Browsing by Subject "Race"

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A cosmovisão africana sobre a morte nas telas de Jean Baptiste Debret
(2009-02-07) Loreno Castro, Silvia
"A great army of instruction" : American teachers and the negotiation of empire in the Philippines
(2013-05) Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah Katherine; Green, Laurie B. (Laurie Beth); Brands, H.W.; Bsumek, Erika; Abzug, Robert; Levine, Philippa; Kramer, Paul A
In the summer of 1901, the United States government began a project of colonial education in the Philippines, sending close to one thousand teachers to the newly-acquired colony. These teachers, called “Thomasites,” were part of a wider justification of empire, which was intimately linked with notions of manly duty, masculine endeavor, and the innate superiority of whiteness. However, all of the American teachers headed for the Philippines, male and female, black and white, engaged with the idea of strenuous living and imperial duty, viewing themselves as personally adventurous, as well as integral members of the imperial project. More so than any other group, these teachers were positioned between the colonial administration and the Filipino people. It was the teachers who were often responsible for implementing colonial policies on the ground and for representing American government and values to Filipinos. Their position as imperial mediators allowed the teachers to create roles for themselves that would not have been possible at home, which both complemented and challenged official visions of empire. Examining these teachers’ negotiations with American officials and Filipinos illuminates the gulf between official policies and the day to day functioning of empire, demonstrating how the implementation of empire on the ground often deviated from the expectations of the colonial state. Rather than construing their experiences as expressions of maternalism – which many scholars argue was the linchpin of women’s Progressive Era politics – white female teachers in the Philippines constructed identities as adventurers, imperial officials and professionals. African American teachers, on the other hand, used their positions within empire to disrupt the linking of civilization and modernity with whiteness. Black teachers argued that their racial sympathy with the Filipino people made them most fit to be benevolent colonizers, and linked racial oppression in the United States to the imperial mission in the Philippines. This dissertation examines how notions of race, gender, and national identity colored quotidian colonial interactions. I argue that these interactions nuance the narrative of American empire and provide deeper understanding of the processes of colonization.
A moral psychological primary source analysis of Brown v. Board of Education
(2017-12-06) Hardee, Benjamin Dawson; Jacobsohn, Gary J., 1946-; Powe, Lucas; Perry, HW; Gawronski, Bertram
This work applies the social intuitionist psychological model of moral judgment to explain the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision-making process. Based on an examination of the available Brown primary source material–––conference notes, interchamber and private memoranda, missives to private individuals, written brainstorms, and clerk recollections–––this work argues that most of the justices’ decision-making in Brown is captured by the model and associated psychological phenomena. The analysis clarifies Brown’s constitutional holding and the nature of the constitutional violation and harm the justices intended to proscribe. The work concludes that Brown has a consequentialist, not a deontological or colorblind, provenance and purpose.
Academic and social influences of underrepresented adolescents' perceptions of opportunity and plans for the future
(2016-08) Kyte, Sarah Blanchard; Riegle-Crumb, Catherine; Callahan, Rebecca M; Crosnoe, Robert; Muller, Chandra; Raley, Kelly
Sociologists of education have long stressed the importance of students’ expectations for their subsequent success. Yet, an insufficient amount of previous work has considered how academic and social psychological factors guide when and how students develop their expectations for the future, particularly for the socioeconomically disadvantaged and minority students attending our cities’ schools. By using rich survey and administrative data from a large, urban district serving low income and predominantly Hispanic and African American students, this dissertation identifies how these students develop expectations related to higher education in general as well as science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in particular at the start of high school. Chapter 2 examines whether Hispanic girls hold higher college expectations than Hispanic boys because they acquire a superior toolkit of academic resources including achievement, attitudes, and relationships, and/or whether girls are better able to leverage these resources. Further, it considers the potentially gendered role of nativity, language-minority, and socioeconomic status in shaping college expectations among Hispanic students. Chapter 3 analyzes how students’ perceptions of the relevance of science outside of school contribute to gender differences in expectations to major in specific areas of STEM, namely the biological and physical sciences as compared with computer science and engineering. Chapter 4 unpacks the extent to which minority students expecting to major in STEM anticipate that gender- or race-based discrimination may act as a barrier to their goals. Taken together, the findings of these studies underscore the importance of perceptions related to schools, society, and opportunity at the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity for guiding students’ expectations, an important precursor to subsequent behavior and success.
