Ethnic Studies Commons^™

A Catalyst For Change: The Extraordinary Anaka Women’S Collective During The June 2026 Belfast Pogrom, Dianne Kirby

The Journal of Social Encounters

Prompted by the pogrom that erupted in Belfast in June this year, this article explores how a women’s collective, Anaka, established by female asylum seekers, refugees and migrants (ASRMs) less than a decade previously, took the lead in ensuring the safety and welfare of the city’s migrant communities in a context where they were horrifically failed by police and politicians, by the state and the institutions meant to protect them. Anaka began as a small-scale endeavour to mitigate the difficulties confronting women struggling to navigate a harsh asylum system. It became a widely respected advocacy and campaigning group for ASRMs. …

Indigenous Land Seizure & Environmental Injustice: Impacts Of Settler Colonialism, Lydia Moorman

Journal of Earth and Life Science

The fields of conservation and environmentalism prioritize ecosystem health, yet both emerged from western frameworks that displaced and criminalized Indigenous land stewardship. The idealization of “pristine wilderness” narratives served to justify the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and erased millennia of sustainable land stewardship that had maintained ecological balance long before western conservation existed. These narratives not only misrepresented Indigenous relationship with land but also constructed a false dichotomy between humans and nature that positioned Indigenous presence as a threat rather than a source of ecological knowledge. Simultaneously, anthropogenic expansion; such as pipelines, mining, railroads, and other extractive …

Women, Race, Recovery: How Some Of History’S Most Impactful Thinkers Reflect On Their Own Healing, Karol Cooper

Gatherings

With examples from influential women of color feminists, the essay points to some obstacles in the way to developing a true practice of recovery for women of color academics whose research brings them in continual contact with histories and enactments of harm against women and people of color. As women of color in higher education, articulating our health and healing needs in our own terms would help us clear a path to promoting ourselves as whole and healthy persons, in addition to promoting us along a career path. The essay collects reflections on health struggles from famous women of color …

Voices Of Latinidad: A Truth And Reconciliation Movement To Preserve Latino And Latina History, J.S. Onésimo (Ness) Sándoval

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

This chapter began as a quest to tell the story of Latinidad in Nebraska. It is not meant to be a historical account of Latinos or Latinidad, nor a socioeconomic analysis. Instead, it has evolved into an accessible narrative highlighting the accomplishments of Latinos in Nebraska. The accounts and data presented serve as a public testimony and starting point for discussions that acknowledge Latinos’ presence. These accounts were not designed as an academic treatment for scholarly work but aim to inspire future scholars to research the lives and accomplishments of Latinos in Nebraska. Latinos have long been an integral part …

Native Americans, Part Ii, Kevin Abourezk

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s – aimed at abolishing legalized racial segregation and discrimination across the United States – found expression in Nebraska in many ways. From college protests to marches in Lincoln, the movement found a home within the youth and counterculture communities of Lincoln and Omaha. But less known is the way the movement impacted Native American populations, especially those in remote Nebraska communities. “Just as young Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans across the nation were learning the lessons of the black experience of the 1960s and expressing their identity as they sought to …

Contributors And Acknowledgments For Roots Of Justice: A History Of Race And Racism In Nebraska

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Paul A. Olson, M. Dewayne Mays, Gabriel Bruguier, Kevin Abourezk, Preston Love, Jr., with Adam Fletcher Sasse, Heather Fryer, Sharon Ishii-Jordan, Emira Ibrahimpašić, and Julia Reilly

Acknowledgements

Frontmatter And Foreword To Roots Of Justice: A History Of Race And Racism In Nebraska, Bill Arfmann

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Covers, Table of Contents, and Foreword:

There is much to understand about the history of Nebraska and how the past shapes the present. This book attempts to bring into clearer focus the triumphs and trials of five broad groups whose lives have often been overlooked when the state’s history is told. The authors know some of this history of racism firsthand: Most of them have lived as people of color in Nebraska. They’ve experienced “the good, the bad and the ugly” that makes up our state story. We encourage educators, scholars and family historians to continue to dig, to document …

Introduction To Roots Of Justice: A History Of Race And Racism In Nebraska, M. Dewayne Mays, Paul Olson

