Homecoming season is around the corner. While my wife and I have gone to homecomings at HBCUs, we will likely go to the homecoming game of our shared Alma mater this year.
We will watch the game, smile nostalgically as graduating law students throw their canes over the goalpost at halftime, and roll our eyes when House of Pain sacrifices its hip-hop offering to families from upstate making their first trip to the city. We will, with considerable ambivalence, mouth the words to the official alma mater song, knowing that while it was our school in fact, it was never our school in the same way it was, and is, for the thousands of Anglo students in the stands.
Because to be Black, and conscious on a contemporary American campus is to live in a state of dual awareness. You walk through these spaces—under the shadow of the columns at Cornell, or across the frosty expanse of the University of Wisconsin—fully aware that these institutions were not originally built with your body in mind.
For the Black student, the fraternity house has historically offered a sanctuary from that cold reality. The Divine Nine—the historic African American fraternities and sororities—were born out of necessity. They were constructed as fortresses of dignity against the relentless theft of Black personhood and culture. They were places where the “Talented Tenth,” as defined by Dubois, could gather, not merely for social prestige, but to organize, to survive, and to affirm their humanity in a world that routinely denied and discarded it.
But, history is an exacting creditor, and privilege, even when hard-won, carries a weight.
In recent years, the American campus has been forced to look at its own rot. The recent allegations of systemic sexual violence, drugging, and predatory behavior coming out of elite white fraternity houses—most visibly at Cornell University, but mirrored across the landscape of higher education—have stripped away whatever polite illusions remained.
We are witnessing the predictable consequence of a culture that treats the human body as property, a playground for unearned entitlement and consequence-free power. These Anglo-Greek institutions, built on the foundations of exclusion, have long fostered an environment where the exploitation of the vulnerable is treated as a rite of passage.
It is easy, in these moments, for Black institutions to look away. It is tempting to say: This is not our sickness. This is their rot. After all, Black fraternities have fundamentally different origins, rooted in uplift and service rather than dominance.
But, to look away in this season is to misunderstand the nature of the struggle.
When we talk about sexual assault, we are talking about the violent assertion of power over another human being’s body. And if Black history in America teaches us anything, it is the sacred, non-negotiable value of bodily autonomy. Our ancestors knew what it meant to have their bodies commodified, violated, and stripped of agency by those who held structural power.
For a Black fraternity to witness the crisis of sexual violence on campus and remain passive is a betrayal of that very lineage. We cannot claim a legacy of fighting against the violation of Black bodies while ignoring the ways patriarchy and rape culture violate bodies within our own communities and spaces.
Leadership in this moment cannot look like the standard bureaucratic response. It cannot be measured in performative workshops, superficial compliance seminars, or the quiet shielding of “brothers” who view women as conquests. It requires a radical, introspective courage. Black fraternities must lead on this issue precisely because our organizations were founded to be counter-cultural—to be better than the broken American standard.
To lead means to openly dismantle the strains of unhealthy masculinity (masculinity is not in and of itself unhealthy) that creep into any space where men gather in secret. It means understanding that brotherhood cannot exist at the expense of sisterhood or womanhood.
The women of our campuses—particularly Black women, who navigate the intersection of racial disregard and gendered violence—deserve more than our chivalric rhetoric. They deserve our active protection, partnership and support, which begins with holding our own spaces to an uncompromising standard of consent and accountability.
Madison, like Ithaca, is a place of profound beauty, but its campuses are still mirrors of the broader American experiment. The Anglo fraternity houses may currently stand as the symbols of this crisis, but the challenge belongs to us all. If the Divine Nine are to remain the vanguard of leadership and dignity for our community, they must be the first to declare that the safety and autonomy of human bodies generally, and Black women specifically, are absolute.
We cannot wait for the institutions that excluded us to fix themselves. The fortresses we built to protect our humanity must now be the spaces that redefine what honor, brotherhood, and accountability truly mean.