Addressing the "Elephant" in the room: exploring race and social justice in the early childhood years
(2016-08) Holmes, Kathlene Alysia; Brown, Anthony L. (Associate professor); Brown, Keffrelyn D.; Salinas, Cinthia; Adair, Jennifer K; Price-Dennis, Detra
This critical case study examined young elementary students’ understandings of race as they participated in an interdisciplinary Social Studies and English Language Arts unit in two kindergarten classrooms and one first grade classroom in two urban regions of the United States. The study utilized the principles of Critical Race Theory, Social Education, and Social Justice to analyze the young elementary-aged students’ thought-processes on race. By implementing an interdisciplinary unit on counter-narrative stories about the past and present experiences of communities of color, the students were also able to examine the impact of race through multiple perspectives. There were distinct differences in classroom teachers’ years of experience, their comfort level in addressing contentious topics such as race and racism, as well as their approaches to deconstructing complex information to their young students. This study also included an in-depth review of the teachers’ thoughts on race and their rationale for teaching their students about it. While the curriculum, lessons, and materials presented in each of the classrooms were slightly different, the common theme of developing a strong sense of community emerged in all three classrooms. Each teacher discussed that, as a result of presenting the students with lessons focused on all different communities of color and their historical fight for equity, a stronger bond formed in their kindergarten or first grade classroom. Considering the curriculum, lessons, and materials all addressed how race and racism impacts different communities, this study presents the conversations that could occur when teachers begin to hold explicit conversations about race with young elementary-aged children.
Affirmative action in Brazil : affirmation or denial?
(2012-12) Torres, Dalila Noleto; Hooker, Juliet
Affirmative action for blacks has been implemented in recent years mainly as racial quota system at public universities in Brazil. The topic became nationally debated when the racial quota system of the University of Brasilia was adopted. Racial quotas were questioned in the Brazilian Supreme Court with the argument that they were unconstitutional. At the same time, the previous governments has been favorable of inclusive policies and extended the scope of affirmative action adoption. However, why the conservative reaction to racial quotas continued to socially and institutionally expand in spite of their implementation in many universities? The focus of this thesis was to frame these reactions in an institutional perspective by hypothesizing in this research that institutional racism could be addressed as non-recognition of black Brazilians as full subjects of rights considering their identity fragmentation due to the processes of racial formation that undermined racial solidarity, identification, and political participation through miscegenation. In order to investigate the identity framing of institutional racism, the racial quotas system at the University of Brasilia was chosen for policy process analysis. The Advocacy Coalition Framework was the choice of analysis because it permits to observe the policy process since the discussions that aimed to insert the problem of black exclusion in the higher education subsystem to the evaluation of policy implementation based on the approved documents to the broad implications considering the scope of actions from those who shared the beliefs by which coalitions are motivated to act. The results point to the maintenance of racial democracy in the coalition actors’ beliefs that affirm the non-existence of race, the impossibility of black identity, and advocate for the no-racist character of Brazilian identity due to its population racial mixing. Therefore, the hypothesis presented indications of being politically relevant since this research found indications that institutional racism can be framed as non-recognition of black identity by those responsible for its implementation, consciously or not led by individuals through the institutional gaps that do not present any mechanism of coercion or reward for managers to be interested in the full development of affirmative action.
Afropolitan projects : creating community, identity, and belonging
(2017-05) Adjepong, Anima; Carrington, Ben, 1972-; Falola, Oloruntoyin; Gonzalez-Lopez, Gloria; Pierre, Jemima; Rodríguez, Néstor
Despite a dramatic growth in the numbers of African immigrants to the United States, until recently, this population has been marginal in studies about voluntary migration and race. Likewise, in mainstream scholarship about black identities, Africa appears as a site of imagination and struggle whilst contemporary Africans are frozen in an unchanging, parochial age. My dissertation addresses the marginalization of Africa and Africans in both race and migration studies through an ethnographic case study of a community of Ghanaians in Houston, Texas. The research considers how questions of religion, race, class, and sexual politics shape the community’s boundaries of belonging. I explore how answers to these questions inform members’ relationship with Ghana, Africa, Houston, and the United States more generally. The ways in which the community addresses these issues are part of what I call its Afropolitan projects, which advance a modern non-victimized narrative about Ghana and Africa more generally, and sustain the community’s identity as progressive, modern Ghanaians. By outlining the contours of one community’s Afropolitan projects, my research offers an urgent contribution to understanding contemporary African and black identities. The dissertation argues that within the intentionally curated community of Ghanaians in Houston, members engage Christianity, sexual and racial politics, and class respectability to claim their place in the United States and to a culturally complex and cosmopolitan Ghanaian/African identity. These practices of belonging are produced through community members’ experiences as Christians, postcolonial Africans, and American residents and citizens. My analysis reveals how this particular Afropolitan project complicates possibilities for the community to find solidarity with working class and queer black/African people and instead aligns itself with heterosexual respectability and middle-class progress. By examining this black/African community formation through a theoretical lens that complicates flattened conceptualizations of community, this project proposes new ways of building solidarities across difference within the black diaspora.
