Fraternities and Harvard's Black Community

TODAY'S students--Black, white, Asian and Hispanic--are tomorrow's social and political shakers-and-movers. They must shoulder societal and institutional burdens far more intricate in tenacity and complexity than any previous generation of American students ever encountered. Rev. Jesse Jackson, during his visit to the Boston area last month, reflected on the importance of today's students to the resolution of tomorrow's ills when he observed that:

"Whenever students are alive and alert and sober, and sane and serious, you drive America forward. Whenever students turn inward and become selfish, become hedonistic, accept short-term pleasures without long-term failures, it slows down the machinery, slows down the quest for justice and for peace."

Rev. Jackson's remarks got me thinking about two recent events relating to Black students at Harvard. One event, the publication by York Eggleston and the Freshman Black Table of their second annual magazine Outlook, pleased me immensely. The other event, a delegation of Black undergraduates to Dean of the College Archie C. Epps' office requesting the legalization at Harvard of Greek-letter fraternities, saddened me.

The second event brought back memories of battles I had with Black fraternities during my undergraduate days at one of the Black colleges (Lincoln University, Penn.)--battles over their pathetic consumerist and hedonist values, as well as their indifference to the budding civil rights activism in the early 1950s.

It is this same consumerist/hedonist world of Black fraternities-their rather ordinary level of bourgeois selfdefinition--that causes me to cast a wary eye on them today, and which ought to cause Harvard Black students to do likewise. Although some Black Greeks have adult branches involved in voter registration and in community uplift activity such as Big-Brother and Big-Sister mentoring, they are mainly still instruments of a consumerist/hedonist bourgeois world view.

Thus Black Greeks on both white and Black campuses around the country spend much more time, and thousands-on-thousands of their bourgeois and working-class parents' hard-won income, on the annual "cakewalk"-type dance competition and festival, in addition to the usual social and partying events. They spend nowhere near equivalent time, energy and resources mounting mechanisms to confront the long-haul task of rolling back the myriad social pathologies among sections of the Black poor such as massive Black-on-Black crime, abysmal education performance and runaway teenage motherhood and fatherhood. So there is no legitimate political and social reason why Harvard College should extend its imprimatur to Black Greeks and no academic reason either.

UNLIKE the wary eye I cast on Black Greeks, I cast smiling eyes on York Eggleston's new edition of Outlook. A couple of the essays are intellectually exquisite, especially one by Kelly Mikelson, called "Mixed," about growing up as a light-skinned Black in a white foster family in Iowa. There are also several fine poems by Lisa White and Kevin Young.

Unlike the memory of battles with Greeks that the delegation to Dean Epps brought to mind, the current issue of Outlook reminds of the exciting intellectual activity among a group of Harvard Black students during my early teaching days in the 1960s. A group of Black students (among them Ayee Queh Armah, now a novelist; Lee Daniels, now a New York Times correspondent, and Robert Hall, now a college professor) came up with the idea to found a journal--The Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs--and I and Archie Epps, then an assistant dean of freshmen, joined them as advisors, which meant mainly running ourselves ragged to find the money to pay the journal's printer.

While our now defunct Harvard Journal of Negro Affairs--published for several years--shared Outlook's interest in the many-sided issues of ethnic selfidentity, it extended its focus much farther afield, to national political and social concerns facing Afro-Americans. I hope further editions of Outlook do likewise. I did sense a tendency in the current Outlook to over-indulge selfidentity concerns--a tendency that leads ultimately to an intellectually stultifying narcissism.

Nevertheless, Outlook is a very serious enterprise by an intellectually engaged group of Harvard students. There are numerous areas of Black American life requiring serious attention from Harvard Black students. The poor reading, writing and math performance of Black public school students in inner cities cries out for tutorial assistance from Black college students (and from white, Asian, and Hispanic students too.) Such a program, in order to be effective, will have to sustained over the next 20 years perhaps.

Black students now mesmerized by Black fraternities should turn to this much more serious enterprise--an enterprise that will enable them, in Rev. Jackson's words, to become "alive and alert and sober...sane and serious." This and similar activity focussed not on Black students' bourgeois pretensions but on crises smothering the Black poor will ensure that Black students will not "turn inward and become selfish, become hedonistic, accept short term pleasures without long-term failures..." Connecting themselves with an ethnic uplift strategy focussed on the Black poor will prepare Black students "to drive America forward."

Martin Kilson is the Thomson Professor of Government.