African American Studies Commons^™

Access To Higher Education For Black Men: A Narrative Perspective, Kayla R. Branch

Masters Theses

A college degree is important because it provides opportunities for graduates to become educated in a field of study that they can start a career in. There is a large underrepresentation of Black male students in higher education. This lack of representation reflects the lack of professional Black men in our society and limits the number of Black role models these men have can look up tot. The purpose of the qualitative study is to identify what influences Black men to attend college and what challenges they may face getting admitted to college. It also examined how these men transition …

The Campus Ministry And The African American College Students' Experience: A Case Study, Tania Lacora Ward

Masters Theses

African Americans surpass other ethnicities in their level of spiritual and religious engagement (Johnson, Elbert-Avilla, &Tulsky, 2005). This is particularly true for African American college students. This engagement though, may be especially important in providing African American students a path to academic success. According to Donahoo and Caffey (2010) "African American students remain committed to church involvement and religious practice, in part, due to the range of individual benefits and supports that those opportunities provide" (p. 79). This study investigated the role of spirituality in African American college students' achievement; to understand how and why they become involved, and how …

Prince Rogers Nelson: From "Dirty Mind" To Devout Jehovah's Witness, Cassandra Chaney Phd

Faculty Publications

Prince Rogers Nelson (born: June 7, 1958) was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, and actor. He was a musical innovator and known for his eclectic work, flamboyant stage presence, extravagant dress and makeup, and wide vocal range. When he passed unexpectedly on April 21, 2016, he had built an immensely successful career that spanned over 30 years. Although Prince is widely known for his highly sexual behavior, we know less about his spiritual beliefs as well as how these beliefs influenced his public persona and private life. Through the lens of social identity theory, this manuscript will examine …

The Double Abcx Model, Family Stress Theory, Risk, Protection, And Resilience In The Movie “Precious”, Cassandra Chaney Phd

Faculty Publications

The critically acclaimed movie Precious [1] highlights the multiple stressors and crises experienced by an abused Black teen female living in poverty. Given its introduction to the screen, scholars have yet to make critical connections between the family dynamics portrayed in this movie and a particular family theory. The purpose of this paper is to help scholars who teach family stress courses apply the experiences of this young woman and her family to McCubbin and Patterson’s [2] Double ABCX Model. Furthermore, this paper will examine the risk factors, the protective factors, and the resilience demonstrated by the movie’s protagonist, Claireece …

We Just Want My People Thriving: Hip Hop As A Catalyst For Social Change In St. Louis, Joel Pettus Iii

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

St. Louis, regularly listed as one of the most segregated cities in the United States, has long been a hotbed of racial tension. As a current resident of St. Louis County, and a former resident of a subsection of St. Louis County called Ferguson, I have witnessed the havoc a history of racism, segregation and violence can wreak on a community. The silver lining of such an environment is the resulting creative talent that focuses its efforts on chronicling its surroundings. In this case, local artists have sought to illustrate St. Louis’ complicated history and uncertain future. Since hip hop …

Ua19/16/5/4 Athletic Media Relations - Basketball, Womens Film/Video/Audio File, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Film, motion pictures, video and audio of WKU women’s basketball games including and press conferences

The Beautiful Struggle Of Black Feminism: Changes In Representations Of Black Womanhood Examined Through The Artwork Of Elizabeth Catlett And Mickalene Thomas, Juana Williams

Wayne State University Theses

The visual representation of black womanhood is important in understanding black women’s journey toward liberation and empowerment. The use of representations of black womanhood as tools of empowerment is evident through the artwork of Elizabeth Catlett and Mickalene Thomas. Catlett was one of the most prominent black female artists during the 1960s – 1970s, as her artwork and activism expressed the Black Nationalist theories of the Black Arts Movement. Thomas’s artwork and artistic beliefs are in line with many theories regarding post-blackness, such as a reinterpreting of the definition of blackness. Discussing the work of these artists offers a glimpse …

Civil Rights Gone Wrong: Racial Nostalgia, Historical Memory, And The Boston Busing Crisis In Contemporary Children’S Literature, Lynnell L. Thomas

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s …

Bridging The Stereotypical Gap From The Past To The Present : An Analysis Of African American Stereotypes Through The Boondocks, Tiffany Addo

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss and identify African American stereotypes that contain both negative and positive connotations. These stereotypes have origins that date back to the Pre-Slavery Era. Regardless of the lapse in time, the stereotypes have only adapted and found a place in the world we live in today. I use these stereotypes and analyze them through a show called The Boondocks. Within the show, Aaron McGruder (the writer and producer of the first three seasons) makes it a point to present his audience with a satirical representation of all these known stereotypes through the main …

Dietary Acculturation And Obesity In African Immigrant Adults, Stella Chinyere Onuoha-Obilor

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Racial/ethnic groups are disproportionately affected by obesity and other risk factors for chronic diseases. African immigrants are an increasing segment of the U.S. population at greater risk for obesity than other immigrants living in the United States. Public health organizations that aid immigrants could benefit from information about changing dietary patterns. The purpose of this study was to explore the association between dietary acculturation and obesity among African immigrant adults living in the United States, controlling for length of stay, English proficiency, region of residence, and other sociodemographic factors. Acculturation theory guided this study. The research design was quantitative cross-sectional …

