Cultural interest fraternities and sororities, in the North American student fraternity and sorority system, refer to general or social organizations oriented to students having a special interest in a culture or cultural identity.
Although racial and religious restrictions have long since been abolished in all North-American Interfraternity Conference and National Panhellenic Conference organizations, their memberships nationally remain predominantly Caucasian, and National Pan-Hellenic Council memberships predominantly African American. The new generation of "cultural interest" organizations has arisen to serve the interests of communities whose numbers in the traditional Greek system are historically small and dispersed.
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or interest:
“If we can learn ... to look at the ways in which various groups appropriate and use the mass-produced art of our culture ... we may well begin to understand that although the ideological power of contemporary cultural forms is enormous, indeed sometimes even frightening, that power is not yet all-pervasive, totally vigilant, or complete.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)
“Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)