#burningsands

So after Burning Sands debuted on Netflix, a lot of Black Greeks went on Twitter talking about how the hazing depicted in the movie is not a proper pledging process and that there’s a difference: pledging builds character, and hazing just hurts people. But honestly, it seems like there is no real difference between the two things.

For the record, I’m an undergraduate member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. who did not have a complete pledging process. There were two instances where I and my two co-initiates were made to meet the prophytes on campus around midnight and recite information in a stressful and uncomfortable environment (at one point there were wall-sits. I have no idea what that has to do with community service, but whatever.). I cried the first time, and angrily ranted about how stupid and wasteful it was after the second time, and I ended up not doing anything else after that. My line sisters decided that they wanted a process, though, and ended up doing one over the summer.

Anyway, what I’m trying to communicate is that I don’t know the full details of what a pledging process entails, and no one will tell me. All I ever hear is the same rhetoric that pledging “breaks you down so we can build you back up,” and that it involves placing stress on people and humiliating them, which is supposed to make them stronger, though I’m not sure how. But humiliation and stress being applied as part of the admission process into an exclusive group sounds like hazing to me, and since no one will give me details to explain how pledging is allegedly different, I can only assume there is no difference.

Additionally, there’s this thing that people say: “Everyone experiences their process differently.” It seems like this is just said to discourage people from discussing and comparing pledging processes. But the problem is that this means nobody can know for sure how “proper” their own process is, assuming there is some standardized pledging process that’s “totally different from hazing you just have to believe me.” The details of a process are kept secret ahead of time, you have to trust that things are being done appropriately, but your prophytes could easily be lying and going off script. But since you can’t discuss it with others to compare due to this culture of secrecy, you’ll never know whether your experience is “accurate.” So hazing and “regular” pledging end up hiding behind the same curtain, and the alleged difference between the two disappears.

Either way, you can’t really say that the pledging process is different from hazing because 1) they have matching general traits and 2) the level of secrecy associated with the pledging process makes it impossible to regulate, so it could effectively mean anything. As far as I can tell, the practical difference between pledging and hazing is whether someone feels okay about it afterwards, but if it’s true that “everyone experiences the process differently,” couldn’t it be that for two people on the same line, one could feel like they were pledged “properly” while the other feels like they were hazed?