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Nebraska has made racism a way of life through most of its history. It is still the way of life for many. In 2020, a Nebraska columnist wrote the following about Nebraska: “[T]he issues stemming from racism can seem like foreign concepts, confined to the larger cities (or the American South) and relics of a distant past.”2 The column goes on to show that these issues were not confined to large cities or to the South; they rested on our back door in Nebraska. Yet, one often heard back as far as one could remember that Nebraska is not and …

A History Of African Americans In Nebraska, Preston Love Jr., Adam Fletcher Sasse, Le Clara Gilreath, Portia Love, Heather Fryer

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

Black people have been present in Nebraska from its earliest days as a U.S. territory. The first U.S. Census of Nebraska, conducted in 1860, counted eighty-one Black people who, together, formed .28 percent of the young territory’s 28,841 residents. That number grew to 3,443 Black residents in 1900, representing 3.5 percent of the 102,555 residents of the state of Nebraska. The number and location of Black Nebraskans varied greatly through the twentieth century, comprising 13.7 percent of the state’s population in 1940 and 11.8 percent in 2020. Although African Americans have been relatively small in numbers, the historical record reflects …

Recent Arrivals: Refugee Resettlement In Nebraska, Emira Ibrahimpašić, Julia Reilly

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

One of the stories Nebraskans tell themselves is that the story of Nebraska is a story of immigration. One of the most recent versions of this story is that Nebraska is one of the best and most welcoming places in the country to be a resettled refugee. In many respects, this narrative is true, but as with all narratives, reality is more complicated. This chapter attempts to paint a fuller picture by providing a detailed history of the foundation of Nebraska’s refugee resettlement program, and an overview of five of the most populous refugee communities in Nebraska. First, we survey …

Exclusion From The Good Life: The Impact Of Anti-Asian Racism On Asian Nebraskans, Heather Fryer, Sharon Ishii-Jordan

Truth and Reconciliation History Project

To understand how Americans of Asian descent experienced, adjusted, and overcame negative experiences in Nebraska, recognizing the external forces on their lives is paramount. The experiences of Asians in their diaspora across the U.S. and Nebraska during a 150-year span have been shaped by both external (global and domestic) and internal (personality and resilience) factors. The presence of stereotypes specifically targeted toward Asian Americans due to exotic imaginings, pseudoscience, and economic fears, in addition to the images created by national media, gave rise to society’s acceptance of stereotypes. These external factors contributed to a belief that continues to this day …

A Journey To A Black Woman’S (Read Black Girl’S) Joy And Her Story Of Coming Home, Brittany Lauren Brock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an auto/ethnography about the self-actualizing journey of reclaiming storytelling as my native tongue and my journey to joy. Throughout, using my story and the stories of so many others, I not only lay out the wounds (the pain, the loss, then the hope that comes) within the academy and outside in the world but I also use storytelling as a tool of healing—my tool of healing—to show how I wrote myself free.

When Black women (read Black girls) go through The Reckoning (the moment we realize something isn’t right with how we are perceived by others) …

Bearing The Benefit: An Evolution Of Passing To Trespassing & How We Got Here, Kennedi J. Williams

Honors College Theses

In recent years, we have seen a shift in the social treatment of white people in America. The desire to be politically correct at all times, in hopes of avoiding becoming the next viral “Karen” or racist has become imperative. The following thesis will explore the latest trend of white women buying racial capital by producing mixed-race children. At first glance, this idea can be a bit problematic. How can we assume the reasoning behind a woman choosing to bear a child? With this in mind, I would like to emphasize that individuals do not have to consciously be racist …

Afro-Latin Americans Living In Spain And Social Death: Moving From The Empirical To The Ontological, Ethan Johnson, Joy González-Güeto, Vanessa Cadena

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper has three objectives. First, we establish that although Spain has attempted to distance itself from its role in the sub-saharan African slave trade and the significance blackness plays within its borders, there exists a significant population of people of African descent from Latin America living in Spain. Second, we show Black people are living what Sadiyah Hartmann refers to as the afterlife of slavery in Latin America. We claim it is worthwhile to take into account that Afro-Latin Americans are fleeing to the country that is largely responsible for them being in Latin America and the conditions of …

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Negative Estrangement: Fantasy And Race In The Drow And Drizzt Do’Urden, Steven Holmes

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This essay introduces the concept of negative estrangement to help understand current cultural interventions into the norms of depicting fantasy races. First, this essay builds on Shklovsky’s concept of estrangement to describe the literary practice of negative estrangement, wherein artists craft “more evil” foes based on hybridized amalgamations of stereotypes to create antipathy toward a subject, be it monster or fantasy race. This practice is sometimes used in service of confronting the issue of race and racism, despite seeming to reify or rearticulate racist stereotypes.

