Sunday, December 11, 2011

HAZING: Is your life worth the price of belonging? Cross post of some insightful comments

I was over at TheRoot reading a post about a 26 year old FAMU student who was a member of the school's famous Marching 100 band. He died a couple of weeks ago, amid speculation that he was put through a series of barabric Hazing rituals. Rest in Peace, Robert Champion, but you should have known better. Here is a repost of a very good comment  written by icantrememberallofmyaliases on the original post.

He states in his article that groups try to weed out the weak but what they end up weeding out are the people who will probably say "no" about any move or decision made in the hierarchy. There has been an illusion withheld and promoted as an advancement strategy in Black America that if you wanted to prove you were exceptional, you joined heirarchal groups and allowed them to haze you and tame your free will. I've heard for decades endless number of Blacks tout their famous Black associates of their groups as clout and evidence that they were themselves game-changers by association and they were going to save Black People. All of these people wait for top-down leadership and are rather unexceptional after it all. Given they may go ahead and abiide to a check list, become something statusy like a doctor or lawyer, but nothing transformative comes from people who abide to heirarchies. I mean, there are the few exceptions but the few you can hardly name. I guess seeing Charles Blow in his forties try to strive for exceptionalism now is even so slow-paced because he can't step fast enough from the systems he volunteered to uphold by joining.

Now he is maturing to realize and come clean about his decision but he isn't even close to understanding he left out the metric rate of ownership he put into it and all other heirarchal behaviors we abide to or have to go along with as normalized systems of managing ourselves in a modern world.

Those people that dropped were the stronger ones and the smarter ones. But they were not recognized by heirarchal society as leaders for disobeying the silly observance and ritualistic thoughts.

I have a forty-something Black male cousin who is stuck in so many ways in his life because he wanted heirarchal stewardship to shape his life. And it did. He can't detach from believing in heirarchies because he spent so much time invested in the romanticism of believing it redeemed him and made him righteous. He thought it would make his wise and exceptional. And that's why they all join. They all think something magical is going to make them an exceptional being because of joining the heirarchies. Time is wasted, humanity is developmentally stunted...intelligence is warped.

Those who join heirarchies are the problems. They are not victims after they end up dying from their volunteerism to join those heirarchies. When the incidents are not pressing them against the wall, it's pressing someone else and they are standing theire supporting no matter how bad they feel about it in real-time. Their inclusion to join is what keeps these heirarchies alive to stall human emotional and mental maturity. Their decisions to stay can't buy them redemption in an op-ed softly trying to excuse away and avoid admitting ownership just because he is admitting it did hurt his behind and make him dizzy. He still is a part of the problem by having to have to face this as the neanderthal in a suit posing as an evolved NYTimes columnist for his peers. He is still showing me and those that can critically think that he's behind-the-curve and just admitting after-the-fact because he is realizing he has been a part of it for all this time.

I have a friend who denounced the Greek/Pan Hellenic system after she 'crossed because she realized she was a neanderthal for sticking with it. After 'crossing, she realized it was a deformed system of management and all that romanticism was inept. She refuses to put it on her resumes or to own anything and she was someone they begged to reconsider. She is in her fifties now. It's people like her that needed to be able to find other people like themselves to take down these heirarchies in Black America that do nothing to advance us. But she had limited resources and didn't think there was more of her out there. And Charles Blow shows that they're aren't. He's trying to act like he is evolved by admitting it did hurt in the past. He's just coming clean now because it took him this long developmentally to realize how long he has abided to not getting it.

How can he now explain why he has been bragging about membership in an antiquated system? It's everywhere in print that he is a member. He used to brag about it for an edge. Now that edge isn't so cache. The value that heirarchies once had isn't the same in the evolving world of intelligence. It makes it hard to pass off one's self as an evolutionary man working at The Times when that is blaring at everyone to see that you are slow at recognizing this wasn't something to brag about...being a member of an antiquated heirarchal system.

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