“Men Doing Life Together”: Black Christian Fraternity Men’s Embodiments of Brotherhood

Abstract

Black people in the United States have and continue to pursue practices of communal bonding as well as cooperative-and-sharing economies, from the invisible institution of Black religion to underground activist collectives such as the African Blood Brotherhood. While many efforts were explicitly political, other organizations primarily emphasized socioeconomic advancement for its group members and the broader Black community. One such set of collectives that in many ways embodied both aims are Black Greek-letter Organizations. One of their enduring legacies is the ability to produce a unique and powerful sense of sisterhood and brotherhood. Through various processes, shared symbols, and cultural artifacts, Black fraternal organizations create a sense of camaraderie readily apparent to even lay observers. Yet, very few empirical studies have examined how fraternity men define and embody such brotherhood bonds. Thus, the purpose of the present study sought to fill these knowledge gaps by addressing the following research questions: (1) how do Black Christian fraternity men define and embody brotherhood? and (2) what social and emotional benefits do Black Christian fraternity men gain from brotherhood? Using qualitative data gathered through various techniques (i.e., semistructured interviews, photovoice and identity maps, focus groups, and Facebook observations), we describe the ways Black male members of this Christian fraternity embody brotherhood as accountability and co-construct a space for men to experience and benefit from intimacy.

Keywords

education religion race hegemonic masculinity friendship

Historically and contemporarily, the unsanctioned gathering of Black people has been represented through Western cultural discourse as always already dangerous in so much as it exists outside of the purview and thus, coercive control of a White supremacist (hetero)patriarchal capitalist state. The history of antiloitering laws as well as violent engagements with Black and First Nations maroon communities is at least partly illustrative of such codified paranoia (Blackmon 2009; Robinson 1983). Ironically, our nation’s founders constructed a sociopolitical economy of Whiteness that exists in large part through the (re)production of spatial and political exclusions based on perceived biological differences between White propertied men and the savage un-/subhuman racially minoritized other (Mills 1997).

Notwithstanding, Black people in the United States have and continue to pursue practices of communal bonding as well as cooperative-and-sharing economies, from the invisible institution of Black religious gatherings (Raboteau 1978/2004) to underground activist collectives such as the African Blood Brotherhood (Robinson 1983). While many efforts were explicitly political, other organizations primarily emphasized socioeconomic advancement for its group members and the broader Black community. One such set of collectives that in many ways embodied both aims are Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLOs).

In his now germinal text on the topic, Black Greek 101: The Culture, Customs, and Challenges of Black Fraternities and Sororities, Kimbrough (2003) offers a groundbreaking analysis of the history, evolution, and ideology of Black fraternal organizations. One of their enduring legacies is the ability to produce a unique and powerful sense of sisterhood and brotherhood. Through various processes, shared symbols, and cultural artifacts, Black fraternal organizations create a sense of camaraderie readily apparent to even lay observers. Yet very few empirical studies have examined how fraternity men define and embody such brotherhood bonds (Jackson 2012).

Of particular note for the purposes of this study is Kimbrough’s (2003) attentiveness to the vast array of Black fraternal organizations beyond those that constitute the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC). That is to say, while a corpus of scholarship speaks to the history, evolution, and contemporary configurations of NPHC sororities and fraternities, comparatively less is known about other predominantly Black fraternal organizations such as Christian fraternities that have several distinctions. For example, one distinction between the two types NPHC and predominantly Black Christian fraternities is that while the former were founded upon and continue to hold some Christian values, they are actively open to potential members from different faiths, beliefs, and religious organizations (Harris and Sewell 2012; Parks, Hughey, and Cohen 2014). Conversely, the organization we explore in our study describes themselves as men who are committed to Jesus Christ and actively participates in evangelical pursuits (note that we decided against sharing specific quotes from the organizations’ materials in order to not disclose the identity of the group). Furthermore, to our understanding, NPHC fraternities and sororities do not regularly engage fully in explicit Christian practices like that of Christian fraternities. Recognizing a lack of empirical literature surrounding predominantly Black Christian fraternities and how Black men embody brotherhood in Christian fraternities, the purpose of the present study sought to fill these knowledge gaps by addressing the following research questions: (1) how do Black Christian fraternity men define and embody brotherhood? and (2) what social and emotional benefits do Black Christian fraternity men gain from brotherhood?

Literature Review

A consequential body of empirical research points to the critical and central influence peers have on college students’ academic and social educational experiences (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005). For Black college students in particular, social scientific research documents the various ways they labor alongside same-race peers to co-construct supportive educational spaces. Such (in)formal subcommunities tailored to students’ racialized needs afford Black students a way to respond to and resist racist environments (Solórzano, Ceja, and Yosso 2000), adjust culturally (Museus 2008), and develop and express their racial identities (Harper and Quaye 2007).

