Intangible Harm: How African American Female Students at a Predominantly White Christian Institution Negotiate Their Image

Buck, Gail F Biola University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

Although research has been conducted on African American female students and their identity at predominantly White institutions, little study has been conducted on African American female students at predominantly White Christian institutions (PWCI). PWCI is a phrase I coined in which the White race encompasses a strong presence in comparison to other racial or ethnic groups. The predominance stems from more than the number of White students but also includes cultural and social influences, curriculum,pedagogy, and overall campus environment on Christian higher education campuses. Furthermore, although research has been conducted on how African American women negotiate their image to fit a majority white culture, there has been little research exploring how African American female undergraduate students at a PWCI negotiate their image. A narrative approach was utilized to explore and understand the experiences of African American female students. The purpose of this narrative research study is to understand how African American/Black female undergraduate students at a PWCI negotiate their image. For the purposes of this study, PWCI refers to an institution in which Whites account for close to 50% of the student enrollment. In this case, the institution of study’s enrollment in 2018 was 46% White and 2% African American/Black (“Field” University, 2018-2019). I collected data by means of semi-structured interviews with eleven African American female students ranging from freshmen to seniors in an undergraduate program at a PWCI. Participants were recruited/invited to participate via email sent by the Chief Diversity Officer at the University. The findings may serve as a model or develop strategies for those who intentionally interact and are responsible for guiding and engaging with African American female students on a university campus where there is a dominant homogeneous environment. Furthermore, this study is significant and imperative to the retention of African American female students and a PWCI’s consideration in hiring faculty and staff with whom this group may identify.

The Call-and-Response of History: Rhetorical and Literate Social Practices of Healing, Re-Education, and Reclaiming Black Humanity Among African Americans in Ghana

Iddrisu, Mohammed Sakip Arizona State University ProQuest Dissertations & 2024 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation is about African Americans' transnational rhetorical and literate social practices of reclaiming Black humanity. To this end, it asks: How is the humanity of African Americans rhetorically constituted in relation to Ghana? To reclaim Black humanity, what do African Americans do down the ground and to what end? For those who turn to Ghana to reclaim their humanity, what do they say they need to learn, and need to unlearn in the process of re-education? What does this re-education make possible? Where do they locate (if any) healing in this process of re-education?Currently, people, including those of African descent, are moving across transnational borders at a rate never seen before. In response, scholars in transnational rhetorical studies such as Rebecca Dingo and Blake Scott have challenged the field to account for the workings of "vectors of power" - colonial histories, nation-state power, and the operations of global capital-in people's lives (Dingo and Blake 524). In relation to such movement among people of African descent, leaders in Global Black Rhetorics, Ronisha Browdy and Esther Milu, direct special attention to matters of healing, re-education, and the reclamation of Black humanity. Given its own experiences of brutal colonial histories of chattel slavery, resource exploitation, and current economic challenges, the nation-state of Ghana has become a contested transnational site to theorize African Americans' inventive practices of negotiating these globalized forces which continue to dehumanize them in multiple ways.Heeding the call of cultural icons including W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou to "return home" to Ghana, the participants in this study enact everyday rhetorical and literate social practices such as taking Indigenous Ghanaian names, wearing Indigenous clothing, and engaging in somatic practices at contested historic sites. This dissertation has sought to honor these difficult and yet necessary rhetorical and literate social practices that African Americans deploy on-the-ground in Ghana to achieve their purposes of making a homeplace conducive for their humanity, honoring their ancestral heritage, re-educating themselves, and healing from epistemic and ontological harm as feats towards reclaiming Black humanity. In honoring these rhetorical and literate social practices of African Americans returning home to Ghana, I invoked bell hooks' concept of homeplace and African philosophical and epistemic concepts of Ubuntu relationality and Sankofa. And yet the call to return home is not without its challenges-challenges that underscore the contributions of participatory rhetorical research in such transnationally complex domains.

The academic and psychological functioning of African American adolescents: What matters most?

