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Entwined Threads Of Red And Black: The Hidden History Of Indigenous Enslavement In Louisiana, 1699-1824, Leila K. Blackbird

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Contrary to nationalist teleologies, the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice in the territories that now comprise the United States. This thesis is a case study of its history in Louisiana from European contact through the Early American Period, utilizing French Superior Council and Spanish judicial records, Louisiana Supreme Court case files, statistical analysis of slave records, and the synthesis and reinterpretation of existing scholarship. This paper primarily argues that it was through anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and with the utilization of socially constructed racial designations that “Indianness” was controlled and exploited, and that Native Americans …

From La Costa Chica To Pasadena: Transnational Racial Politics Of Afro-Mexicans, Antonio Rodriguez-Santiago

Master's Theses

The ethnographic research in this thesis focuses on one group of Afro-Mexicans who migrated to Pasadena, California, from Mexico’s Costa Chica, on the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca and Guerrero, the area where a social movement for Afro-Mexican recognition and collective rights was founded in 1997. This study, using a framework of racial theory, examines the process of racial formation in a transnational setting, which has made this group different in many ways from the Black residents who remain in the Costa Chica. The study also considers how mestizaje, the Mexican national racial ideology that endorses a mixed-race society while …

Whiteness In Black Spaces: An Extended Case Study Of Historically Black Colleges And Universities, Tiara Giddings

Sociology Theses

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have been noted for their ability to create an environment that fosters black intellectuality, specifically for students who are systematically excluded from white academic spaces. At a time with heightened racism on college campuses, it is important to examine the purpose and significance of HBCUs in today’s perceived post racial society. Utilizing an extended case method, I explore how students at HBCUs discuss their experiences on campus and the extent to which HBCU students conceptualize race and racial events using the white racial frame and black anti-racists counter frames. Semi-structured interviews reveal a coexistence …

En Sus Propias Palabras: Testimonios Of Latinas In Elected And Appointed Office, Andrea Guajardo

Theses & Dissertations

Governance in the United States has been the domain of men since the idea of democracy and independence from England was in its infancy. The systematic oppression and exclusion of persons of color and women was the backdrop upon which the United States was founded. Many continue to experience conflict and struggle in their efforts to gain and maintain civil rights and seek personal and professional experiences free from marginalization and oppression. This purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the lived experiences group of Latinas who have been elected or appointed to public office with an emphasis critical …

Essays On The Factors That Contribute To Body Mass Index, Veronica Salinas

Economics ETDs

Using diet, exercise, consumer behavior, and demographic data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), I examine the factors that contribute to body mass index (BMI) for the adult working age population. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examine how female BMI varies by race and ethnicity. In Chapter 4, I study the effect of food deserts on BMI and obesity for both males and females.

In Chapter 2, I use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to examine the factors that influence female BMI for the adult working age population. Results indicate 12 of the 40 covariates are strongly …

The Impact Of Black Lives Matter Movement Publicity On Juror Decision Making, Emily R. Nerness

MSU Graduate Theses

Others have investigated separately whether general pretrial publicity (PTP) or racial salience have an impact on juror decision making, but no one has explored a potential connection between the two. With information about the Black lives matter (BLM) movement recurring in the media, the question arises of whether news about the BLM movement can increase racial salience, thereby influencing juror decision making. The present research addressed whether 1) exposing participants to pro-BLM or negative-BLM news articles would influence verdicts and guilt ratings when compared to a control group, 2) whether this PTP effect would be different for Black versus White …

From Prison To Homeless Shelter: Camp Laguardia And The Political Economy Of An Urban Infrastructure, Christian D. Siener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At this time of increasing housing insecurity, recent reforms in homeless shelter policy have attracted the attention of scholars and activists. This research sheds light on these changes by placing them in historical and political-geographic perspective, focusing on the role of homeless shelters in stabilizing social displacement by destabilizing solidarity. It demonstrates historical continuity between prisons and homeless shelters in New York City through a case study of conditions surrounding the transition of Camp LaGuardia, a prison that slowly transformed into the city’s largest, and longest lasting, homeless shelter. The case study is an empirical demonstration of some of the …

