Thesis PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.

Th.--Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1996. / Résumé en néerlandais. Notes bibliogr. Bibliogr. p. 307-345.

Following the US Recession and global financial meltdown, many Americans lost their jobs and many more queuing for jobs in the labor market significantly lost their initial prospects of getting employed. Even before the onset of the financial turmoil, the labor market was still not equally receptive of persons of different colors, with the African Americans being the worst affected. The Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Life Course Theory (LCT) are both made up of crucial tenets that were used to explain the disparities observed in awarding of job opportunities in various states across the US. The study used data collected through the Current Population Survey (CPS) administered by the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics; surveys from December 2005, December 2008, and December 2011. It was hypothesized that youthful Americans of Black ancestry were the most likely to be denied a chance at employment, with increasing bias towards the South East; the disparities observed in awarding African Americans jobs decreases across advancing age groups; the rates of unemployment for older adults increase over the study period with racial and geographical biases; and that the likelihoods of employment for black and white Hispanics are similar to the probabilities of unemployment for blacks and whites respectively. Using the SPSS and ArcGIS software to develop logistic regression output and thematic mappings of geographic distribution of employment opportunities to members of black, white, and Hispanic backgrounds, the study found out that 1) there is higher concentration of low-likelihood for blacks’ employment among states in the East, without particular bias towards the South West, 2) older African Americans were more likely to secure employment opportunities than their younger counterparts, 3) the rates of unemployment among older members of society have increased tremendously across the three study periods, with the Western states rapidly emerging as leading zones of employment discrimination among the older cohorts, and finally, 4) the probabilities of unemployment amongst black and white Hispanics were not essentially similar to the likelihoods of either blacks or whites.

The Romani are a largely unknown people group in the United States though their plight world-wide is highly visible. The story of Romani in the United States remains largely untold. This study explored the daily lives of 15 Romani women within the United States. The study investigated questions of historical prejudice, gender roles, educational achievement and barriers to assimilation with in the Romani community. Results of the study highlighted that many Romani women encounter significant barriers inside and outside of their communities that impact their ability to pursue higher education and to fully assimilate into mainstream society due to current and historical prejudice encountered outside of their communities and bias found within their communities.

abstract: Geography, and the social sciences more broadly, have long operated within what is arguably a paradigm of the visual. Expanding the reach of geographical consideration into the realm of the aural, though in no way leaving behind the visual, opens the discipline to new areas of human and cultural geography invisible in ocular-centric approaches. At its broadest level, my argument in this dissertation is that music can no longer be simply an object of geographical research. Re-conceptualized and re-theorized in a geographical context to take into account its very real, active, and more-than-representational presence in social life, music provides actual routes to geographic knowledge of the world. I start by constructing a theoretical framework and methodological approach for studying music beyond representation. Based on these theoretical and methodological arguments, I present four narratives that unfold at the intersections of race and music in the northeast Brazilian city of Salvador. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the troubled neighborhood of the Pelourinho, from the manic tempos of samba to the laid back grooves of samba-reggae, and in the year-round competition between the oppressive forces of ordinary time and the fleeting possibility of carnival, music emerges as a creative societal force with affects and effects far beyond the realm of representation. Together, these narratives exemplify the importance of expanding geographical considerations beyond a strictly visual framework. These narratives contribute to the musicalization of the discipline of geography. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Geography 2011

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF CHRISTIAN H. BRYANT, for the Master of Arts degree in PSYCHOLOGY, presented on 12 NOVEMBER 2009, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: AN EXAMINATION OF THE PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES OF THE ATTITUDES TOWARD BLACK MALES SCALE MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Kathleen Chwalisz This survey-based study was conducted in order to examine the utility of the Attitudes Toward Black Males Scale (ATBM; Bryson, 1998). The sample included 224 undergraduate students from a Midwestern university. A principal components analysis was conducted in order to assess the consistency of the current factor structure of the ATBM with the eight-factor structure proposed in Bryson's (1998) scale construction study. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated between the ATBM and other general and Black-specific racial attitude measures in order to assess the construct validity of the ATBM scale. The results of this study did not support the factor structure of the ATBM as identified by Bryson (1998). Therefore, the utility of the Attitudes Toward Black Males Scale is called into questions as an assessment of general racial attitudes toward Black men based on findings with the current sample.

The experience of transgender people provides a unique opportunity to further our understanding of intersectionality, experienced and expressed through multiple axes of social location. Transpeople change genders in relation to androcentric, middle-class, whitenormative, and heterocentric cultural narratives. My dissertation contributes to our understandings of the interconnections of the social structural contexts of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and of how they shape the meanings we attribute to our experiences of self and identity. In addition, I show how the case of transpeople illuminates how all people draw upon hegemonic cultural constructions of intersecting social locations in processes of creating and understanding themselves. Thus, I provide insights into how individuals actively perform ("do") their own multiple social identities (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) and how they incorporate their perceptions of others' attributions of multiple dimensions of social location. Finally, I suggest how the collective identities of identity-based social movements, such as the Transgender Movement, are rooted in racialized gendered meanings.