“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around” : learning about race in the early grades
(2020-06-22) Falkner, Anna Christine; Adair, Jennifer Keys; Payne, Katherina A.; Salinas, Cynthia; Brown, Anthony L; Smith, Christen A
Young Children of Color in the United States are experiencing the effects of racism on a daily basis. There have been calls for anti-bias and anti-racist education across the field of education, yet most recommendations are based on older students or studies in laboratory settings. In this ethnographic study of two early childhood classrooms, children used diverse strategies to learn about race, racism, and difference across the school day. Children explored individual and collective racialized identities, investigated the role of race in the lives of children across time, and applied theories of justice to ideas about race. Their strategies were nuanced, embodied, and socio-historically and socio-culturally influenced. Teachers supported children’s inquiry by valuing and extending their learning and ideas. Findings suggest racial pedagogy should support students’ racial inquiry by acknowledging what they already experience, do, and wonder about race.
American male fantasies and the articulation of Slavic women’s bodies and sexualities in American popular culture : a study of feature and gonzo pornography
(2018-12) Switala, Rebekah Lucille; Campbell, Craig, Ph. D.; Heinzelman, Susan Sage
This thesis examines representations and perceptions of Slavic women and sexuality in American popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present, including contemporary feature and gonzo pornography. I argue that since the late 18th century, the U.S. has racialized and sexualized Slavic women’s bodies, specifically marking the Slavic body as ‘off-white’ with a ‘deviant’ sexuality, rather than as ‘fully white’ with a ‘pure’ sexuality. In both feature and gonzo pornography, which I argue to be distinct styles of pornography, this is articulated through emphasis being placed on the economic and cultural privilege and sexual prowess of white, Western, heteromasculine identity over Slavic women. However, gonzo pornography’s technical uses of the camera and reliance on improvisation create a participatory rather than strictly voyeuristic gaze for the spectator, opening some possibilities for Slavic women to reclaim and rearticulate both American and Soviet stereotypes and silences about their bodies and sexualities
An analysis of the racial geography of Austin Police Department traffic stops in 2020
(2023-04-26) Mejia, Matthew; Karner, Alex; Solis, Miriam
The City of Austin collects and compiles data on Austin Police Department (APD) traffic stops annually. In early 2021, they released the data for 2020 APD traffic stops. This report adapts contemporary research methods to analyze this dataset with an aim of discerning whether and to what degree racial bias occurred throughout the city. Largely a spatial analysis, key findings point to East Austin’s historic areas of racial segregation—now areas of recent gentrification—as primary districts for disparate police traffic stop outcomes, though Black and Hispanic/Latino drivers were also found to be overrepresented in stops and searches across most of the city. This report concludes with a set of nine recommendations, first among them for Austin voters: vote “yes” for Proposition A and “no” for Proposition B on Austin’s May 6, 2023, ballot.
Antiracist pedagogy in the elementary literacy classroom : talking about race and racism across one school year
(2021-06-22) Daly-Lesch, Anne Colleen; Maloch, Beth; Awad , Germine H.; Brown, Keffrelyn D.; Dávila , Denise; Worthy , Jo
This study explores how two elementary teachers, one of whom identifies as multiracial and the other as white, enact antiracist pedagogy by talking about race and racism when teaching literacy. This study also examines how fourth-grade students participate in race-based discussions across one academic school year. The literature suggests that facilitating conversations about race presents pedagogical challenges for many teachers, and that students need multiple opportunities to develop racial literacy. Drawing on critical theories of race and discourse, this study offers a contextualized account of how teachers and students sustain race-based discussions over time. The following research questions guided this study: 1) How do teachers facilitate conversations about race and racism?, and 2) How do students participate in discussions about race and racism? The qualitative, multiple case study took place in two elementary schools, one that served a working class, Latinx community, and one that served an affluent suburban neighborhood of predominantly South Asian and white families. Using an ethnographic approach, data collection took place across the 2019-2020 school year, and data sources included: video and audio recordings, fieldnotes of classroom conversations about race, semi-structured interviews with teachers and students, and artifacts related to literature and discussions about race and racism. 35 conversations from both classrooms were selected for further analysis to examine how teachers and students co-constructed meaning about race through ongoing discussion and interactions. To address the first research question, analysis indicated that the teachers integrated conversations about race and racism into their regular literacy instruction and used a number of pedagogical and discursive practices I refer to as race talk moves to navigate tensions and sustain racial dialogue over time. To address the second research question, analysis indicated that students continuously practiced racial literacy within a classroom community and that shifts occurred in students’ language and literacy practices regarding race. This study and its findings suggest that antiracist pedagogy can be realized in the elementary literacy classroom through everyday conversations about race to support young students’ racial literacy development over time.
