African American Studies Commons^™

Black Feminist Citational Praxis And Disciplinary Belonging, Bianca C. Williams

Publications and Research

What does a Black feminist citational practice look and feel like? This contribution to the #CiteBlackWomen colloquy focuses on two arguments: First, that Black feminist citational praxis is one of the major interventions Black women scholars contribute to the academy; and second, that anthropology’s neglect and erasure of Black feminist anthropologists relates to disciplinary (un)belonging. I explore how citation and “disciplinary belonging” influence hiring practices, doctoral training, intellectual genealogies, and what is valued as anthropological knowledge.

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Luke Meagher, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D., Phillip Stone

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era? …

Beyoncé Making Lemonade Out Of The Colonial System, Caitlin Wheeler

Womanist Ethics

A discussion on Beyoncé's Lemonade and how its imagery and undertones relate to the ever-present colonial system found in relationships and religion. Highlighting connections and ideas found in Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized.

Beyoncé Making Lemonade Out Of The Colonial System, Caitlin Wheeler

Race, Ethnicity, & Religion

A discussion on Beyoncé's Lemonade and how its imagery and undertones relate to the ever-present colonial system found in relationships and religion. Highlighting connections and ideas found in Albert Memmi's The Colonizer and the Colonized.

For The Culture: The Importance Of A Critical Social Theory Within The Music Education Classroom, Brianna Thomas

Senior Honors Theses

This paper will analyze the history of music education in the United States and discuss how the music classroom can contribute to and dismantle social inequalities including social class, gender, and race. Class effects music education by creating barriers to necessary resources and opportunities as a result of economic positions.[1] Gender is the second focus because music has historically been a male-dominated profession. As a result, many textbooks and curriculum highlight the achievements of men while erasing the contributions of women which has taught women to devalue their own work.[2] The last focus is race. While the arts …

Developing And Sustaining Political Citizenship For Poor And Marginalized People: The Evelyn T. Butts Story, Kenneth Cooper Alexander

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This study tells the deep, rich story of Evelyn T. Butts, a grassroots civil rights champion in Norfolk, Virginia, whose bridge leadership style can teach and inspire new generations about political, community, and social change. Butts used neighbor-to-neighbor skills to keep her community connected with the national civil rights movement, which had heavily relied on grassroots leaders—especially women—for much of its success in overthrowing America’s Jim Crow system of segregation and suppression. She is best-known for her 1963 lawsuit that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1966 decision to ban poll taxes for state and local elections, a democratizing event …

Racial Prioritization In Black-White Relationships, Nia Tariq

Auctus: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

The utilization of race as a proxy for evaluating different characteristics of others contains risk because it results in stereotyping and potential alienation of individuals from negatively judged groups. This concept motivated me to uncover the extent to which race affects intimate relationships amongst the historically opposed groups of blacks and whites in the United States. I am studying the historic racially-driven marginalization of blacks and the resulting relationship to recent dating and marriage patterns between black-white interracial pairs. I want to find out why the socioeconomic advantage held by whites is transmutated into dating culture, in order to understand …

Whose Story? His-Story., Meghan E. O'Donnell

SURGE

The essay instructions finally landed in front of me. I passed the extra sheets on and quickly glanced over the page, hoping that the prompt would be inspiring. There were two open-ended options from which to choose: military and social/political aspects of the war. My eyes first fell upon the social option and I pondered using this opportunity to shed light on the experiences of women during the war. I’d done this before – used assignments to explore history’s untold stories – and found it interesting. Then, in a fit of frustration that erupted out of nowhere, I thought to …

The Killing Of An ‘Angry Black Woman’: Sandra Bland And The Politics Of Respectability, Victoria D. Gillon

Eddie Mabry Diversity Award

On July 13th, 2015, 28-year-old Sandra Bland was pulled over by a police officer in Waller County, TX, for failure to signal a lane change. Around six minutes later, Bland was being slammed and handcuffed to the ground. What happened in these six minutes that caused a minor traffic violation to escalate to what would later be three days in jail, concluding with Bland’s death? Hundreds of years of significations towards black women led to Sandra Bland’s arrest. However, at a time when Bland was perceived to be at her most vulnerable, she resisted. By intentionally not putting out a …

Jessie Fauset’S Not-So-New Negro Womanhood: The Harlem Renaissance, The Long Nineteenth Century, And Legacies Of Feminine Representation, Meredith Goldsmith

English Faculty Publications

Fauset’s texts offer a repository of precisely what critic Alain Locke labeled retrograde: seemingly outdated plotlines and tropes that draw upon multiple literary, historical, and popular cultural sources. This essay aims to change the way we read Fauset by excavating this literary archive and exploring how the literary “past” informs the landscape of Fauset’s fiction. Rather than viewing Fauset’s novels as deviations from or subversive instantiations of modernity, I view them as part of a long nineteenth-century tradition of gendered representation. Instead of claiming a subversiveness that Fauset might have rejected or a conservatism that fails to account for the …

Respiration: Breathing Between The Stacks, Jerome D. Clarke

SURGE

How rare are we, who brandish Black and Male identity, in Academia?