The Role Of Personality In The Development Of Health Disparities During Late-Mid Life, Juliette Mcclendon Iacovino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: The current study examined race/gender disparities in initial levels and trajectories of self-reported physical and mental health, and health care utilization, as well as the impact of personality and stressful life events on race/gender disparities. We hypothesized that health disparities would remain stable or decrease over time; that at-risk personality traits (e.g., high neuroticism) would have a more robust negative impact on health for black participants; that trust would mediate racial disparities in health; and that personality traits would moderate the association between stressful life events and health trajectories differentially across race/gender. Methods: Analyses utilized the first six waves …

Media Portrayals Of Police-Involved Deaths In U.S. Newspapers, 2013-2016, Jeannice Latoya Louine

Theses and Dissertations

In the past five years, there have been numerous newspaper reports on police-involved deaths (PID) in the U.S, many of which have involved African American males as victims (Shane, Lawson, & Swenson, 2017). Police-involved deaths (PID) is defined as a death of an individual that results from police action (i.e., by firearm, by electroshock weapon [commonly known as a Taser©], or by vehicle). Given the amount of coverage of police-involved deaths, it is important to investigate which PID victims receive the most coverage in U.S. newspapers. This study merges three databases (Fatal Encounters, the Washington Post, and the Guardian) which …

The Connection Between Race And Performance Of Nba Draft Picks, Jeremiah Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the relationship between race and performance in terms of one of the highest forms of efficiency in basketball, field goal percentage, based on college statistics, with regard to draft position, career earnings and NBA win shares.

Dont Feel Touch, Vanessa Jagodinsky

Art and Design Theses

DONT FEEL TOUCH is an art exhibition and thesis that combines sculpture and performance within a single space. The show’s installation consists of three-dimensional art objects, painted panels, and soft sculptures. Each piece emerges from a series of experiential traumas that span from childhood to adulthood. Embodying the behavioral and emotional distress that suspends my journey to autonomy, the forms work together to act as a sculptural foundation for a live performance. The goal of my thesis work is to understand the psychosocial impact of early childhood trauma through instinctual making and performance.

In The Arena: Deep South Racial Threat And Contact, Kurt Hitzeman

Political Science Dissertations

Political Science offers one overarching paradigm of racial attitude formation and development for the South: group conflict and racial threat (Key 1949, Blumer 1958). In contrast, the theory of intergroup contact (Allport 1954) offers an interactionist prescription for alleviating prejudice formation, regardless of cause or nature. Within and outside the South, existing political research has largely discounted or ignored intergroup contact as a viable theoretical contribution. Additionally, the distinctions between prejudices (thoughts) and discrimination (behaviors) have been articulated unartfully. I develop a new structural theory of modern Southern white racism that clearly identifies the key individual-level pillars on which the …

Black On Both Sides: An Examination Of Race And Class In The Ghetto Mecca, Jonathan P. Grant

Sociology Dissertations

ABSTRACT

From Spike Lee’s School Daze to The Real Housewives of Atlanta, mainstream entertainment has portrayed Atlanta as a “black mecca,” largely due to its consortium of black colleges, expansion of minority-owned businesses and growing black middle class. This title is called into question with research showing that Atlanta maintains high levels of poverty and income inequality. While a disproportionate number of blacks in Atlanta and the United States live below the poverty line, 75 percent of blacks in the U.S. report income above the poverty line. However, most research on African Americans emphasizes disadvantaged communities and many stories …

Local Vs. National: How Twitter Reflects News Coverage Of Colin Kaepernick Protests, Jared Paul Joseph

LSU Master's Theses

Local and national media dedicate different levels of coverage to issues depending on its relevancy to their audiences. This study uses news outlets’ social media activity to show that coverage discrepancies occurred with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem protest. Because his protest reached national headlines, Kaepernick suffered the same fate of many protesting athletes in the past. This study will show how national media carried his story to national headlines and framed his protest negatively. The findings show that local media were the least active among the three media levels, local, regional and national, in covering the Kaepernick …

Black Graduate Students’ Experiences Of Stress And Coping, Shealyn J. Blanchard

Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of Black graduate students related to stress and coping. Specifically, this study seeks to further examine the concept of cognitive appraisal and help-seeking intentions among Black graduate students. Research has indicated that Black graduate students face unique stressors related to race, in addition to general stress demands that can be experienced in graduate education programs. Regarding help-seeking, the literature has tended to focus on psychological help-seeking attitudes with African American populations and undergraduate students. This present study utilizes theories from stress and coping, as well as help-seeking and planned behavior, …

