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.