When considering engagement within BGLOs, Black students gain a number of benefits consistent with the missional aims of most postsecondary institutions. Scholars have found that BGLOs provide opportunities for students to develop paraprofessional and leadership skills, participate in civic engagement, increase their social and professional networks, enhance their cognitive development, and receive academic support (Harper and Harris 2006; Kimbrough 1995, 1997; Patton, Bridges, and Flowers 2011). Furthermore, BGLOs offer transnational professional networks that support students’ postcollege professional trajectories (Henry 2012). Regarding Black men in Black Greek fraternities (BGFs) specifically, researchers report that students are able to benefit from intentional mentorship, racial identity affirmation, cocurricular academic development that is Afrocentric, and expanded ideas about Black manhood (Dancy 2011, 2012; Dancy and Hotchkins 2015; McClure 2006a, 2006b).

Although not related exclusively to BGFs, other scholars’ examinations of Black men’s experiences within other single-sex, same-race student organizations are also instructive of the relationship between homosocial Black male environments and students’ educational experiences. For instance, Brooms (2016) found that students, through participating in Black male initiative programs, gained an increased sense of belonging and mattering, actualized access to social and cultural capital, received academic support and motivation, and strengthened their sense of self and collective identity as Black men. Collectively, the aforementioned studies have been primarily framed as a concern for the ways race-based student organizations and programs contribute to Black students’ persistence, retention, and graduation.

Yet a smaller group of studies focus on one central component of Black male initiatives and organizations (e.g., fraternal life)—brotherhood (Brooms 2016; Brooms, Clark, and Smith 2017; Jones and Hotep 2006). In their investigation of how five Black and Latino student leaders embody brotherhood at a Hispanic-serving institution, Brooms, Clark, and Smith (2017) reported that these students perceived their brotherhood bond to be distinct from fraternities in that they, “don’t throw ragers; we’re here for the genuine well-being of our members” (p. 6). Caring for each other’s well-being was demonstrated through selfless support, being present emotionally, and holding one another accountable for individual growth and academic achievement. Despite their sample not including Black men, Estrada, Mejia, and Hufana’s (2017) phenomenological analysis of six Latino men contributes to our understanding of how some students conceptualize and embody brotherhood. The men described brotherhood as an opportunity to be and do good, a resource for academic and professional support, as well as a family away from home. Importantly, it was also a place where they experienced affective closeness:

“If I’m feeling blue,” one of them shared, “I can always pick up the phone and talk to a bro, any bro,” while another, leaning into the interviewer stated, “whenever you need a hug, I got you,” as in he is there for his “brothers.” (p. 325)

Further focusing on the benefits of brotherhood, several scholars have examined the ways BGFs inform Black men’s understanding of manhood and embodiment of their masculinities (Jackson 2012; McClure 2006b). For instance, Jackson’s (2012) two-year ethnographic study of fraternal brotherhood demonstrated how organizational members purposefully promoted an environment in which men were encouraged to openly express their emotions and maintain social dependency in ways that challenge stereotypical notions of hegemonic masculinities. Such findings are consistent with McClure’s (2006a, 2006b) study of how 20 Black fraternity men embraced emotional vulnerability among their fraternity brothers. McClure’s (2006a) qualitative analysis proffers insights concerning the ways race, gender, and class amalgamate in the lives of Black undergraduate fraternity men. In particular, many participants embodied what McClure (2006a) refers to as hegemonic-Afrocentric masculinity, which represents both traditional Western, capitalist aspirations toward financial success and Afrocentric imperatives toward collaboration and community uplift. Attributable to their Afrocentric cultural identities, these men also found in their fraternity space an “opportunity to experience ‘real,’ emotionally honest relationships with men” (McClure 2006a, 66).

These set of findings related to Black men’s affective vulnerability within homosocial environments are nontrivial considering research documenting the ways such (largely) cisgender, heterosexual male environments reinforce patriarchy. Some scholars argue male homosocial environments reproduce hypermasculinity and police boundaries of masculine embodiment, including emotional reclusiveness and the normalization of violence (Awkward 1999; Bird 1996). Specifically considering BGLOs, several scholars have pointed to the ways more toxic versions of masculinities are expressed through hazing rituals (Jones 2004). Characterized by (at times) extreme forms of physical punishment and psychological stress, Jones argues hazing rituals are taken up as necessary rite of passages for many fraternity organizations and constitute a liminal process of becoming an authentic brother.

Notwithstanding, in comparison to what the literature demonstrates concerning the educational and social benefits of fraternity participation, we know much less about the ways Black men in fraternities in general and Christian fraternities in particular benefit from and embody brotherhood. Further, while some scholars identify how fraternity spaces as well as other single-sex organizations provide space for transgressive (Dancy 2012) performances of masculinities, we know less about the mechanisms and processes through which this is achieved. As such, the present study seeks to extend our understanding of how brotherhood is conceptualized, accomplished, and sustained as well as the specific ways race, gender, and religion interact to inform these processes and outcomes. In the next two subsections, we present the concepts Black fraternalism and male homosocial bonding that we use to frame our findings.

