Kappa Alpha Order should not be allowed to recolonize given its racist ties

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Amid a national reckoning on racial injustice in the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery (among many others), protests and increased support for the Black Lives Matter movement, colleges and governments have moved to confront anti-Blackness and systemic racism. 

President Carol Folt, in a May 31 email, called on the Trojan community to embrace a culture of respect for all. Weeks later, in an Instagram post on June 17, Kappa Alpha Order — a fraternity with a deeply racist legacy — announced that it would return back to USC after many years of hiatus and seek to reestablish itself throughout Fall 2020 and Spring 2021.

Greek life at USC and throughout the nation has recently come under fire. Instagram accounts such as @black_at_usc and @abolishgreekusc have served as platforms to elevate student voices and experiences with discrimination and racism in Greek life. For IFC and Fraternity & Sorority Leadership Development to allow for Kappa Alpha Order’s recolonization despite its racist ties signals a lack of sensitivity to the social movements that have come to define 2020 and an indifference to implementing efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Nationally, Kappa Alpha has a deeply troubling history. The fraternity claims Robert E. Lee as its spiritual founder due to his religious convictions and gentlemanly conduct while president of Washington and Lee University. Elevating Lee in this manner mirrors the negationist ideology of the Lost Cause and whitewashes the Confederate cause as a noble one. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy perpetuates a revisionist ideology of the Civil War that argues it was not primarily about slavery, glamorizes Lee and other generals as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry and romanticizes a particular southern way of life.

Kappa Alpha chooses to ignore Lee’s role in defending the supposed authority of the South to own human beings as property as well as his betrayal of his country in defending that institution. It reduces the sum of human virtue to a fetishization of decorum and gentlemanlike conduct. 

However, the racist legacy of Kappa Alpha goes far deeper than Lee. In 1922, Samuel Zenas Ammen, the “practical founder” of the fraternity, wrote that the Ku Klux Klan and Kappa Alpha were founded upon “reactions against the same evils” — four years before the fraternity first came to USC. The insignia of “KA” is also based on an antebellum fraternity that would ultimately come to serve as an inspiration for the name and ritual of the KKK, while chapters across the country also referred to themselves as “Klans” until at least the 1950s.

More recently, the national organization of Kappa Alpha suspended a chapter at Southwestern University in Texas for formally denouncing Lee and the Confederacy, indicating that the national organization of Kappa Alpha Order has no intention to reconcile its racist past. Instead, the organization seeks to uphold racist power structures by glorifying an old-time, supposedly southern way of life that is built directly upon this country’s legacy of racism. Despite everything, Kappa Alpha is doing this all in 2020, right when America is experiencing a long overdue awakening to systemic racism. It seems that the national organization of Kappa Alpha is not. 

By no means is Kappa Alpha alone in the fraternity world when it comes to championing Confederate leaders. Kappa Sigma, another fraternity at USC, identifies Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States, as its only honorary member, even though the fraternity was founded after the fall of the Confederacy. 

Regardless, Kappa Alpha maintains a deeply problematic history that USC, FSLD and the IFC must not feign ignorance toward. The very existence of Kappa Alpha Order is inherently and necessarily tied to white-nationalist racism in tune with the Lost Cause ideology. 

Allowing back on the University’s campus a fraternity that idolizes Lee, helped shape the KKK and is founded upon a belief in the Lost Cause of the Confederacy would enable the perpetuation of historically racist organizations at this institution. So long as entities like Kappa Alpha Order are allowed to remain on — or return to — our campus, Folt’s anti-racist efforts will inevitably fall short and amount merely to corrective memos and apologies in order to avoid controversy. 

Given that formal recruitment for fraternities begins on Friday, Aug. 21, it is imperative that IFC, FSLD and USC take immediate, concerted action to reject the reestablishment of this fraternity and reevaluate their commitment to efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion.