Race and Ethnicity Commons^™

"Prescribed To Fuck Off": Examining The Role Of Heterosexual White Men In South Africa From The Perspective Of Seven Students At The University Of Cape Town, Meagan Murray

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Movements towards racial and gender equality in South Africa are experiencing growth because of the increasingly urgent need to rectify the inequalities of apartheid. These movements have destabilized notions of white hegemonic masculinity by creating a dissonance between the socially-constructed privileges that white men are entitled to and their perceived limited access to advancement. The primary responses to this “crisis” have materialized in the construction of male organizations aimed at either redeveloping masculinity or defending male privilege, as well as a desire to distance oneself from the stereotypical male identity. All reactions bear significant weight on the future of South …

Referencing Audre Lorde, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This chapter is close a reading and textual analysis of canonical texts, speeches, and archived audio recordings of Audre Lorde. It embraces Lorde’s many identities, including her identity as a librarian who chose to depart from the library as a means of survival. The author urges reference librarians to study Lorde’s example and learn from Lorde’s choice to act in a space where silence can be transformed into language and action. Acknowledgment of the limitations and opportunities that Lorde teaches us in reference service and institutional structures, may allow for librarians to move toward a realm of justice.

A Blueprint On Self-Exploration To Justice: Introduction To “Referencing Audre Lorde” & “Lesbian Librarianship For All”, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

My approach to social justice problematizes the profession by challenging the librarian to focus inwardly to a space concentrated with identity and self-exploration. To galvanize justice, the librarian may impose her or himself into the reference interaction as an element of praxis.

Black Feminism: Dismantling Tropes And Embracing Sisterhood, Elaine Negron

Student Publications

This paper examines the usage of films like Set it off (1996) and Girl’s Trip (2017) and their sisterhood as friends as a way to dismantle tropes typically used towards Black Women. It is through the story lines of each movie that the main characters contradict certain female tropes and go against the societal norms that women are suppose to follow. Meanwhile, dismantling these tropes leads to the empowerment of sisterhood in these communities.

Underrepresentation Of Women In Sports Leadership: Stereotypes, Discrimination, And Race, Keyleigh N. Wallick

Student Publications

Since the passage of Title IX in 1972, the number of women playing sports has significantly increased; however, the percentage of women in coaching positions has strikingly declined. Before the passage of Title IX, women occupied more than 90% of the coaching positions in women’s sports. In 2009, women held 21% of all head coaching positions in intercollegiate sports for both men and women’s teams and 43% of the head coaching positions for women’s teams (Miller & Flores, 2011). Between 2000 and 2014, 2,080 new head coaching jobs in women’s athletics have opened up and one-third have been filled by …

Girls Can Play: Analysis Of Racial And Economic Barriers Of Entry For Women Of Color In Sport, Quinn I. Igram

Student Publications

In order to understand the racial division of modern sport, it is essential to investigate the barriers to entry that occur for black youth at an institutional level. Inner-city and low-income youth are denied opportunities presented to predominately white middle and upper-class youth, who are awarded the opportunities to advance in the dimension of sport. Low-income children are being pushed out of sports, falling into a track that provides marginal community programming, while the economically advantaged are funneled into the other track of competitive private clubs. Race, economics, and social status become drivers for this segmentation in youth sport.

Although …

The Damaging Effects Of Intersectionality And Layers Of Oppression On United States Female Soccer Players, Brooke L. Priddy

Student Publications

Black athletes face structural and overt racism in all sports across the country, in which the majority of White Americans either chooses to ignore or sometimes even use to victimize certain athletes. They are discriminated against because of the color of their skin, despite achieving the same levels of success and fame as their white competitors. Black athletes must work harder than white athletes for the same end goal, not because of any sort of athletic disadvantage, but because of racial injustice and intolerance. Soccer is a prime example of how Black athletes face racism in sport. Black female soccer …

Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in …

Insecure Hegemony: The Cultural Construction Of 'Righteous Retaliation' In The Hunt For Osama Bin Laden, Marisa Tramontano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the American “authorized discourse” about the hunt for and killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to better understand it as an episode in American cultural hegemony maintenance. Through a structural hermeneutic analysis of presidential speeches and widely-circulated national strategy documents, high distribution news coverage, and entertainment media, alongside one-on-one interviews and focus groups, I illuminate the symbolic mechanics by which the death of Osama bin Laden was constructed as righteous and legitimate retaliatory violence in response to the unprompted, offensive violence of the 9/11 attacks.