Black Fraternalism

One concept through which we frame the current study is Black fraternalism. Kimbrough (2003) describes post-1980s Black fraternalism—as well as the fraternal organizations established during that time—as emerging within what he terms an individualistic/multiculturalism era. A function of Black students’ increased access to formerly segregated southern colleges and universities, this era was characterized by students who sought to leave their mark by establishing sororities and fraternities. One central feature of this new iteration of Black fraternalism was an explicit commitment to and embracing of Christianity. Although many of the historic BGLOs were founded upon Christian principles (Parks, Hughey, and Cohen 2014) and considered by some to be secular counterparts of religious institutions (Harris and Sewell 2012), these newly founded organizations perceived the existing fraternities to have moved away from a Christian ethos. As Kimbrough (2003) points out, these newly formed organizations explicitly constructed brotherhood through a prism of Christian theologies that also offered a venue for enjoying unique collegiate experiences (e.g., Greek life).

Other scholars have closely examined the notion of Black fraternalism in both secular and religious spaces. In considering the institutional predecessors of Black Greek-letter fraternities (BGLFs), Parks, Hughey, and Cohen (2014) argue that Black churches, Black secret societies, and college literary societies bequeathed to the latter a commitment to racial uplift vis-à-vis collective action as well as organizational clarity. As BGLFs emerged, the authors explain, their practices of Black fraternalism materialized as foundational principles: scholarship, brotherhood, race consciousness, and activism. As evidence for their claim of the fundamental importance of brotherhood to BGLF’s ideals, Park and colleagues point to mission statements, chapter songs, mottos, and constitutions. Through these enlivened artifacts, BGLFs point to the importance of unity, fellowship, and mutual support. However, they also argue, the ideal of uncompromised brotherhood is found wanting in reality, as divisions are drawn along lines of sexuality, race, and religion.

Relatedly, although in a nonfraternity context, Chipumuro’s (2012) ethnographic analysis of fraternalism within a West Indian and African American Brethren church in the Southeast United States sheds additional light on embodiments and practices of brotherhood among Black men. More specifically, Chipumuro considers the ways brotherhood as enacted within this community of practitioners is a “spiritual, egalitarian, and closely knit relationship” (p. 608) that aspires for nonhierarchical relationships, democratized leadership, and mutual material aid. Within this Christian context, Biblical scriptures offer textual legitimacy to the importance of brotherhood and the practice of bible studies help to solidify the bonds of brotherhood. Similar to Parks, Hughey, and Cohen (2014), Chipumuro (2012) also points to the challenges to espoused versions brotherhood—as always already sites of inclusions—that emerge from the voices of women and youth. Notwithstanding, Chipumuro argues that fraternalism as embodied among her community of participants shares strong similarities with Black fraternal organizations through “mutual aid, ritualism, and democratic participation” as well as “inform counter-cultural identifications for Black constituents negotiating the exclusions of US society” (p. 619).

Taken together, we draw on these scholars’ articulations of Black fraternalism to make sense of how our participants embodied brotherhood as a form of social, emotional, and academic support and ritual bonding, while simultaneously promoting versions of Christian accountability and socioemotional dependency.

Male Homosocial Bonding

Complementing Black fraternalism, we draw upon notions of male homosocial bonding to frame the various ways fraternal contexts present an opportunity for men to temporarily subvert normative expectations concerning masculine performances (Kaplan and Yanay 2006; Kaplan and Rosenmann 2014). To be certain, a considerable amount of social scientific explorations into performances of masculinities documents the ways (largely cisgender heterosexual) men perpetuate heteropatriarchy institutionally and interpersonally as well as men’s intentionally distancing themselves from things considered stereotypically feminine (Connell 1995; O’Neil et al. 1986). For example, Kimmel (2008) offers a groundbreaking analysis of the ways in which young adult college males across various homosocial environments are ushered into some of the most toxic elements associated with hypermasculinity during their collegiate tenures.

Nonetheless, recent findings point to the ways homosocial environments open up space for men to undermine hypermasculine male performance and expectations (Kaplan and Rosenmann 2014). Some scholars have pointed to the fact that men are more likely to close social and emotional distance via “‘shoulder to shoulder’ friendships” (Grief 2006, p. 3) through sporting, athletic, and other doing activities. Distinguishing between relationships that are primarily dyadic and those that emerge from male homosocial environments, Kaplan and Yanay’s (2006) case study of Israeli men’s fraternal friendships among thirty heterosexual men from different generations demonstrates how “various cultural sites associated with heroic male bonding, such as combat, death, and commemoration, produce situations wherein male desire is neither denied nor displaced but rather legitimized and declared” (pp. 128–29). According to Kaplan and Yanay, a hegemonic script of male bonding consists of three features. First, the male-to-male bond develops through enduring a difficult experience. Second, the men encounter and experience together an emotional moment that is typically not allowed among men (i.e., crying together). Finally, a hegemonic script of male bonding involves a commitment to solidarity between the men which outlasts the two aforementioned contained cases.

For our present study, we draw most explicitly on Kaplan and Yanay’s (2006) work to theorize the connection between fraternity members’ ongoing activities to establish and sustain brotherhood, which is in fact solidified and reinforced by embracing traditionally foreclosed performances of masculinity. As such, we are able to make sense of how hegemonic constructions of manhood are fortified, yet men are able to express behaviors and enjoy a level of social intimacy typically not associated with “real men.”

