Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

An Emerging Majority: The Changing Face And Language Of Education In Nebraska, Jose J. Soto Jd

Different Perspectives on Majority Rules: 10th Annual National Conference (2005)

Decision-makers and educators at all levels of our public education system need to assume roles that will serve as strong and unwavering voice for the students and families that our education system consistently fails. It is critically important that we recognize there are things that are terribly wrong with our education system and which obviously need fixing.

The Beat Of A Different Drum: Retention Issues Students Of Color Face In Higher Education, Be Stoney

Different Perspectives on Majority Rules: 10th Annual National Conference (2005)

Retaining students of color has been a challenge at predominantly white institutions since the mid 1960s. This presentation includes findings from a qualitative approach from students of color attending a predominantly white institution in the Midwest. Included are the voices, implications for implementing changes, recommendations, and suggestions that are beneficial in working with this student population.

Retain Or Let Go!, Farouk Aregbe

Different Perspectives on Majority Rules: 10th Annual National Conference (2005)

Participation in the Cultural Diversity Peer Mentoring Program is voluntary for all students. The program is developed under the supervision of the Director of Multicultural Student Services.

“Sons Of Adam”: Text, Context, And The Early Modern African Subject, Herman L. Bennett

Publications and Research

Seeking to dislodge the prism that a singular political practice—represented as the story from savage to slave—informed the slave trade, this essay points to a distinct genealogy shaping the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans.

Owens, Jimmy Interview 1, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

No abstract provided.

The Decline Of The Puerto Rican Fulltime Faculty At The City University Of New York (Cuny) From 1981-2002, Felipe Pimentel

Policy Documents

We show in this brief how the Puerto Rican fulltime faculty at CUNY has been steadily declining while the number of Puerto Ricans earning doctorates has increased considerably since the early 1980s. This analysis intends to draw attention to this paradoxical situation by examining statistical information from dif-ferent data sources. Policy-makers at the City University have insufficiently addressed the historical underrepresentation of Puerto Rican fulltime faculty at this institution—to the point where this issue has become a serious question that needs to be thoroughly analyzed. This document includes some recommendations to increase the number of Puerto Rican fulltime faculty in …

Exploring The Education Profile And Pipeline For Latinos In New York State, Anthony De Jesús, Daniel W. Vasquez

Policy Documents

Using various education and census databases 1this policy brief explores the Latino education pipeline in New York State and, where possible, uses disaggregated data to analyze the changes in educational enrollment, attainment, and achievement for Latinos between 1990 and 2000. The education pipeline represents the distribution of Latinos enrolled in pre-school through graduate and professional school in New York State as well as the education attainment levels of the adult population over 25 years of age. Disaggregated data provide the best picture of the educational situation of various Latino subgroups as they relate to each other and other racial/ethnic populations …

The Seven Years' War In New York State: Introduction, Timothy J. Shannon

History Faculty Publications

Ask the average person on the street about the Seven Years' War and you are likely to get a blank stare. Try again, only this time call the conflict "The French and Indian War" and you might get a faint smile of recognition. Take a different approach: ask random strangers their opinion about The Last of the Mohicans. Many will tell you they loved it, although they will more likely be thinking about Daniel Day-Lewis than James Fenimore Cooper.

Such has been the fate of one of the most important events in early history. In 2004, the 250th anniversary of …

Editors’ Commentary, Alicia Partnoy, Karen Mary Davalos

Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Toward A Cleaner Whiteness: New Racial Identities, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic ethos and meaningful way of life than a pathological structure of privilege and narrowminded cognitive habitus.

Davidson, Jessie, Bronx African American History Project, Mark Naison

Oral Histories

Davidson speaks extensively of is childhood. He grew up in the Bronx and moved around quite a bit. His mother was a homemaker while his father worker at the local post office. In addition to be a postal worker, Davidsons father was also a community activist as well as the founder of the local Bronx NAACP and the newspaper “The Listener”.

