Menacing Monikers: Language as Evidence

• Publication year: 2015
• Author: By Gregory S. Parks Rashawn Ray and Jonathan M. Cox

MENACING MONIKERS: LANGUAGE AS EVIDENCE

By Gregory S. Parks^* Rashawn Ray^** and Jonathan M. Cox^***

In March 2014, the Atlantic magazine published a piece titled The Dark Power of Fraternities.¹ The article was a yearlong study of these organizations. It sparked a broader dialogue about the state of college fraternities—for example, addressing their role in popular culture,² their tensions with host institutions,³ and their place in the context of African American groups.⁴ This dialogue reverberated across a host of media, including television,⁵ radio,⁶ and print.⁷ The article was cast against the backdrop of Sigma Alpha Epsilon ("SAE") fraternity's—one of the nation's largest and most storied college fraternities—elimination of pledging, given a Bloomberg report that found SAE to be the deadliest fraternity, at least in recent years, to join.⁸

Despite Bloomberg's recent analysis of SAE, scholars have opined for years that Black Greek-Letter Organizations ("BGLOs") are the most violent types of fraternal entities.⁹ Only recently has this speculation been confirmed. In one study, an archival analysis of hazing litigation and media accounts from 1980 to 2009, researchers found that hazing in BGLOs is more physically violent than hazing in historically white fraternities and sororities.¹⁰ Even more, hazing in black fraternities is more physically violent than in black sororities.¹¹ In a second study, a survey of more than 1300 BGLO members, researchers found that black fraternities exhibited more general hazing, physical hazing, socialization hazing, control hazing, and extreme hazing than black sororities.¹²

Only recently have scholars begun to investigate BGLO hazing and its legal implications.¹³ This Essay explores the ways in which black fraternities use language in the context of hazing. Specifically, this Essay focuses on the monikers—nicknames—which some black fraternity chapters use that underscore their endorsement of violence, implicitly in the context of hazing. In Part I, we provide an exemplar of a case in which a chapter moniker was at least raised in hazing litigation. In Part II, we seek to discern the meaning behind black fraternity chapters' use of such monikers. Even beyond the violent hazing employed by black fraternity members, it is problematic that the Federal Rules of Evidence have been construed narrowly in the admissibility of such evidence.¹⁴ In Part III, we contend that such evidence, in the context of these organization and vis-a-vis hazing cases, should be much broader.

I. DANGER! DANGER! THE DEATH OF DONNIE WADE

In the fall of 2009, Donnie Wade was a twenty-year-old Phi Beta Sigma fraternity pledge at Prairie View A&M University.¹⁵ He had transferred from Stephen F. Austin State University to major in biology and hopefully study medicine,¹⁶ On September 29, 2009, Wade and thirteen other Prairie View A&M University students attended an initial interest meeting for the Delta Theta Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma.¹⁷ On October 9, the same group of students attended a Membership Intake Process ("MIP") meeting; they received interviews on October 14, and after paying an initial intake fee of $900, they became members of the fraternity.¹⁸

At four o'clock in the morning on October 20, Wade and his fellow pledges were instructed to meet at Hempstead High School in Hempstead, Texas, near Prairie View, for an exercise routine with Marvin Jackson.¹⁹ Jackson, MIP Chairman, directed the exercise, with other members of the fraternity present, and instructed the students to perform "Indian runs."²⁰ These runs required the students to line up, with whoever was in the back sprinting to the front as the students ran around the high school track.²¹ Following this exercise, the students were instructed to run up and down the bleachers in a "snake" run.²² This involved running up one bleacher, over and down the next bleacher, and then up the next bleacher.²³

Following the snake run, the students were instructed to do push-ups and jumping jacks and perform "six-inchers," in which they laid on their backs and held their legs six inches off the ground for a certain amount of time.²⁴ After performing the six-inchers, Wade collapsed as he tried to stand up and told Jackson and the thirteen pledges that he was not feeling well.²⁵ Jackson, nevertheless, told the group that "Donnie was alright and that he was just tired,"²⁶ and Jackson then splashed water on Wade's face. Wade eventually passed out, yet Jackson and the other members of the fraternity denied any assistance and advised against a bystander getting medical help.²⁷ Jackson, the other members of fraternity, and the thirteen pledges then placed Wade into a car and drove him to his home where two pledges and/or fraternity members volunteered to take Wade to the hospital.²⁸