Palmer, Danielle Renae Michigan State University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between individual risk factors, school environmental stressors/supports, and identity development and later academic and psychological functioning of African American adolescents. The model was developed using a modified version of the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory model. More specifically, this study explored the role of early experiences of teacher support and the school's racial/ethnic context on later academic engagement and psychological outcomes of African American adolescents. The study also investigated how risk factors among this population (e.g., gender and age) and protective factors (e.g., ethnic identity) were related to teacher support and outcomes (e.g. academic engagement, depression, and aggressive behavior). Initial data analysis was performed to establish differences in outcome variables between African American and European American students in the sample. The full sample consisted of 1,518 adolescents (16.0% African American and 84.0% European American). Results indicated significant gender and ethnic group differences on measures of ethnic identity and aggressive behaviors, and significant gender differences in depression and academic engagement. In a sub-sample of African-American adolescents (n=243), the racial/ethnic context did not significantly predict later academic engagement, depression, or aggressive behaviors, suggesting that being in a school with a homogenous African American population or European American population was not correlated with engagement or psychological functioning. Findings did suggest, however, that personal characteristics such as gender and age, predicted future outcomes. Students' perceptions of teacher support, however, had the greatest effect on academic engagement and aggression. Students who perceived greater support from their teachers engaged more in school and in fewer aggressive behaviors. Furthermore, results indicated that the development of a positive ethnic identity is important for later academic engagement among this population, particularly for African American males, but it did not mediate the relationship between stressors in the school environment and student outcomes. Continued research is warranted to explore the role of school contextual factors and outcomes for African American adolescents to better support the academic achievement of this population.

Triangulating Race: The Native Presence in Early African American Literature

Stutz, Kate Steinnagel The University of Wisconsin - Madison 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

"Triangulating Race" revises the African American literary tradition through an examination of the native in early African American literature. Recovering these understudied texts and examining them as an archive reveals that the native has been a foundational and recurrent figure in African American literature. The triangulation of Euro-American, Native American, and African American identities enabled African American writers to circumvent the binarism of race in America. The first chapter uses eighteenth century environmental explanations of human difference to revise current scholarship on the African American captivity narrative. Lucy Terry's "Bars Fight" (1746), Briton Hammon's Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings (1760), and John Marrant's A Narrative of the Lord's Wonderful Dealings (1785) use the experience of captivity and its resultant triangulation of identities to change the environmental context in which their race is constructed, thereby enabling them to access localized communal belonging. Chapter two considers the ways African Americans used the figure of the native to define themselves collectively and individually during the 1850s. In the first section, I argue that Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Martin Delany, and Josiah Henson strategically use American ethnology generally, and the Native American specifically, to develop their respective visions for African Americans' relationship to the United States. The second section reads two autobiographies in which African Americans are adopted into Native American tribes: Okah Tubbee's A Sketch of the Life (1852) and James Beckwourth's Life and Adventures (1856). By centering their identities in native kinship, Tubbee and Beckwourth challenge normative definitions of racial ontology. Chapter three considers the region as a space that could foster more nuanced, hybrid identity. Albery Allson Whitman's The Rape of Florida (1884) and Pauline Hopkins' Winona (1905) portray Afro-Native communities that cultivate identities rooted in shared culture rather than genealogy. In contrast, Nat Love's Life and Adventures (1907) portrays the west as a region where African Americans can transcend race in opposition to greater national threats. In all three texts, the region is overcome by a national movement, and as such, they critique U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century.

Violating maternity: Servitude, sexual abuse, lynching and the (un)making of the black maternal subject

Frank, Michele Sharon University of Pennsylvania 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation argues that African American women writers have identified the black maternal figure as a primary symbol of black cultural trauma. Through an examination of selected texts from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, I isolate writers' and dramatists' explorations of servitude, sexual abuse and lynching as systemic, historical violations of blackness and womanhood that have shaped black women's maternal experiences. African American women writers' depictions of black women's experience of and resistance to such systemic violations of themselves, their children, and their communities reveal how their traumatized subjectivities defy facile understandings of maternal connection, love and protection. This dissertation argues that the writers' construction of this maternal aesthetic signals an enduring concern with the intergenerational effects of compounded trauma and of black people's sometimes self-wounding efforts simultaneously to contest their violation and affirm their humanity. My dissertation explicates the texts' meanings within the socio-historical contexts of their creation and publication as well as on emphasizing attention to the periods of their representations. From its beginnings, African American literature has engaged both dominant and resistant ideologies of being in, first, the American Colonies and, later, the United States. Authors who have grown out of a markedly marginalized population have negotiated and participated in an artistically expressive tradition---literature---to which they routinely had been denied access and to which it was assumed they had little to contribute. African American literary and cultural criticism and Feminist Studies inform my methodology. While conversing with the theoretical constructs of Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and New Historicism, Feminist and African American critical studies have insisted on modes of inquiry which foreground analyses of class, gender, race and, increasingly, sexuality as interconnected, systemic structures of identity that shape African American lives. These tropes of traumatic violation recur in other African American-authored texts, thereby corroborating my premise that a sustained explication of their representational significance contributes to the scholarly examination of the ways in which the symbolic work of cultural producers shapes our understanding of the formation of black subjectivities.

