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Old 12-10-2004, 03:37 PM
PhDiva PhDiva is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Southern California
Posts: 185
Jocelyn,

You make excellent points throughout your post. I offer a different bit of perspective as I am a college professor in Black and Women's Studies and not a memeber of any GLO.

I encounter students on a regular basis who are bi-racial, multi-racial or as jeni puts it "multiculturally-minded" and often b/c of the college administration's and/or the existing GLO's resistance to change, these students often don't have a place for them to feel accepted. I've witnessed several of these students become disgusted with the whole idea of Greek Life b/c no one wants to move beyond the black-white binary paradigm (I know, I'm a professor... in layperson's terms: American society's willful inability to deal with Asians, Latino/as and people of mixed race ancestry). NPC and NPHC organizations are both guilty of this.

I've seen NPHC (Black GLO's) assume that they should have a monopoly on Black students wanting to join their organizations...thus someone like Jocelyn is viewed as a "sellout" b/c she opted to go with a NPC organization. Likewise, I've seen white students who are Black Studies majors (at my institutition) who wanted to participate in NPHC organizations (1) are seen as "wiggers" by NPC groups and (2) hazed beyond belief by NPHC organizations they are trying to join.

The point to all of this is that no one should have a say in how you define yourself and the choices you make. Therefore, MCGLO's can provide viable options for someone who's looking for a different experience. This is not to say that MCGLO's are without their faults but if they provide a means for a student to feel more connected and improves their quality of life, by all means they shouldn't have to face this "old guard" mentality of NPC, NPHC or the highway. People are going to gravitate to that with which they feel most comfortable so why not offer a smorgasborg of options and let people make up their own minds (and live with those choices).

Our world is becoming more diverse everyday and Americans have some of the least globally and multi-culturally minded people in the world b/c we cluster in ethnic enclaves and never leave our comfort zones. If we don't start taking the time to learn about one another without using our lens to judge someone else's experience negatively, we are going have many more Iraq's (your generation's Vietnam).

PhDiva
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