Upon arrival at the hospital, CPR was performed and Wade was pronounced dead.²⁹ The Assistant Harris County Medical Examiner ruled that Wade's death was caused by the combination of an inherited sickle cell trait and a rare medical syndrome, acute exertional rhabdomyolysis, which can be triggered by strenuous exertion.³⁰ Following the incident, the fraternity was ordered to suspend all operations through 2013 and was later disbanded after a university review board determined that members violated hazing rules and plotted a cover-up after Wade's death.³¹ The fraternity was also sanctioned with a suspension lasting through December 2014 and a probation ending in May 2015.³²

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Wade's parents, Katrina and Donnie Wade Sr., filed a suit against Phi Beta Sigma, Marvin Jackson, and several other members of the fraternity, alleging claims of vicarious liability, negligence (of varying degrees), res ipsa loquitur, wrongful death, and survival.³³ Most unique about the plaintiffs' complaint is that it was the first time that a victim's family focused on a BGLO chapter's moniker.³⁴ Throughout the amended petition, the plaintiffs underscored that their son had been killed by the "Dangerous Delta Theta Chapter."³⁵ The Wades sought $97 million in damages but later elected to settle their lawsuit.³⁶ A final judgment was signed September 1, 2010, by a district court judge in Beaumont.³⁷ On January 21, 2011, a tape surfaced revealing that Marvin Jackson, who had not been indicted by a grand jury for the death despite the university's sanctions against the fraternity, had admitted to the police that he was responsible for Wade's death only two days after the incident had occurred.³⁸

II. AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

BGLOs are organizations with a unique hazing culture. For example, research has shown that the way these organizations use language underscores how hazing is interpreted by their members. In one study, researchers found that BGLO members learn and internalize poems like William Ernest Henley's Invictus and Rudyard Kipling's If during their hazing experience.³⁹ Even more, they interpret these poems as referent to their experience of persevering through their violent hazing experience.⁴⁰ In another study, similar findings were made in the context of hazing victims' creation or learning of chants, songs, and greetings to big brothers and big sisters.⁴¹

To date, scholars have paid little attention to what monikers/nicknames signify or their effect. The limited existing research on the topic suggests that monikers/nicknames can alter others' evaluative judgments of the moniker/nickname holder.⁴² These findings underscore the fact that monikers/nicknames are rarely benign and thus may have an impact on litigation, especially before a jury. Accordingly, we conducted two studies.

A. Study I

In the first study, we sought to ascertain the public accessibility of BGLO monikers and the extent to which some of those monikers may be perceived as "menacing."⁴³ In the fall of 2011, we e-mailed the National Pan-Hellenic Council's⁴⁴ Yahoo group and asked members what monikers they commonly found employed by BGLO chapters.⁴⁵ Members responded with sixty-eight unique monikers.⁴⁶ Similar monikers, such as "deadly" and "death" or "money-making'' and "money," were conflated into one general moniker.⁴⁷ An e-mail was sent to 823 student affairs professionals, who were asked to label each of the sixty-eight words as either "positive" or "negative." Eighty-three individuals responded. With a cutoff of 75% labeling the words as "negative," twenty-six words remained.⁴⁸ The student affairs professionals were also asked to label each of those twenty-six words as being either "associated with violence" or "not associated with violence." With a cutoff of 50% labeling the word as "associated with violence," sixteen words remained.⁴⁹ Using these words, Facebook, Google, and YouTube searches were conducted, employing black fraternity names—Alpha Phi Alpha ("Alpha"), Kappa Alpha Psi ("Kappa"), Omega Psi Phi ("Omega"), Phi Beta Sigma ("Sigma"), and Iota Phi Theta ("lota")—with each of the sixteen monikers.⁵⁰ In essence, these searches provided a crude way to discern which black fraternity chapters market themselves with such monikers. The results are indicated in Table 1.

TABLE 1: MENACING MONIKERS BY FRATERNITY ORGANIZATION

Monikers	Alpha	Kappa	Omega	Sigma	Iota
Bloody	15	5	17	2	1
Death/Deadly	10	0	3	0	0
Evil	3	0	0	0	1
Gangsta/Gangster	2	4	2	1	0
Killa/Killer	2	0	2	0	0
Monster/Monstrous	2	0	0	0	0
Murder	2	0	1	0	0
Vicious	0	0	1	0	0
Total	36	9	26	3	2

While these hits should not be construed as adequately representing how frequently violent-themed monikers are used by black fraternities, those monikers discovered on the Internet are particularly problematic because they highlight the publicly accessible nature of monikers, which may suggest a violent hazing culture within black fraternities.⁵¹

B. Study II

In order to further assess the impact of BGLO monikers, an online survey of 1822 BGLO members was conducted. This survey investigated the relationships between undergraduate chapter monikers and various outcomes, including...