In the past two weeks, I have been reminded of my Black maleness in a multitude of ways. I sat alone, subordinate in number, in a dialogue about Internalized Oppression at Diaspora House. Strong women of color discuss this issue while I work to stay respectful and non-oppressive in this space. I sat alone, subordinate in number, in each of my classes, where I am often the only one of my race and class. My race-gender circumstance is a matter of fact to me. How does this Black …

Intersectionality To Social Justice = Theory To Practice, Donald Mitchell Jr., Ph.D.

Executives, Administrators, & Staff Publications

NASPA’s MultiRacial Knowledge Community’s #Projectintersections highlights the intersectionality movement in higher education and student affairs contexts. First used by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality was used by Crenshaw to describe the experiences of Black women who, because of the intersection of race and gender, are faced with interlocking systems of oppression and marginalization.

Prefatory: Informing Higher Education Policy And Practice Through Intersectionality, Donald Mitchell Jr., Ph.D., Don C. Sawyer Iii

Executives, Administrators, & Staff Publications

Intersectionality as a framework has garnered much attention in law, sociology, and education research, and conversations surrounding the framework and its utility now span the globe. Intersectionality addresses the junction of identities, and how the intersectional nature of identities, together, shape the lived experiences of individuals (Hancock, 2007) because of interlocking systems of oppression and marginalization often associated with those identities. In this special issue, “Informing Higher Education Policy and Practice Through Intersectionality,” the authors build upon Crenshaw’s (1989) articulation of intersectionality to frame their work, seeking to improve U.S. higher education.

Pauli Murray And The Twentieth-Century Quest For Legal And Social Equality, Serena Mayeri

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Angel And The Imp: The Duncan Sisters’ Performances Of Race And Gender, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

From 1923 to 1959 Vivian and Rosetta Duncan performed the show Topsy and Eva in front of thousands of audiences in the United States and abroad. This essay examines how the Duncan Sisters’ appropriation of blackness through a yin and yang performance of black and white womanhood, their sexualized but ultimately infantilizing routine as young girls, and their take on anarchistic comedy resulted in a particular spin on age, gender, race, and sexuality that reinforced their privilege as white women even while it pushed the boundaries of acceptable femininity in the swiftly shifting American culture of the first half of …

Stories Of Resistance: Black Women Corporate Executives Opposing Gendered (Everyday) Racism, Cheryl D. Jordan

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

For this research, I explored contemporary resistance strategies that Black women executives in the corporate world use to oppose negative behaviors by others associated with their race and gender. The dissertation reviews scholarship about the major role the convergence of race and gender play in the day-to-day existence of Black women. Historically, negative images and beliefs have influenced the treatment of Black women in society. These same thoughts and images affect Black women executives in today’s workplace. African-American women continue to see limited advancement to senior levels within the corporate organization, even though diversity programs abound. As leaders in the …

Cross-Race Relationships As Sites Of Transformation: Navigating The Protective Shell And The Insular Bubble, Karen Audrey Geiger

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

The context of leadership has evolved to incorporate greater social identity differences. Therefore, learning ways to navigate differences in social identity becomes important work leaders must now do. Because these differences surface in relationship with others, examining a relational framework helps us understand the nature of what happens between people (Ely & Roberts, 2008). This study explored the processes by which Black African American and White European American women enact leadership by creating and sustaining cross-race relationships as they work to change unjust systems around them. Using grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006; Strauss & Corbin, 1990), a model was developed …

Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity In Going To Meet The Man, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

"Papas' Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man" employs the conceit of “impossible” fatherhood to critique mutually reinforcing racist and heteronormative constructions of reproduction. It argues, first, that the white paternal fantasy of creating “pure” white sons is undermined by the homoerotic necessity of bring the phantasmatic black eunuch, castrated yet powerfully potent, into the procreative white bed. The “fact” of the “white” child produced in that marital bed, however, not only cloaks the failure of racial reproduction in the living proof of success but also occludes the male/male union that subtends the heteronormative fantasy of reproduction. …

On Being A Role Model, Anita L. Allen

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.