This essay builds on Tolkien’s argument in favor of creating “more evil” foes to exemplify …

Review Of The Book Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias And The Struggle For Equality, By T. K. Hernández, Martín Alberto Gonzalez

Chicano/Latino Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This is a book review of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality - Tanya Katerí Hernández, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 2022, 216pp., $24.95, ISBN: 978-0807020135 (hardcover).

Cultural Folk, Political Lore: The Politics Of Folklore During The United States Occupation Of Haiti From 1915 To 1934, Cheyla G. Muñoz Ramos

Honors Theses

My project focuses on Haitian folklore in the early twentieth century in connection to the first United States’ occupation of Haiti. The United States’ Marine Corps occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. This nineteenth-year occupation brought violence and racial stereotypes towards the Haitian population, especially the peasantry. United States Americans coming to Haiti intensified these stereotypes. During this period, Haitian upper-and middle-class members heavily politized Haitian folklore and used it to defend Haiti against these stereotypes. Scholars have long discussed the anthropological works of ethno-anthropologist Jean Price-Mars as someone who tried to show the value of Haitian folklore, especially the …

Systematic Barriers To Success: The Impact Of Redlining On Modern Educational Outcomes In Omaha Public Schools, Sarah Sedivy

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The systemic denial of mortgages, loans, and other financial services to specific neighborhoods on the basis of race, a practice known as redlining, has continued to have a disproportionately negative effect on communities of color since its inception in the 1930s. The contemporary impacts of redlining can be seen in ongoing disparities in household income, property values, generational wealth, and more. This paper uses a three-pronged approach to extensively examine the history, application, and implications of redlining, with an emphasis on how the practice affects modern educational outcomes in Omaha public schools. The paper analyzes statistical data from the Nebraska …

Our Silence Will Not Protect Us . . . And Neither Will J. Edgar Hoover: Reclaiming Critical Race Theory Under The New Mccarthyism, Christina Hsu Accomando, Kristin J. Anderson

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

The right-wing attack against critical race theory is the latest manufactured panic designed to whip up supporters of a party beholden to Donald Trump. Since late 2020, hundreds of measures have been introduced across the U.S. to ban antiracism education, critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and any understanding of racism as systemic and embedded in U.S. history and law. While an understandable reaction of educators is to declare that they are not teaching critical race theory, our position is to reclaim critical race theory for the powerful lens it offers in understanding the history of the U.S., the protracted …

Demanding More: 4-H’S Diversity And Inclusion Efforts Are Simply Not Enough, Nicole Webster

Journal of Extension

Several youth organizations, such as 4-H, are reaffirming their commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace due to social and political events in 2020. Despite the national reckoning around civil rights, the author argues that racial and ethnic minorities are still not fully integrated into the 4-H culture. Addressing inclusion presents challenges; however, these can be better addressed when individuals realize the difficult conversations and actions needed to evoke change. The article concludes with a set of action items for the 4-H system, which focuses on investments, accountability, recognition, and transparency.

The Nature Of Anti-Asian American Xenophobia During The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Preliminary Exploration Into Envy As A Key Motivator Of Hate, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

Background. The current Coronavirus pandemic has been linked to a dramatic increase in anti-Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate incidents in the United States. At the time of writing, there does not appear to be any published empirical research examining the mechanisms underlying Asiaphobia during the current pandemic. Based on the stereotype content model, we investigated the idea that ambivalent attitudes toward AAPIs, marked primarily with envy, may be contributing to anti-AAPI xenophobia. Methods. Study 1 (N = 140) explored, through a survey, the link between envious stereotypes toward AAPIs and Asiaphobia. Study 2 (N = 167), …

Black And White Health Disparities: Racial Bias In American Healthcare, Yasmeen Almomani

