Black Girls Yell: A Racialized And Gendered Analysis

In discussions of Greek-letter organizations like fraternities, one controversial issue has been the question of how masculinity contributes to hazing, and, more specifically, how ideas about masculinity contribute to the differing hazing rituals in black and white fraternities. On the one hand, some Greek-letter organization scholars – such as Tyra Black, Joanne Belknap, and Jennifer Ginsberg – have compared black and white fraternities and argue that masculinity plays a similar role in the hazing rituals of both. On the other hand, other scholars – such as Gregory Parks, Johnathan Cox, Matthew Hughey, Shayne Jones, Rashawn Ray, and Nicholas Syrett – have studied black and white fraternities separately and concluded that masculinity manifests
maintain Syrett’s implication that hazing in black and white fraternities differs and that masculinity affects hazing differently for these organizations. However, in “White Boys Drink, Black Girls Yell…: A Racialized and Gendered Analysis of Violent Hazing and the Law,” Parks et al. that it is notions of a type of masculinity exclusive to the black community the authors refer to as “black masculinity” that underline the violent essence of hazing in BGLOs. According to the authors, today’s generation of black young men defines black masculinity as “physical, sexual, hard, and street or urban smart” and sees masculinity as standing “in binary opposition to anything chaste, sensitive, studious, and refined” (153). Basically, Black masculinity seems to value those who are physically tough, sexually experienced, and “street smart” (meaning they know how to navigate life in an urban environment) while rejecting those who are not and any characteristics that fail to align with the characteristics black masculinity considers manly. As a result, black masculinity embraces violence as a way of proving masculinity and black fraternities use violence as a way of testing their pledge’s masculinity. The authors also state that black masculinity rejects homosexuality, considering it unmanly. I believe this is why homoeroticism is not a characteristic of hazing in black fraternities the way it is a characteristic of hazing in white fraternities. Overall, Parks et al. argue that masculinity, more specifically black masculinity, manifests in the form of violence in hazing in BGLO’s, enforcing the idea that to be violent is to be