Drawing on an array of theoretical approaches including classical sociologists Karl …

Bias-Motivated Homicides: Toward A New Typology, Lindsey Sank Davis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite significant progress towards equal protection under the law for women, LGBT individuals, and people of color in the United States, hate crime remains a pervasive problem, and rates appear to have increased in recent years. Bias-motivated homicide – arguably the most serious form of hate crime – is statistically rare but may have far-reaching consequences for marginalized communities. Data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the National Crime Victimization Survey have suggested that, on average, fewer than 10 bias-motivated homicides occur in the United States per year; however, data from open sources indicate that the rate of bias-motivated homicide …

Toward Culturally Competent Archival (Re)Description Of Marginalized Histories, Annie Tang, Dorothy Berry, Kelly Bolding, Rachel E. Winston

Library Presentations, Posters, and Audiovisual Materials

Influenced by the radical archives movement, panelists discuss their (re)processing projects for which they wrote or rewrote descriptions in culturally competent approaches. Their case studies include materials regarding underrepresented peoples and historically oppressed groups who are marginalized from or maligned in the archival record. Targeted to processors, this session aims to teach participants to apply their cultural competencies in writing finding aids through an introduction to cultural competency framework, the case study examples, and a short audience-participation exercise.

Moving Women Of Color From Reliable Voters To Candidates For Public Office, Christina Bejarano, Wendy Smooth

Latino Public Policy

In recent presidential elections, women, people of color, millennials, and new immigrants shaped the outcomes of those elections. Women of color standing at the nexus of two underrepresented groups in politics- racial minorities and women- demonstrated their commitments to democracy by maintaining their traditions as reliable voters, far exceeding expectations. In this project, we ask what is necessary to move these women of color from reliable voters to candidates for political office and locate our answer with women of color. They are doing much of the work to deepen democratic engagement in communities of color, namely mobilizing voters and political …

Examining The Meaning Of Course Evaluation, Tyesha Stewart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teaching evaluations significantly influence faculty members’ annual evaluations and progress toward tenure and promotion within academic programs in higher education. Those with consistently strong, positive, teaching evaluations have been deemed effective instructors and often validated with increases in salary, teaching awards, and promotion and tenure. This is especially the case when strong course evaluations are received in addition to documented scholarship and research activities and positively evaluated professional service. However, questions are being raised about the meaningfulness of students' ratings of course instruction. Do these measures effectively assess competence as instructors or do they measure other unknown processes in the …

The Torch (June 2018), Crtp

Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter

Civic and Community Engagement | Civil Rights and Discrimination | Education | Gender and Sexuality | Inequality and Stratification | Politics and Social Change | Public Policy | Race and Ethnicity

Recommended Citation

Baldwin, Brandon and Civil Rights Team Project, "Torch (August 2013)" (2013). Torch: The Civil Rights Team Project Newsletter. 58. http://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/torch/58

Bullies And Allies Near The Playground: Mothers' Experiences Of Aggression In Their Children's Schools, Mara Vicente Robinson

Dissertations

Despite an increasing understanding of the importance of both parent-involvement and aggression among women, there appears to be little understanding of how these two areas influence each other; specifically, the lack of literature examining the extent to which female guardians experienced aggression from other female guardians and the effect it had on their involvement in their children’s schools. In an effort to investigate the extent to which aggression was prevalent among female guardians, the factors that influenced the aggression, and the effects of that aggression on women’s involvement in their children’s education, a convergent parallel mixed methods design was used …

Gendered Reproductive Negotiation And Family Formation: Latino/A Parents And Voluntarily Childless Couples In Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, Jessica Lott

Anthropology Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation explores tensions between the empirical reality that Latino/a birth rates have been slowing in the United States since the Great Recession in 2007 and American discourse that presumes Latinos/as are a fairly homogenous group with “excessively” high fertility rates. This study is an intervention in the literature on Latino/a reproduction that assumes large family size as well as the literature on voluntarily childless couples, who are generally assumed to be Anglo in the American context. I explore these tensions with the case study of middle-class heterosexual Latino/a couples in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. I compare voluntarily childless Latinos/as with …

Acknowledgement, The Zine Team

New and Dangerous Ideas

The editorial team’s acknowledgement of Dr. Mina Chung’s contribution to the publication of the journal.

Dear Students Of Color, Melissa Mota

New and Dangerous Ideas

Why are we hated for the things that we cannot control? Why is the killing of a black man just another sequel? Why don’t black lives matter?

