‘It’s not written on their skin like it is ours’: Greek letter organizations in the age of the multicultural imperative

Abstract

Today’s students wrestle with the continued salience of racial identity on campuses that encourage the celebration of ‘diversity’ while at once digesting messages that the USA is now largely ‘post-racial’. Based on data collected through fieldwork observation, focus groups and in-depth interviews with a local Multicultural Greek Council for fraternities and sororities, we argue that ‘multicultural’ student organizations engage in a variety of racial identity tactics that simultaneously constrain and enable the perception of their racial identities. By relying on the two cultural narratives of multiculturalism – abstract and organizational – members of Greek organizations that do not conform to the White/Black binary can construct identities and a movement understood as rational, progressive and generally innocuous. Yet, in practice, the dominant expectations to perform ‘multiculturalism’ were manifest in narrow, essentialist and singular expressions of ethnic pride as an oppositional identity to Anglo-conformity and color-blindness, rather than an embrace of pluralism and multiculturalism per se. By highlighting how members of multicultural student organizations navigate this troubling paradox, our study raises important questions about the concept of multiculturalism, especially as it is constructed and enacted by the millennial generation.