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On March 2, 1867, the Historically Black College or University (HBCU) Howard University (HU) was founded in Washington, D. C. Almost exactly one year later, the all white fraternity of Pi Kappa Alpha was founded at the University of Virginia. Over 100 years later, on February 18 2006, fifty-five HU students became charter members of Pi Kappa Alpha ("Pike"), making the Pikes the first traditionally White social Greek organization to begin a colony at HU. Using recent interviews with HU students as a touchstone for analysis, this author presents a six-part typology of student ideological responses to the Pike colony. These responses are described nominally and arranged in order of ascending racial consciousness. The first is the "Color-Blind Copasetic," who argues for a post-race political utopia. Next is the "Agreeable Assimilationist," who views HU's predominantly Black campus culture as disingenuous and possibly misinformative. Next is the "Campus Conventionist," who views non-Black changes to tradition as negative. There is also the "Munificent Multiculturalist," who believes that racial diversity, no matter the form, is positive. In addition, there is the "Radical Racialist," who expresses a dislike of the Pikes on campus because of their White traditionalism and racist past. Last is "Antonio's Ghost," who believes that the Pikes can be used by Black students to advance Black interests. While these labels are surely reductive, they nonetheless capture a certain version of the HU student realities of culturally specific ideologies that make meaning and sense out of the HU Pike presence. (Contains 1 figure and 7 notes.)

Although law prohibits race-based exclusion in college sororities and fraternities in the United States, racial segregation prevails. As a result, nonwhite membership in white Greek-letter organizations (WGLOs) is often hailed as a transformative step toward equality and unity. The bulk of work on such cross-racial membership centers on comparative-historical and survey data and treats integrated membership as the successful end, rather than a problematic beginning, of analysis. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in three university campuses on the East Coast, I shift the focus from resource factors that either prevent or enable membership to the strategies of action that nonwhite members employ in their everyday lives in order to be perceived as full, belonging members. By drawing upon the insights of the sociology of culture, I argue that robust racialized schemas simultaneously enable and constrain inclusion. Rather than hide explicit racial-ethnic difference or accede to traditional expectations of Anglo conformity, I find that nonwhite members are enmeshed in a paradox of participation: their ability to frame themselves as equal and belonging Greek 'brothers and sisters' remains tied to a patterned reproduction of their racial and ethnic identities as essentially different and inferior. Such a paradox emerges as an important theoretical and pragmatic dilemma with implications for an array of institutional contexts. Keywords: whiteness, identity, schema, segregation, fraternity, sorority. DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.4.653.

Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere. Gwendolyn D. Pough. 2004. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 265 pp. (photographs and index included). $US 21.95 [...]

The article focuses on fostering racial equality in the U.S. Topics discussed include role of comic book and movies of "The X-Men" in depicting struggle for racial equality in the country; police brutality in the African American community; and various civil rights movements took place in the country for abolishing teh same.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to Alan Sica's review of "The Man Farthest Down," by B. T. Washington and R. E. Park Find.