What's the Difference Between a Frat and a Gang?
When I thought about locking up with a crew in 1996, I wanted to see a full initiation first, not parts I stumbled upon over the years. My friend Cliff and I arrived at a park not close from my home in Jamaica, Queens. Leaves danced with the wind around our feet, wafting an eerie feeling in my 14-year-old black body. The grounds of the initiation beckoned: a high-rise chain link fence, enclosing two basketball courts.
Through the daylighted chain, I watched scowls and punches and stomps engulf the uninitiated teen—a stoppage, then an awkward transition into hugs, handshakes, and smiles. The striking contrast shot at my core of authenticity, the insincerity of the punch-hug, of the stomp-smile, murdering my thoughts of joining a crew.
The same feeling shot within me five years later in 2001 when I thought about joining a college fraternity. The rumors of beatings and sexual assaults overwhelmed me like the worn-down bodies of pledges inching around campus unclothed in hazing. The before contrasted vividly again with the after: the excitable energy of the sparkling new brothers when they came out each year to the deafening cheers of their potential victims, especially in sororities. At these campus spectacles, my mind became a split screen of the past and the present.
My timeworn mind remains a split screen, seeing the fraternity from the same vantage point I see the gang. An abnormal view, I know. But from abnormal views, we discover.
The fraternity may be as violent as the gang. Collegiate America may be as dangerous for women as urban America. If sexual violence is a violent crime, then the fraternity of today may be committing as many violent crimes as the gang of the 1990s that spooked fearful Americans into tough-on-crime policies. The fraternity may be as frequently violent as the “savage gang MS-13,” as President Donald Trump called it in his State of the Union Address in January to spook fearful Americans into tough immigration policies. But Americans stereotype the gang and fraternity differently and treat them differently and rationalize their violence differently and police them differently. What if Americans looked at them similarly? What if Americans treated them similarly? What if Americans treated their victims similarly? ...