Law Commons^™

Piercing The Prison Uniform Of Invisibility For Black Female Inmates, Michelle S. Jacobs

Michelle S Jacobs

In Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women In Prison, Professor Paula Johnson has written about the most invisible of incarcerated women — incarcerated African American women. The number of women incarcerated in the United States increased by seventy-five percent between 1986 and 1991. Of these women, a disproportionate number are black women. The percentages vary by region and by the nature of institution (county jail, state prison or federal facility), but the bottom line remains the same. In every instance, black women are incarcerated at rates disproportionate to their percentage in the general population. In Inner Lives, Professor Johnson …

Post-9/11 Illegal Immigrant Detention And Deportation: Terrorism And The Criminalization Of Immigration, Stefany N. Laun

Student Publications

This paper analyzes the changes in immigration policy since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in terms of how immigrants are viewed in the United States. The goal is to address the recent criminalization of immigration in that the perceptions of terrorists and immigrants have become relatively synonymous since 2001. Although deportations have decreased, immigrant detention has increased significantly. Detention centers pose threats to the basic human rights of the immigrants residing in them, as well as perpetuate the culture of fear enveloping recent immigrants, whether they are legally or illegally in the country, and native United States citizens …

Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical, Judith Smith

Judith E. Smith

A son of poor Jamaican immigrants who grew up in Depression-era Harlem, Harry Belafonte became the first black performer to gain artistic control over the representation of African Americans in commercial television and film. Forging connections with an astonishing array of consequential players on the American scene in the decades following World War II—from Paul Robeson to Ed Sullivan, John Kennedy to Stokely Carmichael—Belafonte established his place in American culture as a hugely popular singer, matinee idol, internationalist, and champion of civil rights, black pride, and black power.

In Becoming Belafonte, Judith E. Smith presents the first full-length interpretive …

Black Is Decidedly Not Just Black: A Case Study On Hiv Among African-Born Populations Living In Massachusetts, Chioma Nnaji, Nzinga Metzger

Trotter Review

Black or African American is a racial category that includes the descendants of enslaved Africans as well as members of foreign-born black communities who migrated to the United States from places abroad, such as Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Grouping native-born and foreign-born blacks into a single homogeneous racial category may make it easier to track disease and health outcomes; however, it masks the different cultural experiences, histories, languages, social and moral values, and expectations that influence health beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors. It also ignores such factors as migration, which forces foreign-born populations to examine both their traditional …

Panoply: Haitian And Haitian-American Youth Crafting Identities In U.S. Schools, Fabienne Doucet

Trotter Review

In the United States, where race is a powerful factor for social stratification (Appiah & Gutmann, 1998; Glick-Schiller & Fouron, 1990a; Omni & Winant, 1986), foreign-born Blacks find themselves battling the demoralizing impacts of discrimination, racism, and xenophobia on a daily basis. In the school context, racist assumptions have been shown to predispose teachers to have lower expectations of immigrant students and other students of color, to view them more often as behavioral problems, and to assume that their parents do not value education (Doucet, 2008, 2011b; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). At the same time, the powerful influence of …

The Somali Diaspora In Greater Boston, Paul R. Camacho, Abdi Dirshe, Mohamoud Hiray, Mohamed J. Farah

Trotter Review

Our nation was founded on and thrives on immigration. One of the newest immigrant groups in the Boston area are Somalis. They are among the largest of the new populations of African immigrants. While precise numbers are very difficult to determine, there are approximately 8,000 in the Greater Boston area and another 2,000 estimated across the rest of Massachusetts. Very few studies have examined Somalis in the United States, and no studies exist on the community in Boston or Massachusetts.

It is an interesting sociological question to ask how similar the Somali experience has been in the United States (and …

Introduction: Appreciating Difference, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

Are we a narrative nation, imagined and connected mentally, tied by a common history of disruption if not by contiguous geography? Lorick-Wilmot suggests that the stories we tell offer the basis of mutual understanding across distance and cultures and generations. In a reconfigured mental Diasporic cartography, where is our citadel, our castle (not to be confused with what Europeans named as slave castles of Africa)? The remains and monuments built in this hemisphere by iron will and the drive to change yesterday, uprooting it from the ground of inequality, still stand on the highest hill in northern Haiti, reminding us …