Archiv für Rassenbilder 16 = Archivkarte 151-160. Grundzüge der Erblichkeitslehre
(1927) Fetscher, Rainer
Articulating race on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast
(2017-05-05) Herrera, Francisco Jose, Jr.; Hooker, Juliet
Mestizos have lived on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast since at least 1894 and been the majority group since at least 1981. However, Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast is frequently imagined as a predominantly black and indigenous space. As renewed interest in mega-development projects, such as the trans-oceanic canal, bring attention to Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, questions about the autonomy of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities are raised once again. Moreover, as mestizos continue to migrate from the Pacific and central regions of the country towards the Caribbean coast territories, violence has escalated as they attempt to claim lands that have been constitutionally recognized as collectively owned by Afro-descendant and indigenous communities of the Caribbean coast territories. Recently, mestizos on the Caribbean coast have begun to express a racial identity, as “mestizos costeños.” This thesis explores the emergence of this racial articulation by drawing on Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation to analyze the discourses produced about mestizo costeño history and identity in Bluefields, Nicaragua. Using in-depth interviews and participant observation, this thesis examines the discursive elements that mestizos costeños link together to produce these discourses. The thesis argues that to understand how mestizos costeños fit into regional and national politics, we must explore the political work that the discursive linkages do in the articulations they produce. To that end, this thesis examines these articulations and situates them in the context of local, regional, and national politics to gain a broader understanding of the implications of the discourse of mestizo costeño identity for racial politics in Bluefields and the Caribbean coast. The thesis concludes by examining what the case of mestizos costeños in Bluefields has to offer towards understanding the contributions of identity politics to liberalism by considering the ideas of Charles Mills and Creole community leaders from Bluefields
Atomic memory : theorizing post-racial memory and trauma in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
(2012-12) Shaw, Vivian Giboung; Carrington, Ben, 1972-; Bos, Pascale
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, established in 1955, remains the primary site for recuperating and transforming memories of the atomic bombing into a message for global peace. Within the museum’s transcendental politics, American and European visitors are a key presence, evident in the site’s 1994 renovation adding historical context for the bombings, its design as a bilingual space using both Japanese and English, and in its refusal to criticize the United States for their use of the bomb. However, what remains excluded from this global view is a discussion of race, a critical dimension of U.S.-Japanese relations and Pacific Rim colonialism during and after World War II. This thesis utilizes scholarship on cultural memory and cultural trauma to interrogate how the museum has been constructed as a site of post-racial politics. In examining the mechanics of this space, this thesis focuses on the “objects” that the museum describes as “material witnesses,” to interrogate the historical links between Orientalism and cultural trauma. Through a theoretical development of my fieldwork in Hiroshima in 2011, analysis of the space, and relevant literature, I argue that the gaze of Western tourism is fundamental in the construction of Hiroshima as a global, peaceful, and post-racial experience for museum visitors.
Banking White Supremacy: A Comparative Evaluation of Racism in Brazilian and United States Education Systems in the Twenty-First Century
(2008-02-09) Kennedy, Elizabeth
Barbra O. Interview
(2022-08-02) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious Studies
This interview is with Barbra O., a master’s student in Milan, Italy who was born in Nigeria and grew up in Texas. She details navigating life as an immigrant child and the experiences that shaped her perception of community and self. She describes cultural connections, such as memories of food and family. Barbra compares her experiences in Texas with her life now in Italy.