Davidson recalls a racially harmonious neighborhood in which he lived. However, the surrounding neighborhoods were fraught with racial tension and animus. He describes a tense relationship between blacks and police officers in these neighborhoods. According to Davidson, two or …

The Good, The Bad, And The Inverted: Rhetorical Strategies In The Portrayal Of Cultures In Ruth Benedict's Patterns Of Culture And Margaret Mead's Sex And Temperament In Three Primitive Societies, Phillip Guddemi

Pacific Studies

Patterns of Culture and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, published a year apart, have a startlingly parallel structure. Discussions of anthropological method open both; the question of the individual and deviance closes both. The triad of cultures in each book is arranged in the order of "the good, the bad, and the inverted." The first culture emphasizes cooperation and nurturance, the second competition and discord. The third culture in each inverts some feature of Western society, either in the economic realm (Kwakiutl) or in that of gendered personality (Tchambuli). Cultural inversion places Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in …

Margaret Mead's Other Samoa: Rereading Social Organization Of Manu'a, Paul Shankman

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman focused his attention on Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa to such an extent that her ethnography of Samoa, Social Organization of Manu'a, has been neglected. This professional monograph demonstrates Mead's credibility as an ethnographer and as a modern student of social organization. While Freeman believed that Mead was young, naive, and gullible, a closer examination of Social Organization of Manu'a indicates that she was energetic, resourceful, perceptive, and theoretically sophisticated. Any evaluation of Mead's Samoan research should include this enduring contribution to our knowledge of the islands.

Vol. 28 Nos. 3/4 (2005): Pacific Studies Full Issue, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US $26.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, …

Vol. 28 Nos. 3/4 (2005): Pacific Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 28, Nos. 3/4-Sept/Dec 2005 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Margaret Mead And Psychology: The Education Of An Anthropologist, Patricia A. Francis

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead's brand of anthropology was deeply rooted in the psychological. Mead began her career in psychology, taking a master's degree in that field but switching to anthropology at the urging of Ruth Benedict. Mead's background in psychology equipped her particularly well to embark on her field trip to American Samoa in 1925. While the anthropological training of her day did not emphasize practical aspects of conducting fieldwork, Mead's training in psychology taught her how to conduct case studies, design experiments, and measure results quantitatively and qualitatively. Mead's family background also contributed to her training as a social scientist, particularly …

Margaret Mead's Individual In Culture, Or Cultures And Personalities Without Embarrassment, Gerald Sullivan

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead is associated with the rubric "culture and personality." Mead herself preferred the formula "individual in culture." This essay traces Mead's uses of her preferred formula from 1928 through 1946. Over the course of this period, Mead developed her idea from its initial concerns with the "role" of the individual in Samoan culture in ways which came to focus on the person as the conjunction of biological, developmental (or "genetic"), and cultural processes. The essay examines both published, if now little known, materials and Ruth Benedict's notes taken during a course on "The Study of the Individual in Culture" …

The Correspondence Associated With Margaret Mead's Samoa Research: What Does It Really Tell Us?, James Côté

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman based much of his critique of Margaret Mead's Samoa research on the letters she exchanged with Franz Boas and others. However, as I have indicated elsewhere (Cöté 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c), Freeman seriously misrepresented the content and intention of these letters. The present article extends the examination of archival material by reviewing letters from the late 1920s associated with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, which reveal that Mead originally wrote it as a commercial book, and that she was heavily influenced by her publisher to further sensationalize her account of life in Samoa. Additional archived …

Contesting The Erotic Zone: Margaret Mead's Fieldwork Photographs Of Samoa, Sharon W. Tiffany

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead's photographs taken during her first ethnographic fieldwork in the South Pacific have received little scholarly attention. While some of Mead's images borrowed from earlier photographic conventions, her pictures also challenged prevailing representations of Polynesian women. Mead's photos experimented with alternative visual narratives about Samoan women's bodies and their everyday lives, in contrast to signature images of Pacific Islander women as commoditized sex objects, exoticized women of power, or as romanticized primitives. Mead's first effort at using a camera in the field provided a spectrum of representations useful for re-interpreting female embodiment and the gender politics of the photographic …

Margaret Mead And Gregory Bateson In The Sepik, 1938: A Timely Polemic From A Lost Anthropological Efflorescence, Eric Kline Silverman

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's 1938 study of a Iatmul-speaking village in the middle Sepik River, Papua New Guinea, remains an anthropological efflorescence. At the very least, this collaboration resulted in a well-known fieldwork photo: Mead and Bateson in the famous "mosquito room." Ironically, little is actually known about the 1938 undertaking, which remains, however famous, sadly obscure. Towards correcting this misjudgment, I have two objectives. First, I want to provide a selective overview of the 1938 project, focusing on its unique outlook, tone, voices, morality, and theoretical perspectives. But my objective is not merely historical and descriptive. Hence, my …

Using And Abusing The Works Of The Ancestors: Margaret Mead, Mary Catherine Bateson

Pacific Studies

Because early-twentieth-century anthropologists worked under very different circumstances from those of anthropologists today, they have become easy to criticize and hard to use fruitfully. Finding the appropriate use of Margaret Mead's work today is a goal she would have felt at home with. Criticism and correction are essential, but opportunistic uses of Mead's work, legacy, and persona, like the attack by Derek Freeman that made him famous, are essentially wasteful and exploitative. By focusing attention on Mead's earliest work, Freeman obscured her lifelong contribution and undermined concepts she helped embed in American thinking, like the indispensable (if vague) concept of …