Reflecting On And Shattering My White Lens: A Critical Autoethnography On My Experience As A White Editor Working With Authors Of Color, Kelsey Medlin

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This critical autoethnography aims to reveal how the cultural biases of a white majority industry impact the stories they select for acquisition and how they are edited. As an editor, I came to this topic from my personal desire to see if my own whiteness affects the way I view writers of color, their stories, and the audience that the companies market to. Thus, the purpose of this project is to explore the current conversations on the topic of diversity within the publishing industry and whether the conversation is making a connection between the lack of diversity in the workforce …

Communication Is A Two Way Street: Race, Gender, And Elite Responsiveness In U.S. Politics, Mia Costa

Doctoral Dissertations

At the heart of a representative democracy is the need for open lines of communication between citizens and their representatives. This dissertation is comprised of three stand-alone chapters which examine how responsive American public officials are to constituent communications, Americans' attitudes about elite responsiveness, and how race and gender condition this relationship. In the first chapter, I conduct the first meta-analysis of all experiments that examine how responsive public officials are to constituent communication. I demonstrate at a higher level of precision than any single study the degree to which legislators are biased against racial and ethnic minorities, and find …

Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …

Two Of The Same? Infants' Conceptual Representation Of Faces Based Upon Gender, Race, And Kind Information, Charisse Pickron

Doctoral Dissertations

Infants’ perceptual abilities allow them to distinguish faces of different races and genders from an early age (for a review, see Pascalis et al., 2011). However, it is still unknown when infants begin using these perceptual differences to represent faces in a conceptual, kind-based manner. The current dissertation examined this issue by testing whether 12- and 24-month-old infants represent faces of different races and genders as distinct ‘kinds’ or instead as variations of a single broader category (e.g., ‘human face’). The current dissertation included two experiments each with a different type of violation-of-expectation individuation paradigm. Experiment 1 used a passive …

Wanderers Of Empire: The Tropical Tramp In Latin America, 1870-1930, Jack Werner

Masters Theses

U.S. public and private imperial interests confronted the problem of labor and labor power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the U.S. empire expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. The question of how to make an empire work spurred the creation of new labor regimes reliant on black West Indians who traveled to work in the Panama Canal Zone and on United Fruit Company (UFCO) banana plantations. Just as importantly, new labor regimes engendered new categories for troublesome laborers. One of these classifications, “tramp,” surfaced in the United States after the U.S. Civil War as a …

The Gender Gap In Postsecondary Enrollment Intentions: The Mediating Role Of Student Attitudes And Behaviors, Paul J. Deppen Iii

Dissertations and Theses

Current literature on the gender gap in higher education lacks in-depth exploration of how the gap between males and females in postsecondary enrollment and degree attainment differs among racial/ethnic groups and among students of differing socioeconomic status (SES). This thesis explores the potential mediating role of student attitudes and behaviors and whether or not inclusion in certain racial/ethnic or SES groups moderates the relationship between gender and intentions to continue one's education immediately after high school graduation. This study uses data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Results suggest that student attitudes mediate more of the relationship between …

Opening Wounds And Possibilities: A Critical Examination Of Violence And Monstrosity In Horror Tv, Amanda K. Leblanc

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines contemporary horror TV, dissecting the ways it works both to subvert and uphold contemporary social standards about race, gender, class, and ability. This work attends to the moments in horror TV where graphic displays of violence and monstrous characters open up possibilities for innovative and progressive representation of historically marginalized people, as well as those instances that foreclose such potential. Horror TV shows blur the definitions of monster and human, suggesting that humans can be monstrous and that monsters can have humanity. Horror TV is a platform through which we see the coming together of a traditional …

Exploring Factors That Enhance Career Advancement For African-Americans Across Various Criminal Justice Occupations: A Qualitative Examination, Antonio Jon Bryer

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

This study examined the factors that are important for African-Americans to reach executive-level positions within the field of corrections. Using nine semi-structured interviews with current and former executive-level corrections professionals, it was found that investments in social capital and human capital are the main career advancement enhancers. However, when it came to factors that were specific to African-American corrections professionals, a majority of the respondents mentioned proficiency as an enhancer.

