Mary Polk of Maryland didn't learn that her son Marcus had been hospitalized until he called his brother when he came out of the operating room on April 8.
Marcus Polk, a sophomore majoring in computer science at the University of Mary land-Eastern Shore (UMES), needed major surgery to reconstruct parts of his buttocks, where so many of the blood vessels were ruptured that he had developed gangrene, According to police, he was one of five UMES students hospitalized after a Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity paddling ritual that went on for eight weeks.
That Mrs. Polk wasn't contacted by the school, the fraternity, the hospital, or even Marcus himself shows how little control parents, school administrators, and fraternity officials have over the problem of violent hazing.
Two weeks after the UMES incident was reported, another Kappa, twenty-three-year-old Ernest Harris, a recent graduate of Kansas State University who majored in business, was hospitalized after a fraternity-related beating.
"No one should have to undergo something like this to get an education," says Richard Lee Snow, the national executive director of Kappa Alpha Psi.
Snow's assertion raises the question of why? Why would such talented, young, Black college students willingly submit to this kind of treatment -- not even to get an education, but simply as a rite of passage for membership into a fraternity?
While campus administrators, law enforcement authorities, and Greek organizations aggressively search for new ways to deter this perverse and often life-threatening behavior, Black Issues spoke to a handful of Black psychologists around the country to ask why they think students continue to subject themselves to these disturbing rites of passage.
Links to Slavery, Abuse, of Sadomasochism?
To some onlookers, Greek hazing is painfully reminiscent of the types of cruelty and abuse African Americans were subjected to during slavery. After all, the increasingly popular practice of fraternity branding appears, at least symbolically, to be a direct throwback to slavery.
