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:
“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Parents do not give up their children to strangers lightly. They wait in uncertain anticipation for an expression of awareness and interest in their children that is as genuine as their own. They are subject to ambivalent feelings of trust and competitiveness toward a teacher their child loves and to feelings of resentment and anger when their child suffers at her hands. They place high hopes in their children and struggle with themselves to cope with their children’s failures.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)