Methodological Framework

Prior to discussing the technical aspects of our research design, we offer an admittedly brief statement about how our collective positionalities informed the current study. Among the five of us, one is a Black woman, three are Black men, and one is a White man. Each of us identifies as cisgender and heterosexual. Also, three of the five research team members are active members of BGLOs: one is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated and two are members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated. Our varied lived experiences provided unique and often complementary affordances regarding the questions we asked and the ways we made sense of the data in at least two explicit ways. First, the perspectives of the sorority and fraternity members on the research team were invaluable in helping us appropriately frame questions without being perceived as intrusive as well as understanding a general, lived history of BGLOs. Second, those of us who possess embodied knowledge by the way of our extended exposure to Black Christian institutions, rhetoric, and communities allowed us to both gain rapport with participants and make sense of language/terminology that may seem foreign to outsiders.

Site and Data Collection

Recruitment for this study began in the early summer of 2015. In order to recruit organizations to participate, members of the research team conducted a Web search to identify any US-based, predominantly Black, Christian sororities and fraternities. In all, we were able to identify eight active organizations. The lead author then e-mailed the leadership of each organization, inviting them to participate in the study and providing them a project description that explained the purpose, potential risks and benefits, and incentives concerning the study. Despite one sorority and two fraternities initially expressing interests, ultimately one Christian fraternity decided to follow through and complete the study. This present study draws conclusions from findings based on the experiences of this particular fraternity, Mu Phi Beta (MPB) (pseudonym).

MPB has been in existence for approximately three decades. While the fraternity is open to persons of any racial group—and in fact was founded by Black and Latino men—the majority of active members are Black. Throughout its history, the chapter has established approximately two dozen collegiate and alumni chapters at colleges and universities across the United States, yet predominantly in the Southwest region. Currently, however, the fraternity boasts just over half a dozen active chapters.

After receiving approval from the national leadership board, the national president sent a recruitment e-mail to all active members of the organization (current students and alumni) inviting them to participate in the study. The lead author also met in person with one of the national board members to further discuss the project’s parameters and intent. During the lead author’s ongoing communication with the organization’s president, we were invited to attend its fall 2015 southwest undergraduate leadership retreat. The president also stated this would be an opportune place to both learn more about the organization and engage with its members. Thus, the lead author and two research assistants traveled to the retreat and conducted the first of three waves of data collection.

During the retreat, we did not attend a majority of the private meetings, but we spent time informally interacting with the group by attending the opening meet-and-greet session and sharing meals together. Formally, we conducted fourteen individual, semistructured interviews with both alumni and current undergraduate members (note that participants’ demographic information is shared in the next section). Also, the lead author conducted a focus group with six national board members as well as a joint interview with two of the fraternity’s founders. For the second wave of data collection, the researchers conducted follow-up interviews with the fourteen participants from the retreat. The follow-up interviews took place via Skype, Google Hangout, or telephone. Between the first and second interviews, participants were asked to complete a photovoice (Wang 1999) or identity map (Fine and Sirin 2007) assignment whereby they selected photos and/or drew a picture, respectively, that capture what it means for them to be a Black, Christian, fraternity man. Participants were asked to submit their photos or drawings prior to the second interview, which included a conversation whereby participants explained to researchers their decisions to include those specific images and the meanings they reflected. Six participants completed the photovoice exercise and two participants completed the identity map. The third phase of data collection consisted of the lead author being an inactive observer of the fraternity’s Facebook group.

Participants

There were a total of eighteen fraternity members who participated in the study and its various data collection procedures described above. Of the fourteen participants who participated in the individual interviews, two were second-year students, three were juniors, four were seniors, and five were alumni. The participants represented a diverse group of educational majors, including mathematics, accounting, music education, political theory, and constitutional democracy. Concerning participants’ ages, the range was nineteen to twenty-seven years old and the average membership tenure for current students was twenty-three months (n = 9) and sixty-eight months for alumni (n = 5). Last, on the demographic profile form, participants were asked to select from four identity categories: (a) spiritual-and-religious, (b) spiritual-not-religious, (c) religious-not-spiritual, or (d) other. In all, six students identified as spiritual-and-religious, seven students identified as spiritual-not-religious, and one student identified as other (“follower of Jesus Christ”).

Research Design

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009) borrows from concepts and debates among phenomenology, hermeneutics, and idiography. While phenomenology is loosely defined as a philosophical approach that seeks to examine and understand the experience of being human, hermeneutics emphasizes interpretation, and ideography is committed to the particular; that is, how phenomena can be understood from a particular perspective in a particular context. Although IPA combines these philosophical approaches, lending somewhat equal emphasis to each, the researchers in this study lean specifically on the interpretative tradition IPA suggests.

