I agree with you. The black fraternities actually BRANDED their pledges at Pitt.
My fraternity, at the end of HELL WEEK, bent a coat hanger and heated it to glowing. They pretended to brand us pledges, but it was all AN ACT. They dumped a little blob of CANDLE WAX on us.
It was effective and generated the lifelong feeling of BROTHERHOOD in us which was what fraternities were all about.
My best friends all these years later are still the Brothers from my fraternity days, did we haze and do stupid things, absolutely we did but how many people going to college on their own for the first time don’t do stupid stuff, fraternities don’t have monopoly on this type of behavior
Fraternities get labeled as a bunch of drunk rich white guys partying their way thru college, it’s generally coming from people who don’t really know what fraternities are all about or tried and didn’t get in a fraternity
At UF besides the white fraternities, we had black fraternities, Jewish fraternities and other racial and ethnic fraternities in the 70s