Director Byron Hurt uses his own experience as a longstanding member of a member of a Black greek letter fraternity, as the springboard for this wide-ranging interrogation of initiation rituals on college campuses. He reveals a raft of largely secret rituals that routinely humiliate and degrade pledges in their quest for a sense of belonging, rites that have ended in scores of deaths on college campuses and lifelong scars for many. Survivors describe the cruelty woven through the rituals they endured, and the difficult decisions of some initiates who choose to walk away. Hurt does not spare himself in this moment of reckoning, interviewing a fraternity brother whom he hazed, despite Hurt’s initial aversion, when it was his turn. We hear from grieving family members of pledges whose hazing cost them their lives, left to seek justice and accountability for their children.

Hurt shows how hazing is shaped by culture. He finds that in white fraternities, the trial often revolves around dangerous levels of alcohol consumption, while in Black fraternities the punishments are more physical and psychological. Sororities, Black and white, tend more toward “mean girl” humiliations, put downs, and sexual degradation.

So why does hazing persist despite the excesses and the outrage? Hurt examines the invisible ties that relegate serious injury and death by hazing to one-off accidents, and that keep campuses across the country from exercising meaningful oversight or reining in fraternities and sororities as a matter of policy.

Screening followed by a talkback with director Byron Hurt and Natalie Bullock-Brown. Moderated by Leslie Fields-Cruz, executive director of Black Public Media.