Introduction: The Essentialization Of Margaret Mead, Nancy Mcdowell

Pacific Studies

Margaret Mead and her contributions to Pacific anthropology play a large role in the discipline, and anthropologists need to consider her work carefully and in context. Evaluators of Mead are often guilty of simplifying her work rather than assessing its full complexity. The reasons for this phenomenon are examined here: several commentators have not read the work carefully, while others select only some aspects of it to support their analyses. Many misrepresentations are the result of a failure to consider her work in its appropriate historical context, and a few employ Mead as a symbol or trope for broader phenomena, …

Tales From The Internet: Margaret Mead's Legacy In American Culture, Merrily Stover

Pacific Studies

This essay explores the importance of Margaret Mead for American society as revealed through the cultural domain of the Internet. By examining sites accessible through popular search engines, the essay analyzes Mead's life using Joseph Campbell's myth of the hero's journey. Mead's legend emphasizes her journey to far places and her return with important gifts of knowledge for society. Mead is also a distinctly American hero by representing values of pioneering, defense of personal freedom, and commitment to bettering society. The recognition of the importance of culture on human behavior, Mead's own life as a role model for people, the …

Fleet, James, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

The Fleet family moved to the Patterson Houses in the Bronx in the fall of 1956 from Harlem. He says growing up there provided for a very healthy and nurturing childhood. His father, Bittie Fleet a noted jazz musician, abandoned his music career in the early 1950’s to work in a department store, while his mother stayed at home with the children.

He had been aware of his father’s jazz career from an early age. He learned to play on his own, without lessons of any form. His claim to fame is that he was the person who influenced Charlie …

American Commemorative Panels: To Form A More Perfect Union, United States Postal Service. Stamp Division

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

Informational pages for To Form a More Perfect Union Commemorative Stamp – American Commemorative Panels, includes images of the stamps, information about the physical stamp and information regarding Freedom Fighters and the fight for equal rights. First issued August 30, 2005.

Mincy, Kenneth, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Kenneth Mincy grew up in the Patterson Houses in the late 1950’s. He felt very safe and loved. His mother was a nurse’s aid at a local hospital and while she was working a woman from their building would come up and watch him. Although there were many ethnicities in the building he lived in, everyone helped each other in taking care of the children.

He tells an interesting story about riding and studying subway maps at 4 years old. By this time, he was already and avid reader and feeling bored with his education in kindergarten. Because of this, …

American Commemorative Panels: Arthur Ashe, United States Postal Service. Stamp Division

Rodney Lawrence Hurst, Sr. Stamp Collection

Informational pages for Arthur Ashe Commemorative Stamp – American Commemorative Panels, includes images of the stamps, information about the physical stamp and biographical information for Arthur Ashe. First issued August 27, 2005.

Sall, Gilda, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Gilda Sall, originally from Harlem, moved to the Soundview section of the Bronx with her mother at the age of six. Unhappy with the education that her daughter was receiving in Harlem, Sall’s mother moved to the city’s northernmost borough, which many still considered to be almost suburban at the time. Sall tells of her first impressions of the Bronx as clean, different from the city from where she came, and overall a beautiful community in which to live.

After attending P.S. 77 and M.S. 123, Sall participated in the College Bound program at Monroe High School, a special subsection …

Brown, Donald, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewee: Dr. Donald Brown

Interviewer: Dr. Brian Purnell

Summarized by: Estevan Román

Dr. Donald Brown was born on February 4^th, 1948 at Morissania Hospital in the Bronx. His mother Lula Moore is from Athens, Georgia or actually a town just outside Athens named Whitehall. His father was named Robert Brown is from Charleston, South Carolina. His parents were thirteen years apart in age. He mentions that his mother was previously married with three other kids and he would meet them a few years later at his mother’s funeral. His father did not like Charleston because of the racism …

Ramsey, Andrea, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Her grandparents moved to the Bronx from Harlem in the 1950’s and were immigrants from Barbados. Many of their friends from the Caribbean were moving to the Bronx, and they moved along with them to Union Avenue. Andrea was born in Harlem and then moved to the Bronx when she was very young to Tinton Avenue with her parents. There were many other Caribbean families in her life and she does not recall people from certain islands segregating themselves from the rest of the community. She and her family attended St. Augustine Church, which was Presbyterian. She remembers the amount …