Sensuality, Sara Slowik

New and Dangerous Ideas

My quilt is an intimate object that explores sexuality, feminism, beauty, and the vulnerability of women. I explored these topics through hand-stitching sensual images onto squares of fabric, which I then sewed into a quilt. There is a conflicting connection between the security of a quilt and the vulnerability of the images. In my Mixed Media class, I explored the ways in which society's views on nudity causes tension between security and vulnerability. Sensuality is a taboo topic, yet it fills the media. Where is the line between sexualizing women and embracing their bodies and beauty? This quilt was created …

Letter From The Editor, Lily Schenk

New and Dangerous Ideas

A summary of the first issue of New and Dangerous Ideas.

On Apocalypses: 11.9.16, Raffi Altman-Allen

New and Dangerous Ideas

I wrote this piece as my way of trying to come to terms with the most recent presidential election. I needed to process how weird it was that something so impactful and terrible had happened, but everyday life didn't stop existing. My hope is that this poem will offer encouragement to those of us involved in social justice work in the wake of the election. I would also want this to act as an acknowledgment that in other places in the world people are living in war-zones, surrounded constantly by death and destruction, and still get up in the morning …

Lotus Blossom, Meg Dela Dingco

New and Dangerous Ideas

In making Lotus Blossom, I hoped to bring light to the fact that Asians do face racism and how Asian women, in particular, have been fetishized. There are many misconceptions that racism is only violent in specific ways, such as the genocide of Indigenous people or much of America being built on the slavery of Blacks and African Americans. Through ｌｏｔｕｓ ｂｌｏｓｓｏｍ, I wanted to show that racism isn't based only on physical violence (although I did cover the demographics of Asians when it comes to being victims of sexual assault), it is also about history.

Table Of Contents

New and Dangerous Ideas

Photocopy of the Table of Contents.

No Te Pierda, Xante Chalwell

New and Dangerous Ideas

The Dominican Republic is globally portrayed as a paradise. Tourists flock from every corner of the earth to experience the glamorized side of the Dominican Republic. However, few venture out to the reality. The reality that is a two-tier caste system, exemplified by the city of Punta Cana. Security guards and gates separate the two starkly different realities of this nation.

Nasty, Paulina Kobylar

New and Dangerous Ideas

There are numerous ways to combat institutionalized oppression, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and violence. One way just so happens to be through the art. This piece explores identity groups who are discriminated against every day, which President Trump has only emphasized through his actions and words. It questions why the history of our country has divided people by the color of their skin, why powerful men can say what they please about the female body, why heterosexuality is the only sexual orientation, why people should fall on either side of a gender binary, and why violence has continually …

Black Life Mater: Debunked!, Asia A. Carter-Lamb

New and Dangerous Ideas

The Black Lives Matter movement emerged in 2012 to combat racial targeting after the death of Trayvon Martin. The purpose of the movement, according to the Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles, is to serve as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” and “an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” From meetings with Democratic National Convention leaders, to attending a meeting at the White House at the invitation of the President, the Black Lives Matter movement …

Different Tongues, Skyler Moncada

New and Dangerous Ideas

I wanted to share my experience as an individual who often intervenes in challenging or dangerous situations who was transformed into a bystander by a familiar situation that occurred in an unfamiliar setting. While my study abroad experience was undoubtedly one of the best moments in my life, it brought a lot of discomfort in the forms of different cultures, settings, peoples, and expectations.

Afrobeat, Elfreda Hoff

New and Dangerous Ideas

My dance is called Afrobeat. You may ask, what is Afrobeat? Afrobeat is a unique style of dance and popular music embracing elements of African music, jazz, soul, and funk. I used a mixture of African songs that focus on romance, self-love, and acceptance. I ended my dance with a powerful song that talks about always pushing through no matter what the struggles and hard times will be.

Prisoner Of America, Kat Vicente

New and Dangerous Ideas

I wanted to expose the fact that many understand that we do not live in a just world but they do nothing to fight against it either, which makes them part of the problem. It just shows that you can know something is wrong, but if you chose not to do anything about it, then you have sided with the oppressors.

It’S Not Because I’M Black, Judith Suffrard

New and Dangerous Ideas

This piece is my way of responding to the accusations that a lot of minoritized peoples receive. Too often, they are asked to explain why they are offered an amazing opportunity. They do not owe anyone an explanation as to why they were chosen any more than their white counterparts would. It takes away from the joy of their success and can motivate them to avoid opportunities for success in the future.