The interpretative tradition of IPA emphasizes how a phenomenon appears and places responsibility on the researchers to interpret this appearance (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). Moreover, IPA suggests a reevaluation of bracketing and transcends more traditional approaches in an attempt at a productive and cyclical relationship between “fore-understanding” (the researcher’s prior experiences, assumptions, and preconceptions; p. 25) and the phenomenon being studied. As such, we employ this productive interpretative approach to enrich our analyses of the events; cycling the diversity of our experiences and fore-understandings through our data throughout the entire analysis allows for deep and thick interpretations of the phenomenon under study.

Data Analysis

Data analysis occurred iteratively in a five-phase process informed by Smith, Flowers, and Larkin’s (2009) instructions. While the lead research was assigned and responsible for reading all interview and focus group transcripts, the second and fourth authors were each assigned four individual participants and the third and fifth authors were assigned three participants each. In the first phase, each team member read their transcripts at least twice with one of those readings accompanied by the audio recording of the interview. During the second phase, each team member jotted down initial notes that inductively captured “the things which mattered to them…and the meaning of those things for the participant…” (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009, 83). These notes included descriptive, linguistic, conceptual comments, and preliminary codes, which were then shared during a collective research team meeting. Subsequently, in the third phase, the lead author compiled and transformed the comments and preliminary codes into a formal codebook.

In the fourth phase of analysis, each team member was provided a codebook that she or he used with HyperRESEARCH software version 2016. The fifth and final phase consisted of the research team collectively identifying relationships between codes among each team members’ assigned subgroup of participants as well as across all participants’ interviews. This primarily occurred through collective deliberation during two distinct research team meetings that lasted approximately one hour each. These deliberations led to the identification of emergent themes, which were further reduced to superordinate themes. The focus group data were used to triangulate and provide additional context to the superordinate themes. Through this iterative process of close readings and collaborative sensemaking, we achieved trustworthiness and quality assurance.

Limitations

Despite our efforts described above to maximize and ensure trustworthiness, there were several methodological limitations to the study. First, though we initially gathered a list of Christian fraternities to study, only one Christian fraternity agreed to participate. The second limitation was the study exclusively focuses on Black Christian fraternity members although the fraternity that participated was comprised of men from other racial/ethnic backgrounds. Third, the fraternity includes men primarily from the Southwest region of the United States. Last, the study focused on interviews from only the fraternity men and did not obtain perspectives from its sister sorority. These supplemental interviews would have likely provided greater insights into the outside appearance of the fraternity and how the fraternity’s actions were perceived by others in the Christian community.

Findings

Drawn from the two individual semistructured interviews with all fourteen participants, the joint interview with the two founders, the focus group with the national board, and observations from the Facebook group, we present data reflecting how participants defined and embodied brotherhood. Namely, the men defined brotherhood as accountability to others, intimacy, and as an active process. Also, interwoven in the narrative statements presented below is an analysis of the social and emotional benefits the Black Christian fraternity men derived from brotherhood.

Support for and Accountability to Others

One way in which our participants conceptualized and embodied Christian fraternal brotherhood was through a rigorous commitment to accountability to one another. One member went as far to say that they have not encountered “an organization to have so much invested in a buddy system or in some type of system that requires its members to take account for one another.” Very much dialogical, this was not simply an expectation that someone would be there for you, but that others could count on you to show up for them. As one participant shared, a brotherhood is “a group of people that you can go to anything for, hold each other accountable to good things or bad things, have fun together, be there through the struggle, we don’t run away when times get hard.” As can be seen, this particular articulation of brotherhood held space for both the good and bad, the difficult and fun things. A story shared by one of the young men captures the extent to which he and his brothers went for one another and how such a level of male support was exceptional in his life:

My car broke down, many times, like going to Market North [psuedonym], but every time I gave one of my brothers a call, they were willing, regardless if they were at work, if they were in class, they were like, “Oh, J, I’m on my way.” Which I felt that no other male had done for me before. And I would do the same for my brothers.

Other men used words or phrases such as “being present,” “going out of your way,” and generally being available when needed to further describe accountability and dependability within Christian fraternal brotherhood. Additionally, there was this idea of remaining consistent in the bonds of brotherhood. Another participant reiterated this idea by stating that a critical part of brotherhood was “suffering with a brother.” The very notion of suffering holds specific Christian theological connotation that views painful experiences as necessary and inevitable, yet ultimately working toward a greater good. In further emphasizing his perspective that brotherhood requires a continual motion of walking beside an individual during tough times without abandonment, this participant referenced the Bible Verse Proverbs 17:7: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.” Also, he argued that “true accountability, Biblical accountability” involved “really sticking to what you said you were going to do, long after the emotions and the feelings were there…”

Moreover, the men described how their networks of accountability helped them meet specific behavioral goals. For instance, one participant shared his reflections on how often he prayed prior to and after becoming a member of his fraternity:

I can definitely say my prayer life was not that strong before I pledged. After I pledged and I had my line brother to be my accountability partner, he definitely encouraged me a lot to pray and to pray a lot more [and] to fast.