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

This paper explores the historical implications of race in American society that have led to implicit racism in the healthcare system. Racial bias in healthcare against Black people is a factor in the health disparities between Black and white people in America, such as the gap in life expectancy, infant death, and maternal mortality. Black people are more likely to report racial discrimination from healthcare providers, which is a reason for the decreased quality of care received. The past justifications of slavery, the Tuskegee syphilis study, and the medical experimentations on Black women are horrifying but were considered acceptable in …

Stray Thoughts And Desire Paths—A Dialogue, Jenna Butler, Yvonne E. Blomer

The Goose

In this dialogue, authors, teachers, and environmentalists Yvonne Blomer and Jenna Butler discuss the ways in which our desire paths—our intents for our lives—have changed since the start of the pandemic. Covering women's writing, feminism, daily life during the pandemic, environmentalism, and race, this dialogue is an act of allyship from two women of different backgrounds writing together.

A Look At Asian American Studies, Emery Mckee, Ryan Caragher, Emma Rohrer, Gabe Velazquez

Ethnic Studies Student Zines

Our Zine hopes to cover the multitude of topics discussed in our Intro to Asian American Studies class. Each section is based on a reading relevant to a specific subject covered in the class, whether that be the history of Japanese internment camps or the globalization of the Filipino workforce. After a deeper analysis of the history and tradition in each reading, our zine also focuses on the social, political, and intellectual significance of Asian American articles and stories. There are many significant facts and key ideas that truly speak for themselves on the issues and events being discussed along …

From The Yellow Peril To The Model Minority: A History Of Asian American Immigration, Annabelle Jefferies, Ben Police, Jack Evenson, Sam Stiker

Ethnic Studies Student Zines

Throughout the past semester, our group has read books, interpreted art and propaganda, and grappled with ideas from scholars on the topic of Asian American immigration and assimilation into the society of the United States. The zines that were created in response to these different forms of media discuss this process of immigration and inclusion as a slow, ongoing process that began with Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century. They also investigate this historical process through a lens of prejudice and racism in our country as a result of global geopolitical events, such as the Vietnam War or the …

Introduction To Asian American Studies: Final Zine Project (5), Delaney Tax, Maria Zesbaugh, Ashley Montrezza

Ethnic Studies Student Zines

This zine allowed us to confront the ways in which colonization and its historical implications play into modern race relations. This is especially evident in the ways bodies are valued and devalued based on social location, birthplace, and racial appearance. Our weekly zines confronted the direct interactions between colonial violence and individuals, as well as their communities. We also worked to intentionally contrast this to the western construction of whiteness, and pulled from historical and modern examples of how whiteness has been weaponized against Asian communities in order to further marginalize them. Adjacency to whiteness, however, has also been used …

A Study Of Asian American Issues In The United States, Nicoline Pedersen, Krista Celo, Eden Stilman, Seren Ventullo

Ethnic Studies Student Zines

Throughout this zine you will explore a variety of obstacles that Asian Americans have faced in regards to their immigration and acclimation into American society and culture. Over the last century, individuals from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa have either migrated to America in hopes of a better life, or have been forced out of their homes due to war conflicts or as a necessity for cheap labor. Despite the means of their arrival, Americans have historically maintained an imperialistic outlook that America is the superior country. While the white American believes he is saving these transpacific countries from …

A Brief Journey Through Asian American History, Jordan Rahe, Julian-Ross Fernandez, Jefferson Kiyasu, Dylan Latham

Ethnic Studies Student Zines

In order to understand the complexities of the Asian American experience, readers must be able to comprehend how the past has built a foundation for the treatment of individuals both inside and outside of the Asian community. Based on various academic editorials and books, we have analyzed what we believe to be the most valuable historical facts, stories, and ideas and presented them in a way that provides the most important information along with our perceptions of each topic. This compilation of articles looks to bring largely unknown issues to the forefront of reader’s minds, in a pursuit to create …

(Re) Model Minority: A Discussion Of The Past And Present, Eden Concepcion, Jason Luu, Jannah Orbita, John Tran

Ethnic Studies Student Zines

PURPOSE. The purpose of this zine is to look at historical events that have influenced the way Asian American communities cope with injustices in the United States, and how Asian Americans have been treated throughout history and until now. Throughout this zine, we draw connections between the past and the present– some things may have changed, but others still remain the same. KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR... Analysis of Discriminatory Law Before & After Historical Analysis Satire PANDEMIC. With racial tensions towards Asian American high throughout the world because of COVID-19, it has become relevant to learn about the origins …