An Examination Of Optimism Between Gender, Race, And School Classification Of Millennial Students – An Exploratory Study, Abigail C. Johnson

Honors College Theses

Optimism is defined as an individual’s approach to the expectation that good things will happen in the future and bad things are a rarity. Along with the general definition of what optimism is, many researchers have found that optimism depends on culturally embedded values and beliefs (Singh & Shukla, 2014; Lee & Mason, 2013). In addition, the relationship between optimism and positive health outcomes and well-being is well established (Coll, J.E. & Draves, P. R., 2008; Bastianello, M. R., Pacico, J. C., & Hutz, C. S., 2014). Although this is the case, little research has been found examining the differences …

A Woman's Place In Jazz In The 21st Century, Valerie T. Simuro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Women often harbor ingrained attitudes that restrain them from achieving a successful career. They retain deep-seated attitudes that confine them to a self-defined space based on internalized patriarchal standards. Some women do achieve success in spite of the challenges they face. Esperanza Spalding, a young, African-American woman jazz instrumentalist is one such success story. She defies convention, plays an unconventional musical instrument in a musical genre that is historically deemed a masculine world. My thesis discusses the difficult path she traverses between feminist ideals and commercial success. It discusses what characteristics of femininity she chooses to display. Some intentional, some …

Iago The Moor Killer: The Geo-Political Context Behind Shakespeare's Othello, Elisha A. Hamlin

Honors Projects

Shakespeare’s Othello is often viewed as an example of seventeenth century Renaissance binaries. Critics make distinctions when reading the play between hero and villain, Moors and Europeans, and between civilization and barbarity. These definitions are all complicated by Iago’s presence in the play. Iago, whose name implies he is actually a Spaniard, frames the play in a geo-political context. Because of Iago’s presence, Othello provides a picture of England’s position in the seventeenth century geo-political climate. Shakespeare is giving his English audience a particular political message.

"If You Stand On This Corner, People Know What You're About": Powerful Geographies Of Airline & Goodwood In #Justiceforalton, Shannon Kathleen Groll

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis seeks to understand the multiple geographies of Airline & Goodwood, a site of protest occupied nightly during a part of summer 2016 in response to the police shooting of Alton Sterling. Through a methodology of observant-participation, interviews, and oral histories, I make the case that the politics of this site differed from other contemporaneous protest sites in the city through specific place-making activity which highlighted the site’s powerful contemporary and historical geographies. I connect protest at this site to the precarity of Black life and death in Baton Rouge through interviews and oral histories which discuss the historical …

Interracial Dating On Campus, Marisa Andersen

Social Sciences

The purpose of this study is to use mixed methods research and grounded theory to determine what obstacles a predominantly White university contains for interracial couples. Previous research involving interracial couples on college campuses has only focused on quantitative surveys. A sample size of 234 students from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo participated in a quantitative survey as well as 12 interracial couples that were separately interviewed. This data was used to gain insight on interracial couples’ experiences on campus. The data revealed that Cal Poly students felt interracial couples were generally supported on campus. However, the racial or ethnic …

American Exceptionalism In Mass Incarceration, Isabell Murray

Global Honors Theses

American exceptionalism is often positively connotated; America’s exceptionalism often refers to the nation’s unique, progressive ideals of liberty during the nation’s founding, as well as the premise of a free Democratic Republic. While the United States of America has many positive and exceptional qualities, this research illustrates an unfortunate exceptional American quality: the mass incarceration of over 2.3 million people in the United States of America. This paper reviews the literature to understand the evolution of mass incarceration on the basis of three lines: the United States’ history of race, the nation’s governmental structure and the development of policy. Additionally, …

The Systemic Issues Associated With Violent Crime In Predominantly African American Communities, Abraham Coles

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate the issues associated with violent crime in African American communities. The study discusses the theory of racism as a key factor in the societal conditions African Americans live in the United States. The researcher explains the methodology used. The study is a qualitative study, based on interviews of eight participants answers to twenty questions. The study discusses the research sites, who participated in the research study, and how the participants were selected. The study outlines the sampling method and why this method was chosen. The descriptive statistics of participants in the study …