Through accountable partnership, this participant was able to achieve what he was unable to accomplish alone. Another participant shared how his accountability to others within the brotherhood helped him to develop professional skills, such as public speaking, by placing him in positions that were uncomfortable and challenging yet rewarding. Similarly, one of the fraternity members expressed how accountability within the bond of Christian fraternal brotherhood had a positive impact on his academic performance: “It changed my whole academic path…they try their best to look after me. Even though they won’t know anything about the subjects…they need to go and have study hours with me.”

However, there were several members who raised the importance of not thinking of brotherhood, or access to it, as a carte blanche invitation to resources and support. For example, one of the fraternity founders reflected on the potential limits of brotherhood: “We’ve even had cases where brotherhood, it negatively impacted us because someone basically came in and kept lifting up needs and folk were just giving freely. Until brotherhood said, we cannot be enabling. That can be a brotherhood [re: telling a brother no].” This idea of considering whether accountability and support within Christian fraternal brotherhood could be exploited was also discussed within the fraternity’s Facebook group during their identity infusion series. Each week, the host (an undergraduate fraternity member) would post a prompt in order to generate dialogue around difficult topics. On one particular week, the following scenario was presented:

Someone asks you for something that they say they need (food, money, etc.). You give them whatever they need the 1st couple of times they ask, but they continuously ask you for the same thing every time they see you. What do you do and why do you do it?

Initially, two members posited that ideally, based on their interpretation of Christian principles, one should give if they have. While they both employed Bible verses—1 John 3:17 and Luke 6:34—to support their argument, one individual reflexively acknowledged the difficulty of actualizing this espoused value: “I definitely struggle with this, because I want to get what I gave back or not give at all ever again but that opposes Jesus’s characteristics.” While these perspectives were shared, they did not constitute what seemed to be the consensus among the five individuals to respond—in part reflected by the seventeen total likes their posts received compared to one received by the other two posts. The consensus can be summed up by the following admonishment shared: “Bro, give responsibly.” As other participants expounded, responsible giving was important because sometimes individuals would take advantage of your willingness to give without taking actions toward remedying their situation.

Also, worth noting is how one member offered a different interpretation of 1 John 3:17,¹ which was initially shared. Specifically, they challenged who would be included in the category of “brother” by arguing that this could potentially refer to the members of a local church. They then drew on additional scriptures to offer more nuance to consider one’s responsibility to one’s family, other members in their local congregation, and Christians writ large. The import of this intrafraternity dialogue, in part, is that it raised contentions about the parameters of brotherhood and as a result, who the Christian fraternity members were accountable to. For instance, while all those interviewed argued that their brotherhood should reflect their individual relationships with God—“as far as the closeness that we all have, just being able to be transparent” and “the willingness to go the extra mile for your brother, to sacrifice for your brother”—not all agreed on who was counted within the confines of brotherhood. That is, some believed that level of support and being there for others should be extended to all Christians and others argued that while this may be an ideal, their level of accountability was more acute among their fraternity brothers.

As evidenced by participants’ statements, embodied Christian fraternal brotherhood was built upon and required accountability to one another. While there were divergent perspectives concerning the borders of and limitations to the boundaries of brotherhood, consistently the men spoke to how access to such accountability was to mirror their relationship with God and offered material, professional, and personal support. In the next section, we discuss another form of support offered through Christian fraternal brotherhood achieved through vulnerability and transparency.

An Invitation for Intimacy

As has been documented by other scholars (Jackson 2012), fraternal bonds sometimes offer Black men community spaces in which they can embody forms of raced-gendered masculinities traditionally policed and critiqued in larger homosocial environments. For the Black Christian fraternity men within our study, achieving true brotherhood required a serious commitment to a version of intimacy that demanded both physical proximity and affective closeness. For one participant, this was the fundamental distinction between friends and brothers:

That’s a big part that a lot of people don’t pay attention to. If you’re not vulnerable, it doesn’t matter how many friends you have, it doesn’t matter how many people you interact with. If you don’t have someone to be vulnerable with, you’re missing out.

In this way, the perception that an absence of vulnerability was a loss inverts assumptions that naturalize a link between men and their unwillingness to be emotionally vulnerable. One participant went as far as to say this was the most important lesson he learned from his fraternity:

It’s okay to bare your sole to somebody else. If you’re able to keep it to yourself and you’re never able to share with anybody, it becomes a problem. One thing we’re always taught is even in prayer you have to be comfortable giving it all to God.

In attempting to establish relationships with each other in a manner that mirrored personal relationships they aspired to have with God, they were able to normalize such openness as desirable.

However, the men we spoke with held no pretense about how difficult it was to achieve this: “You have to prepare yourself for the scrutiny. You have to prepare yourself for those tough conversations.” Understanding that this was not something men in particular may readily embrace, there needed to be intentional efforts to, as one participant described it, peel back the layers of the onion. While not always formalized, the participants shared how they sought to co-construct such intimacy. One participant recalled a day he and a fraternity brother were engaging in surface-level conversation:

I’m just shooting the breeze, having a conversation, and he was like “Well, you know man, a lot of times we just talk about basketball, but what are some things that you’re dealing with? What are some issues that you’re having?” The conversation went, boom, right to it.