The Lived Experience Of In-Center Hemodialysis Patients Receiving Treatment In Dekalb County, Georgia, Stacey Deniese Cooper

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is preventable and reversible in the early stages with upstream strategies; however, the number of individuals diagnosed with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is increasing annually. Although researchers have documented the physiological and psychological stressors associated with hemodialysis (HD), little is known about the effects of in-center HD on the recipients in DeKalb County, Georgia. This study described the experiences of 10 African American HD patients who dialyze in DeKalb County. Using a phenomenological approach, the interviews were transcribed and then analyzed for significant quotes and recurrent themes relevant to receiving HD in DeKalb County. The health …

Brachytherapy And External Beam Radiation And Survival Of Jamaicans With Prostate Cancer, Salome Elizabeth Brown-Williams

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Jamaican males are a high-risk population for aggressive prostate cancer (PrCa) due to genetic influences, and identifying empirical data on treatments, which provide survival benefits is a prime challenge for clinicians who manage Jamaican PrCa patients. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to elucidate treatment effects of brachytherapy and ERBT in the survival of a Jamaican PrCa cohort. Differences in survival outcomes of brachytherapy and ERBT treated Jamaican, and White U.S.-born PrCa patients with localized PrCa were compared. The mechanism of radiation programmed cell death in PrCa carcinogenesis explained in the oxidative stress theory, was the theoretical base for …

Rituals Reproducing Race: African American Women's Feminine Hygiene Practices, Shared Experiences, And Power, Angela K. Guy-Lee

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is an exploration of the role African American women’s feminine hygiene practices, namely vaginal douching, plays in the creation and reproduction of race. Compared to their white and Latina counterparts, African American women are the most likely to engage in this practice. Vaginal douching is associated with myriad reproductive and sexual health problems. These problems include but are not limited to recurrent yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, disrupting healthy vaginal microbiomes, and spontaneous preterm birth; of which African American women experience disproportionately. Although racial differences in vaginal douching are well documented, little is known about the impetus for African …

Historical Analysis: Tracking, Problematizing, And Reterritorializing Achievement And The Achievement Gap, Justin Olmanson, Zoe Falls, Guieswende Rouamba

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

For more than a century, state and federal governments and organizations have used different measures to determine if students and groups of students have achieved in a particular subject or grade level. While the construct of achievement is applied irrespective of student differences, this equal application turns out to be anything but equitable. In this chapter, we work to understand the way achievement plays out for Black students by deconstructing how the word achievement works. In doing so, we track the history of education, testing, and curriculum as it has been applied to Black youth and youth of color.

Forgotten Soldiers From A Forgotten War: Oral History Testimonies Of African American Korean War Veterans, O. Eliot Pope, Jr.

Dissertations

Otis Eliot Pope, Jr.

Loyola University Chicago

FORGOTTEN SOLDIERS FROM A FORGOTTEN WAR: ORAL HISTORY

TESTIMONIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN KOREAN WAR VETERANS

This study seeks to illuminate the motivations, struggles, conflicts, and contributions African American soldiers made to the US military during the Korean War. Forty oral history testimonies from African American Korean War veterans were used for this dissertation. The findings of this dissertation illustrate that previously held beliefs about African American participation in the Korean War were inaccurate. My research indicates a variety of reasons, including a desire for upward mobility, influenced African Americans to join the US …

The Reflection And Reification Of Racialized Language In Popular Media, Kelly E. Wright

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks …

A Theory Of Veteran Identity, Travis L. Martin

Theses and Dissertations--English

More than 2.6 million troops have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, surveys reveal that more than half feel “disconnected” from their civilian counterparts, and this feeling persists despite ongoing efforts, in the academy and elsewhere, to help returning veterans overcome physical and mental wounds, seek an education, and find meaningful ways to contribute to society after taking off the uniform. This dissertation argues that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans struggle with reassimilation because they lack healthy, complete models of veteran identity to draw upon in their postwar lives, a problem they’re working through collectively …

Re-Calling The Past: Poetry As Preservation Of Black Female Histories, Rachel Miller-Haughton

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a …

A Select Survey Of Choral Arrangements Based On The Songs Of Stephen Foster Tracing Developments In Music And Textual Changes Through The Twentieth And Twenty-First Centuries, Perry K. Ward

Theses and Dissertations--Music

Stephen Foster is acknowledged as America’s first composer of popular music. His legacy can be seen in the number of songs that are embedded in our cultural heritage – “Oh! Susanna,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” are but a very few of his most popular works. Stephen Foster’s songs have been incorporated into every facet of American culture including both popular and classical musical culture, television, and film. However, his legacy is complicated as it is tainted by connections to blackface minstrelsy in some works. This document seeks to trace the threads of racial sensitivity and cultural appropriation …

The Anti-Imperialism Of Ottobah Cugoano: Slavery, Abolition, And Colonialism In Thoughts And Sentiments On The Evil Of Slavery, Tacuma Peters

Publications and Research

This article argues that the work of Ottobah Cugoano provides readers with a robust anti-imperial analysis of European modernity. For Cugoano, slavery and colonialism are coeval and mutually constitutive processes. I argue that Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery which has been accepted as a tract of radical abolitionism should also be interpreted as an anti-imperial text. I contend that we must attend to the global scope of Cugoano’s anti-imperialism which includes critiques of European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as provides recommendations for radical changes in the relationship between Europe and …