African American Child and Adolescent Obesity: The Parent's Perspective

Austin, Alice M ProQuest Dissertations & Theses The University of 2017 해외박사(DDOD)

Nearly 36% of African American children ages 2 to 19 are overweight or obese. Childhood obesity results in children with social and psychological disorders, chronic disease, and an increase in morbidity and mortality. Solutions have been offered but none have made a significant impact on African American children living in the Southern United States. Studies that implement life style change produce short-term reductions in African American children but few show life-long change. Parents are responsible for making lifestyle choices for children, it is imperative to understand parental perceptions of child and adolescent obesity and its relationship to lifestyle change. The constructivist paradigm was used to grasps the knowledge of African American's interpretation of their reality, their beliefs and experiences in their environment related to the phenomenon of child and adolescent obesity. A modified ethnographic approach was employed to understand and examine the cultural roots of the phenomena of child and adolescent obesity in African American children. A purposive sample of 15 African American parent/caregivers and 15 of their children, aged 6-19, were recruited from four faith-based facilities. A data form was used to collect the child's actual height, weight and calculated BMI. An interview guide of open-ended questions composed by the researcher was used to facilitate focus group discussions. Recorded interviews were transcribed and reviewed for accurate reflection of the focus group interviews. Field notes, journaling, observations, and transcripts were reviewed observing for themes. The themes were coded based on the interviews, patterns of thought, and behavior expressed by the participants to understand the perception that African American parents have related to child and adolescent obesity. Data were uploaded into NVivo 11 to assist with capturing, organizing, and finalizing analysis of collected data. Final data analysis results revealed themes: false perception, culture and traditions, time and convenience, and expenses. Culture and traditions were found to be very significant to this African American population thus possibly contributing to child and adolescent obesity. Further studies on African Americans, their perceptions and perspectives of child and adolescent obesity will help researchers understand and implement culturally appropriate interventions in this population.

The appointment and conditions of employment for African-American law faculty: Perspectives from inside America's legal academy

Carson, Loftus C., II University of Pennsylvania 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

African-Americans are underrepresented on the faculties of American law schools. Currently, it is estimated that while they make up 12.6% of the U.S. population, only approximately 4% of the tenured faculty members at historically white law schools are African American. Moreover, there is evidence that once appointed to a tenure-track law faculty position, the conditions of employment for African Americans are often problematic. This reality may be indicated by the higher attrition rate and lower tenure rate for them than for white law faculty. Even attainment of tenure by African-American law professors does not guarantee job satisfaction and feelings of equitable treatment. The pioneering Bell-Delgado study of minority law faculty found that a clear majority of the participants described their law school climates as racist (10.4%) or subtly racist (44.3%). Only 12.2% of the participants described their work environments as nonracist. Perhaps not surprisingly, only a minority of the Bell-Delgado participants indicated they were satisfied with their jobs. This study seeks to understand whether tenured African-American law faculty of today perceive problems, challenges, and/or circumstances which, if not unique, are more common for and are more likely to impede African-Americans and other members of minority groups who aspire to careers in the legal academy. Specifically, this study examines perspectives of tenured African-American law faculty with regard to faculty appointment and conditions of employment for members of their group at law schools that have historically had largely, if not exclusively, white faculty and student bodies. This study also examines the perceptions of tenured African-American law faculty members regarding the role that race/racism may play with respect to law faculty appointment for members of their group and conditions of employment thereafter. This study examines, as well, African-American law faculty perspectives regarding potential strategies for addressing problems, challenges, and circumstances, if any, which, if not unique, are more common for them in the legal professoriate. In that connection, the study elicited participants' views on the viability of organizational change, litigation, and strong affirmative action plans for addressing potential impediments to African-American inclusion in American law school faculties.