Does regulating hate promote racial equality? This dissertation proposes a method for beginning an empirical examination into the benefits and burdens of anti-hate laws. Since prohibiting hate speech necessarily invokes the penal system, a promising approach involves measuring the effects of criminalizing similar conduct, i.e., hate crimes. The effects of criminalization are particularly important given the U.S. history of racialized and colorblind justice and some evidence indicating criminalization may harm racial minorities. Chapter 2 examines whether hate crime laws have the unintended consequence of promoting racial inequality by contributing to racial disparities in arrests. It finds that while police are more likely to recognize assaults as hate crimes when the suspects are white, African Americans are nonetheless significantly overrepresented among hate crime arrestees. Chapter 3 examines how race affects victim perception of potential hate crimes, and how this, in turn, affects police response. While research suggests people tend to have a preconceived notion of the quintessential hate crime in which African Americans are victims, it also shows a negative racial bias in which people ascribe greater culpability and are more punitive towards African Americans. This study looks at how people act under the real-world stresses of crime. Findings provide clear evidence of a tendency to label African Americans as hate crime offenders and to report them to police at significantly higher rates. Further, while African American suspects experience relatively high arrest rates generally, the magnitude of this effect is significantly greater for hate crimes. Chapter 4 explores the nefarious uses of hate crime laws, examining how they may be weaponized to inoculate police and undermine movements for racial justice. Specifically, it looks at the case of “Blue Lives Matter” legislation, which extends hate crime protections to police. Findings reject the officer safety rationale: States with BLM proposals do not differ significantly from other states in terms of violence against police. However, African American arrests do predict these bills, indicating they are a continuation of past police repression. Further research is needed to fully understand how officials enforce hate regulations, and the reverberations of this enforcement on society.

As economic inequality in the United States continues to increase, the ways in which Americans cope with and conceptualize the issue itself as well as the disadvantaged groups affected by it has become increasingly salient features of their political attitudes. While important research has been done, particularly by Bartels (2009), showing that Americans share widespread consensus that economic inequality is a negative feature of American society and that Americans do not harbor any innate antipathy towards the poor, more work needs to be done to understand what activates Americans’ sympathy for the poor. This study, building on Burden and Klofstad’s (2005) assessment into the effects of cognitive and affective priming, seeks to understand how issue and subgroup framing alters political expression. I find that the use of the word “feel” in survey questions—as opposed to the word “think”—makes respondents more likely to hold poor subgroups less accountable for their economic circumstances. However, this differential outcome does not manifest when applied to policy-based questions. This indicates that invoking person- or group-based arguments along with affective signifiers shows the best promise for activating sympathy for the poor among Americans.

This dissertation investigates race as a determinant of health trajectories for immigrants to the United States. Previous research suggests that integration into U.S. society can be detrimental to the health and mortality outcomes of many minority immigrant groups. Popular explanations for post-migration health changes have focused on individual-level mechanisms, such as behavioral changes associated with acculturation. I use multiple sources of data and a variety of quantitative methods to situate these changes in a context of racial inequality for three migrant groups. In my first case, I draw on historical data collected from the Vital Statistics of the United States and the U.S. Census to analyze the changing health trajectories associated with European immigrants’ transition from marginalized minorities to members of the white majority in the early 20th century. My second case draws on restricted-use data from the National Survey of American Life to test how interpersonal and institutionalized racial discrimination influence health patterns of black immigrants from the Caribbean. In my third case, I use population-level birth data from New York City (2000-2010) to investigate changes in birth outcomes associated with elevated anti-Muslim sentiment after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Taken together, these cases demonstrate how racial formation in the United States shapes patterns of post-migration outcomes. I find that marginalized European immigrants exhibited patterns of worsening mortality trajectories, but the overall gap between European immigrants and native-born whites narrowed as racial categories were redefined in the early 20th century. This pattern of intergenerational health improvement contrasts with the segmented trajectories of contemporary Caribbean black immigrants, whose health is shaped by experiences of both interpersonal and institutionalized racism. Similarly, rates of low birth weight births increased for Middle Eastern and Asian Indian immigrants in the decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001, likely due to increased experiences of discrimination. By tying health trajectories and outcome disparities to the construction and stratification of racial boundaries, I advance theory about the "upstream" social causes of health and illness and develop a framework for analyzing the sociohistorical formation of health disparities.