Recent African Immigrants’ Fatherhood Experiences In America: The Changing Role Of Fathers, Zacharia N. Nchinda

Trotter Review

This article examines the lived experiences of recent African immigrant fathers in the United States. It focuses specifically on recent African immigrant fathers with African women as wives and children below the age of 18. Its aim is a better understanding of these fathers’ involvement in the life of their children and the changes immigration has forced upon the fathers. Information for the study emanates from interviews carried out with African immigrant fathers in the Milwaukee area, supplemented by my knowledge of African immigrant communities. The categorization of the data uses a construct established by the mid-1990s DADS Project initiative …

Between Two Worlds: Stories Of The Second-Generation Black Caribbean Immigrant, Yndia S. Lorick-Wilmot

Trotter Review

People have an endless fascination with character information since it helps us to predict the behavior of those we interact with (King, Rumbaugh, and Savage-Rumbaugh 1999). Stories or narratives serve as an extension of this fascination. They help us make better decisions even without supplying immediate information. When we each talk about the past, our stories not only disclose currently relevant social particulars, but also provide tools for reasoning about action—our own and others’. In many instances, the stories we tell offer explanations of an outcome that resulted when we acted upon something—or serve as indirect memories of a place …

Southern Injustice And Radical Discontent: The Black Panther Party In The Post-Civil Rights South, Adam Nolan

History Undergraduate Theses

This paper looks at the efforts, obstacles, and outcomes of attempts to organize Black Panther Party chapters in four southern states – Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas - using a variety of sources, including the The Black Panther and Southern Patriot newspapers. Organized in 1966, the BPP mobilized against police brutality and injustices inflicted upon African Americans throughout American history. While successfully establishing various popular community survival programs to help uplift local communities, the BPP’s revolutionary rhetoric and imagery instantly attracted state-sponsored repression that exacted a heavy toll on the organization on local and national levels.

Opening Borders: African Americans And Latinos Through The Lens Of Immigration, Maritza I. Reyes

Journal Publications

African-American and Latino voter turnout during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections hit record numbers. Polls show that the immigration debate influenced Latino voter turnout and preference. Presidential candidate Barack Obama's voiced support of comprehensive immigration reform strengthened his lead among Latino voters in 2008 and, once in office, his executive policy of granting temporary protection to DREAMers solidified his lead among Latino voters in 2012. Both elections showed the power that minority groups can exert when they vote in support of the candidate. If the demographic changes continue as currently estimated, African Americans and Latinos will contribute in large …

On V. Stiviano, Donald Sterling's Companion: Exploring Whiteness As Property, Imani Jackson

Florida A & M University Law Review

Much maligned billionaire and former Clippers owner Donald Sterling ignited national race relations discourse after his companion, V. Stiviano, was connected to the leak of a conversation in which Sterling made anti-black comments. This author posits that Sterling's command that his companion Stiviano disassociate with people of color, particularly black people, is covertly and overtly racist. Covert racism is implicit in the nature of their conversation.

This paper will focus on Stiviano's identity and the violence white men inflicted upon her because of her race and the circumstances surrounding her relationship with Sterling. This author contends that Stiviano attempted to …

Introduction To The Workplace Constitution From The New Deal To The New Right, Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Today, most American workers do not have constitutional rights on the job. As The Workplace Constitution shows, this outcome was far from inevitable. Instead, American workers have a long history of fighting for such rights. Beginning in the 1930s, civil rights advocates sought constitutional protections against racial discrimination by employers and unions. At the same time, a conservative right-to-work movement argued that the Constitution protected workers from having to join or support unions. Those two movements, with their shared aim of extending constitutional protections to American workers, were a potentially powerful combination. But they sought to use those protections to …

Segregation In United States Healthcare: From Reconstruction To Deluxe Jim Crow, Kerri L. Hunkele

Honors Theses and Capstones

During the time period between Reconstruction and the Deluxe Jim Crow era, African Americans were legally oppressed, which hindered their ability to live fully and equally in society with whites. This was especially true in terms of healthcare. Segregation laws were implemented to separate blacks from the rest of society in everyday life; the worst of these laws affected the ability of African Americans to gain access to medical care that was equal to whites. This inequality prevented blacks from being accepted into society and from living quality lives that stem from adequate healthcare. Although the federal and state governments …