Fighting for economic stability in a time of uncertainty: African American economic development in Philadelphia 1940--1970

Gammage, Justin T Temple University 2011 해외박사(DDOD)

The central problem that this research seeks to engage is the non-implementation of an Afrocentric movement for African American economic advancement. A wealth of research has explored external and internal factors that cause inequalities in wealth among African Americans and their White counterparts, but there has yet to be an adequate program that addresses African American poverty. The lack of an Afrocentric program has contributed to the formation of African American communities plagued by economic challenges. Social factors such as structural racism, poor educational institutions, generational transfer of poverty, urban removal etc. has had devastating effects on African Americans' opportunities of accumulating wealth. While wealth alone will not solve all issues that face African Americans, addressing economics realities from a social, political, and historical perspective will assist with the current movement for African American economic empowerment and contribute to the economic dimension of the struggle for African liberation. In focusing on economics, this research seeks to contribute to African liberation by providing a detailed Afrocentric historiographical perspective, an empirical analysis of current economic realities, and a model for economic liberation.

German Americans, African Americans, and the construction of racial identity in nineteenth-century St. Louis, 1848-1872

Anderson, Kristen Layne The University of Iowa 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

This study examines the evolution of German American racial attitudes during the nineteenth-century through an investigation of the relationships between German immigrants and African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri. It focuses on how these attitudes changed over time and the role the Civil War and Emancipation played in those changes. The German Americans of St. Louis shifted their position on slavery and the place of African Americans in American society in relation to the needs of their on community. Upon their arrival they quickly adopted American racial ideology and generally accepted the institution of slavery during the 1840s and early 1850s. Once slavery appeared to be a threat to the German population, during the struggles over the settlement of Kansas, Germans began to openly question the wisdom of allowing slavery to spread. Some even supported emancipation, thereby distinguishing themselves from many whites in Missouri. This need to attack slavery to protect their own political and economic interests increasingly led them to question the racial basis of the institution of slavery as well. While they did not for the most part deny the existence of racial difference, antislavery Germans increasingly sympathized with the plight of the enslaved, portraying African Americans as human beings who shared the universal human desire to be free. During the Civil War many St. Louis Germans saw African Americans as potential allies against the Confederacy. After the war, however, native-born whites condemned Germans for their radicalism and Germans, like other white Americans, began to consider more fully what place the African American population would occupy in the post-emancipation world. In part out of fear over the return of pre-war nativism and the ascendance of the Republican Party, they once again closed ranks with other whites against the full citizenship claims of African Americans. Although the most radical Germans continued to argue that African Americans had earned full political rights through their war service, the majority of the German population again deployed the language of American racism to justify denying ex-slaves full citizenship rights and by implication defend their own rights as bonafide citizens in their adopted country.

Teaching African American youth: Learning from the lives of three African American social studies teachers

McBride, Chantee Earl University of Pittsburgh 2010 해외박사(DDOD)

This study examines the life histories of three African American social studies teachers, focusing on the evolution and changes in their identities, perspectives, and attitudes related to their profession and instructional practice. In addition, the study addresses the significance of the teachers' racialized experiences as African Americans and how these experiences influence their use of culturally relevant pedagogy and other culturally responsive instructional strategies to teach their African American students. In the context of this study of three African American social studies teachers, critical race theory is used to acknowledge the teachers' life experiences with racism and the ways in which the teachers combat and address racism and oppressive mainstream educational ideologies, by sharing their counter-stories of experience in educational scholarship and their daily classroom teaching. A life history methodological approach was used to collect and interpret meaning from the narrative life stories of the three African American social studies teachers. The themes that emerge from the teachers' life stories focus on the teachers' beliefs and practices of culturally relevant pedagogy; the teachers' beliefs and practices of African-centered pedagogy; and the teachers' emancipatory teaching regarding racism in society and education. The results of this study have implications for the practice and research of African American teachers' philosophies and pedagogies; practice and research of culturally relevant teaching in social studies; and social studies teacher education.