Although this caught him off guard, he welcomed this request for deeper conversation as it showed that his fraternity brother “[wanted] to know more about [me than] who my favorite basketball team is.”

The participants also described how they benefited from having a place to be vulnerable and transparent with other Christian men. First, it offered space to be honest about shortcomings without fearing judgment. While, as one participant argued, faith-based institutions are “full of people who want to see you fall,” he experienced his brotherhood as a place to “…confess our sins to each other and we’d talk to each other and try to help each other out and help each other grow even more.” Further, it allowed men an opportunity to ask questions and engage in dialogue around topics that men may be afraid to share with others. One participant reflected on this phenomenon:

We have these questions, but we don’t want to ask them because we don’t know if the next brother isn’t having those questions in his mind. “I don’t know what it really feels like or looks like to be a man in this area, I feel like I’m supposed to look [like] this. I know I’m not looking like that. Does that mean I’m inadequate?” This was a place where we could have those safe conversations.

While normative expectations of hegemonic masculinity vigorously defend against any semblance of physical, emotional, and financial inadequacies, their embodied Christian fraternal brotherhood invited men to share their vulnerabilities in order to support and challenge authenticity scripts of manhood.

Lastly, the men were allowed to embody their masculinity in their own divergent ways. As one participant shared, “He accepts me for who I am. I accept him for who he is. We just come together as brothers.” This was especially powerful for one participant who described himself as a “crier”:

That was the thing…This was the first group that actually supported me in that, because of the thought of masculinity, especially within the Black community, was kind of like, “Oh, so you’re crying, so you’re a punk. Are you a female? Oh, okay, cool, you can go now, come back to us when you suck up your tears.” These guys didn’t do that to me. They were willing to sit there and wonder why I was crying. They were sitting there wondering, are these tears of joy, or are these tears of sadness? What is it?

As several masculinities scholars (Connell 1995; O’Neil et al. 1986) have discussed, masculinity is very much relational in so much as it is often defined against femininities. However, this participant’s experience of his Christian fraternal brotherhood not only refused to discipline these expressions or ignore them but rather engaged them fully and opened up space for their existence.

The onus of being intentional about ushering the men into a form of embodied Christian fraternal brotherhood that was predicated upon vulnerability and transparency, one participant argued, fell upon current members:

The brother that’s bringing them in, he has to be forthcoming first. It has to be established from one to the other, “Hey, this is how we’re going to be, these are our expectations.” I have to be transparent with you in order for this process to work. You have to know some of my challenges, some of the things that’s going on with me, as well as I have to know yours, and we love on each other.

In order to establish trust and arrive at a place where you would have at least one relationship within the fraternity where no conversation was out of bounds, the current members had to embody these attributes themselves. In their interview, the fraternity’s two founders argued that it was particularly incumbent upon them to model such vulnerability, and they acknowledged that this was intentionally built into their fraternity’s foundation. In addition to being able to share with another brother one’s personal struggles, the two founders described how they as a collective worked to resist any attempts by younger brothers to glorify them:

We tell our members all the time we’re not on pedestals; we’re not perfect. We’re just regular brothers trying to live through this life, and we have our Christian walk just like you…That means that yeah, I may be embarrassed to share some of this stuff with you, but you’re my brothers and I’m going to trust you.

In addition to current members and founders modeling this emotional vulnerability themselves, one thing that made this possible was purposeful and institutionalized efforts of affirmation. In addition to wanting to merge an explicit Christian focus within a fraternity context and their commitment to being a nonsecret organization, part of the impetus for founding the fraternity was an immediate ecological context whereby fraternities carried out a breaking-down-to-build-up process. Some of the founders had some familiarity with other fraternities as they either had close friends or family members who were members of traditional historically Black fraternities and sororities. Beyond emphasizing Christian theology, the founders were intentional about inverting this specific aspect of pledging. One way they attempted to accomplish this during the process was an activity they called the love seat. As one of the founders excitedly shared:

When you get on line…we’re going to build you up. We have two things that I think are real dear, one is called the love seat where we’ll put a brother in the middle of the circle. All the brothers will circle us, put the brother in the middle…everybody go around and they tell that brother eye to eye, man to man everything that’s positive that they love about that brother. I have seen brothers breakdown and cry in that chair because they’ve never had such positive male affirmation before in their lives.

This level of intentional, male-to-male vocal affirmation subverts and undermines traditional barriers that would typically foreclose such expressions of emotionality. However, within this context, men were encouraged to build each other up in this way. Building upon the previous statement, the other founder, with whom we had an opportunity to speak, shared what he believed to be the significance of this experience:

You don’t have to have a Jacob and Esau experience because we may not be your daddy, but you’re going to get blessed. You’re going to have someone speak into you words that you’re not going to hear from the rest of the society, but may not hear from your professor. May not even hear from your parents, but you’re going to hear it from another brother.

