ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the relationship between context and group membership by showing how campus racial climate acts as a catalyst for membership in race-based organizations, like Black fraternities and sororities. Campus racial climate comprises the norms, values, and routines of an institution's environment in regards to race. The chapter also highlights non-Black Black Greek-letter organizations (BGLO) membership as a particular case of a larger shift in racial understandings away from a Black–white racial binary to one dichotomizing whiteness as compared to non-whiteness. Both BGLO outsiders and insiders had responses to non-Black members, which provided respondents with the analytic tools to navigate the larger racial landscape and their place within it. The chapter argues that BGLOs are able to facilitate members' understanding of their place within this shifting racial hierarchy. It discusses the types of boundary enforcement respondents experienced as a result of their color-line crossing.
