizations to offer a complimentary, highly personalized, and values-driven form of civic education that may be offered through higher education institutions.

The Natural Profits of Their Years of Labor

This article uses the politics of old age to help explain the moral conservatism of the American welfare state. It argues that the onset of Fordism caused both uneven economic displacement of old workers and broader anxiety among social reformers about dependency and the forms of social disorder it produced by disturbing normative families. The management of this disturbance became a key promise of the movement for old-age pensions in the 1920s, in which Progressive labor reformers and conservative workers’ and fraternal organizations combined in an effort to support and rehabilitate the patriarchal family form through social policy. This logic ultimately became embedded in Social Security. Grasping this helps clarify the conservative dimensions of the New Deal as a moment of class, state, and racial formation.

Proselytizing, Building, and Serving: Latter-day Saint Missionaries in Manitoba and Eastern Canada, 1897-1942

This article will consider missionary work performed in Manitoba and Eastern Canada, and how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints progressed toward integration into Canadian society as another established minority religion searching for potential new members. By navigating through their Canadian settings, Latter-day Saint missionaries adjusted themselves and their Church to local expectations and environments, and constructed a new home for Mormonism in Canada. Three ways that Latter-day Saint missionaries negotiated their place in Canada include evolving relationships with the Canadian public through missionary encounters, renting meeting spaces from fraternal organizations and then constructing their own meetinghouses, and organizing local, auxiliary organizations that aided non-members. The Canadian context, the Latter-day Saint missionary experience, and the growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada, reveals a process of negotiation. There exists a tension between integration and otherness. Latter-day Saints balanced this tension by on some levels maintaining their distinctiveness, while at the same time blending into Canadian expectations. How the Latter-day Saint missionaries responded to these barriers, the challenges related to communicating with the Canadian public, finding spaces to congregate, local leadership roles, and participating in different aspects of Canadian society, tells a story of a new religion integrating into a new environment.

Activism

Chapter 4 discusses Walker’s gift of political and social activism and her leveraging of the number and voices of her agents to challenge Jim Crow. In a manner reflective of leading black women’s clubs and fraternal organizations of the day, Madam Walker organized her sales agents into local clubs and a national umbrella association to legitimize beauty culture as a profession, strengthen relations between them, and enlist them in doing charity and advocacy work in their communities that would last long after her death. The National Beauty Culturists’ and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents, Inc., developed a model of associationalism, ritualism, and activism that galvanized Walker agents to serve their communities and the cause of racial uplift. Through it, agents regularly donated money to black schools and other organizations, held fundraising events, organized programs, and cared for the vulnerable in their communities. Together, they sent a resolution to President Woodrow Wilson demanding legislative action against lynching. The chapter reviews Walker’s unique ability to interact with black women across class differences, as exhibited by her engagement of working-class women in her agent clubs and the elite black women of the era through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Through these clubs and their rituals, Walker agents staked claims for themselves as respectable professionals, performed charitable works in black communities, and used their formidable numbers to speak out against lynching and Jim Crow.

Race, Discrimination, and the Cuban Constitution of 1940

After the Revolution of 1933, the Cuban Communist Party reflected an intersection of labor organizers, members of prestigious black fraternal organizations, and the intelligentsia—groups that have previously been framed as distinct bodies of black political activism. I argue that the Communist Party successfully reintroduced critical discussions of racial discrimination on the island during the 1939 Club Atenas colloquium and the 1940 constitutional assembly. Public engagement with race and discrimination had previously been silenced due to the island's famous rhetoric of a raceless nation, created by the writings of José Martí and enforced during the Race War of 1912. Between the Revolution of 1933 and the constitution of 1940, the political landscape of Cuba transformed dramatically. As the traditional two-party system splintered, the Communist Party coalesced to establish themselves as a unique site for black political leadership and operated as the island's most outspoken critic of racial discrimination.

Fraternal Organizations and Mentoring

The involvement of African American males in the community and in school-based service-learning programs has been an ongoing conversation not only within the African American community but in academia. Often, when we hear of African American males, it is encumbered with negative images and negative associations versus positive ones. The primary push for this case study is to examine the critical nature of mentoring for African American male use within school-based mentoring and community-based mentoring through Black Greek-Letter fraternity. The following case study will examine the mentoring and support initiatives of three fraternities within the Divine Nine Greek-Letter organizations and their specific strategies for engaging youth and developing leadership.

The Impact Of Social Media On Fraternal Organizations: Ethical Concerns

This case study concerns how the personal behavior of students involved in fraternal organizations is depicted in social media, and how that behavior impacts the organization and its image. The legal and ethical implications of individuals’ behaviors in social media has become a major issue for many organizations. This case follows an example of a fraternal organization and how the governing body must handle the information members post on social media. The mission of many fraternal organizations is to champion or contribute to specific causes. Members’ social media postings may reflect poorly on the organization and may not always align with the principles of the organization. This case examines how those postings impact the organization, and what it can do to mitigate the effects. The ethical issues that can affect the actions of both the governing body and the members are probed throughout the case.

“We have even locked out the very Zeitgeist itself”

This article analyses the discourse employed by Norwegian fraternal organizations, based on Hugh B. Urban’s postulate that secrecy is a strategy for ‘adornment’, i.e. conveying a special status to certain values and beliefs. The discourse is analysed in terms of the fraternities’ idea of reality, identity, and mission, and claims that these organizations regard themselves as defenders of society’s core values which they claim are threatened by moral corruption and decay.

“Men Doing Life Together”: Black Christian Fraternity Men’s Embodiments of Brotherhood

Black people in the United States have and continue to pursue practices of communal bonding as well as cooperative-and-sharing economies, from the invisible institution of Black religion to underground activist collectives such as the African Blood Brotherhood. While many efforts were explicitly political, other organizations primarily emphasized socioeconomic advancement for its group members and the broader Black community. One such set of collectives that in many ways embodied both aims are Black Greek-letter Organizations. One of their enduring legacies is the ability to produce a unique and powerful sense of sisterhood and brotherhood. Through various processes, shared symbols, and cultural artifacts, Black fraternal organizations create a sense of camaraderie readily apparent to even lay observers. Yet, very few empirical studies have examined how fraternity men define and embody such brotherhood bonds. Thus, the purpose of the present study sought to fill these knowledge gaps by addressing the following research questions: (1) how do Black Christian fraternity men define and embody brotherhood? and (2) what social and emotional benefits do Black Christian fraternity men gain from brotherhood? Using qualitative data gathered through various techniques (i.e., semistructured interviews, photovoice and identity maps, focus groups, and Facebook observations), we describe the ways Black male members of this Christian fraternity embody brotherhood as accountability and co-construct a space for men to experience and benefit from intimacy.