This quote is important for at least two reasons. First, it demonstrates the spiritually symbolic relationship current members have with incoming men. That is, in stating “we may not be your daddy, but” the relationship is constituted as not being explicitly a parent–child dynamic, yet it holds some of those benefits. Second, there is an understanding that affirmation and love serve as a protective factor against a society, college environment, and potentially familial relationships that are not invested in nurturing you through uplifting words. As another fraternity member shared, an integral part of their consistent building of brotherhood was repeated encouragement: “Something that we do a lot is by edifying each other…edifying the person, and really telling them about the good qualities that they have and bring to the table.”

Throughout this section, we highlight the ways embodied Christian fraternal brotherhood among these Black men created a space for intimacy and invited the men to be vulnerable and transparent with one another. This was achieved through current members modeling such behaviors, informal yet intentional engagement in difficult conversations, and institutionalized affirmation. Collectively, this allows us to rethink the possibilities of Black Christian male homosocial environments.

Discussion and Conclusion

The findings presented in the current study support several tentative conclusions concerning how Black Christian fraternity men understand, embody, experience, and benefit from brotherhood. First, brotherhood was characterized by a sense of dialogical accountability among individual fraternity men. Being there for one another even (or rather especially) when one was inconvenienced was consistent with the ways various men understood what brotherhood represented and required. Also, reflective of Kimbrough’s (2003) representation of post-1980 Black fraternalism and Chipumuro’s (2012) articulation of fraternalism among the religious community in her study, our participants’ notions of accountability were explicitly Christian in that inherent in being a brother was to endure adversity alongside another. Moreover, the goals to which one held a brother accountable was not merely social, academic, or professional, but also theologically specific (e.g., to pray more). These findings confirm the ways brotherhood and its benefits have been conceptualized in previous research studies—as a mutually beneficial social, academic, and paraprofessional community (Brooms 2016; Brooms, Clark, and Smith 2017; Jones and Hotep 2006). In addition, our findings extend this work by considering the ways brotherhood is explicitly constructed via Christian theology toward specified outcomes.

Second, similar to prior discussion of male homosocial bonding (Kaplan and Yanay 2006; Kaplan and Rosenmann 2014), our findings demonstrate the very ways such contexts offer space for attitudes and behaviors that exist in contradiction to hegemonic masculinity. As explained above, our participants shared the ways that social and emotional intimacy was not only desired but also achieved. Specifically, our participants described how they prepared for peer-to-peer scrutiny, embodied transparency, and experienced vulnerability in such a manner that the men could be honest about perceived inadequacies and converse about topics typically off limits in most of their male-to-male relationships. These particular findings compliment prior research studies that point to ways fraternal spaces in particular and male homosocial environments in general offer and promote versions of embodied Black masculinities that is not always already antagonistic to emotional expressivity and socioemotional dependency (Estrada, Mejia, and Hufana 2017; Jackson 2012). As such, this work provides a counterbalance to extant literature related to male homosocial environments as spaces that exclusively perpetuate hegemonic masculinity.

Taken together, our findings help us to think differently about the potentiality of Black male homosocial spaces and peer-to-peer relationships. In addition, we are drawn to the way men consistently described their relationships as ongoing, in motion, and requiring repeated investment of energy and actions. In describing what brotherhood meant to him, one participant shared “Brotherhood to me is like an active word. It’s continuous. You continuously build brotherhood, you continuously do things for your brother.” Similarly, another fraternity member shared:

With MPB and the whole line process, and where we are today, it’s like you literally walk together with this person to figure out who God is together. Not individually, not just on your own, but it’s together you have to figure out who God is.

Arguably, this is likely a result of the men being in a fraternity whereby their very entry into the organization emphasizes and is largely established by process-oriented activities (i.e., membership intake). Nonetheless, it holds important conceptual implications for how we think about embodied Black masculinities and its possibilities for existing, even if situationally and temporarily restricted, in subversion to hegemonic norms. Namely, seeking to understand Black embodied masculinities relationally and tracing the ways they are constituted through collective, repetitive actions may lead to ways for identifying more transgressive moves and progressive commitments. As such, both researchers and educators might consider investigations that engage participatory methods and programs that center processes and activities, respectively.

Lastly, it is important to note what we hope are the ethical implications of our findings related to Black men’s expressions of and engagement with intimacy. While we acknowledge that these subversive embodiments may be spatially and temporally contained, it is our hope that such moments will serve as a model and motivation for educators and researchers alike to consider the ways such environments might undermine destructive, toxic, and hegemonic embodiments of masculinities. While we have established the various ways such nonhegemonic expressions of masculinities benefits Black men, we believe any project—research or programmatic—that ends with (cisgender heterosexual) men’s intra- and interpersonal development among themselves falls short and remains unfinished. Consistent with our profeminist, antihomophobic, and antiracist politics, a profeminist project must ask: how might these examples of subverting hegemonic masculinities be used as an opportunity to also rethink, subvert, and undue hegemonic relations (largely cisgender, heterosexual) men have with women and noncisgender and nonheterosexual men? Might we consider other nonsexualized pathways to intimacy with others we have been closed off from? This remains our hope: that if what we have been socialized to believe about hegemonic masculinity locked us away from ourselves and others, what other ways might hegemonic masculinity foreclose healthier and more-freeing modes of relationality to ourselves and others?

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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