Between practice and the classroom : the making of masculinity and race in the mis-education of Black male student-athletes on a college campus
(2012-05) Yearwood, Gabby M. H.; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Franklin, Maria; Richardson, Matt; Smith, Christen; Vargas, João
This project argues that American college sports involving Black male athletes (primarily football and men’s basketball) at Gulf Coast State University (GCSU) actively construct and impact local knowledge about Black masculinity in relation to white, male, hetero-normative systems of authority. These sports, in turn, then impact policy, administrative decisions, and teaching approaches as they relate to young Black men on a college campus. In other words, Black male college athletes on a white college campus offer the opportunity for a reinforcement of systems of authority through the pattern of de-stabilizing their subjectivity (as nothing more than physical entities) in order to provide a revenue-generating resource for the university. I posit that the positioning of Black males in this space as athletes and as students is strategic and intentional, when one takes into account the ongoing dynamic of the hegemonic positioning of white, male, hetero-normative value systems as the unmarked standard of social norms. That these contested meanings become significant within the realm of sport situates sport itself as another, often underutilized, space for social inquiry. I further argue that this categorization is heightened in the context of a predominantly white institution. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explored the sport (mainly football and men’s basketball) and academic community at GCSU with the goal of understanding how high-profile and high-revenue sports and their participants become central to the understanding and expression of normalized ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. I reason that the predominantly white demography of GCSU, added to the uneven ratio of Black to white males on the football and basketball teams, creates perceptions about race and masculinity that factor into people’s everyday understanding of the term “student-athlete”. The term “student-athlete” becomes racialized and gendered in ways that continually make reference to Black male athletes differently than other students and student-athletes at the university. I believe these effects on the term then impacts the structural mechanisms that affect the daily lives of these Black male athletes both on and off the field, both inside and outside the classroom.
Beyond resistance : transgressive white racial knowledge and its limits
(2014-05) Crowley, Ryan M; Brown, Anthony L. (Associate professor)
This critical case study investigated the experiences of ten White preservice social studies and language arts teachers as they learned about race and racism during the first semester of an urban-focused teacher preparation program. Through observation, interview, and artifact data, this inquiry analyzed how the preservice teachers engaged with the topic of race through the conceptual framework of critical Whiteness studies. This theoretical lens seeks to identify the normalized, oppressive practices of Whiteness with the goal of reorienting those practices in antiracist ways. The author identified two broad themes of transgressive White racial knowledge and conventional White racial knowledge to characterize the progressive and problematic aspects, respectively, of the preservice teachers’ engagement with race. The participants displayed transgressive White racial knowledge through the way they combatted deficit thinking toward urban students and through their knowledge of the mechanics of Whiteness and structural racism. They displayed conventional White racial knowledge through their stories of early experiences with racial difference, their use of subtle resistance discourses during race conversations, and their tendency to misappropriate critical racial discourses. As a whole, the racial knowledge of the ten White preservice teachers points to conflicted, ambivalent feelings at the core of their racial identities. Their desires to talk about race and to develop an antiracist teaching practice were mediated by competing desires to maintain their identities as “good Whites” and to protect their investments in Whiteness. The complex ways that these White preservice teachers engaged with critical racial discourses have significant implications for critical Whiteness studies, teacher education, and social studies education. Their willingness to explore race in a critical fashion should push teacher educators to resist homogenizing, deficit views of the antiracist potential of White teachers. However, their problematic engagement with race points to the importance of viewing White identity as conflicted. If antiracist pedagogies begin with this understanding of White racial identity, they can encourage profound shifts in the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of Whiteness. These shifts can help White teachers to develop racial literacy and to build an antiracist teaching practice.
Black and white : does race matter for health outcomes among Hispanics?
(2012-05) Chinn, Juanita Jeanne; Hummer, Robert A.
Heterogeneity within the Hispanic population in the United States (US) has important implications for health. Despite the empirical work examining heterogeneity in Hispanic health and mortality by nativity, generational status, and country of origin, relatively little research has been devoted to understanding if and how racial identification impacts Hispanic health outcomes. Racial differences in health and mortality are well documented throughout the literature, particularly for non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic whites. Meanwhile, current socio-demographic and health literature commonly compares US non-Hispanic racial groups with people who claim Hispanic ethnicity, the latter of whom are comprised of multiple racial groups. Thus, this dissertation examines the racial heterogeneity of the Hispanic population and the implications of race for physical health among Hispanics. Using the National Health Interview Survey and the National Centers for Health Statistics Linked Birth/Infant Death Cohort Files, the key findings of this dissertation are (1) racial identity is associated with socioeconomic status among Hispanics, (2) infants born to Hispanic black mothers displayed statistically significant higher odds of being born with low birth weight when compared to infants born to Hispanic white mothers, (3) there is evidence of weathering in the infant health of Hispanics, as measured using birth weight, (4) black-white disparities in the risk of infant mortality exist within the Hispanic population, (5) both Hispanic blacks and those of other races have greater odds of functional limitations than Hispanic whites and for Hispanic blacks; moreover, this disadvantage increases with age, (6) I show no race differences in the odds of hypertension or poorly self-assessed health status. In short, the results of this dissertation suggest that the social experience for Hispanic blacks and whites is different and that this difference affects health outcomes. It is imperative that future research and health policy recognize the racial heterogeneity of this population, in both empirical analyses and policy decisions regarding social influences on physical health.
Black Immigrants in the United States and the “Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity
(Identities, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2004) Pierre, Jemima