The ascension of the first black president, second-year athletic training student Tim Bryson, to the Fraternity Council shouldn’t have been a big deal, despite its implications for the future of fraternities at USC.
Like most things that should have happened a long time ago, the fact that it’s taken so many decades for a black person to become president is more of our reflection of our past failures than the achievement at hand.
It's hard to overwhelmingly praise something that always should have been the case.
But the election of Bryson is also an institutional development as well as a social one. Bryson was also the first member of the National Pan-Hellenic Council to achieve that position.
Before his election Monday, the only presidents of Fraternity Council came from the overwhelmingly white Interfraternity Council.
The election of a non-IFC president might have more lasting implications than electing a nonwhite president. Now that a group overseeing overwhelmingly black fraternities has unprecedented standing, perhaps there will be progress in equalizing the discrepancies between white and black fraternities.
While Bryson’s election shows that change can occur to some extent, it doesn’t mean that further change is guaranteed. That, again, depends on Bryson’s future leadership, as well as those who follow him.
That's because USC still has overwhelming black Greek organizations and white Greek organizations, basically. There are a few exceptions to the rule, but the relatively small number of white people in black sororities and vice versa only serve to make the general separation more visible.
Don’t get us wrong: compared to some other schools, we’re doing better in terms of general diversity. Even so, we’re still leagues away from having a truly multicultural Greek environment.
We don’t expect this issue to be solved in one calendar year (the length of a Fraternity Council president’s tenure) — it would be infeasible to think that such a radical shift in priorities would happen so soon.
But now that a non-IFC member is president of the Fraternity Council, perhaps there will be more scrutiny in terms of how fraternities handle future recruiting.
It would be a small step, but, then again, progress of this kind is often a series of small steps. We hope Bryson's election is the first of many.