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This research examines connections between race, ethnicity, and professional baseball. I use a multi-method approach looking at secondary source data on player positions and contemporary stacking, media analysis, fan narratives and sport blogs in the two contexts of Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I find that minorities are well represented in leadership positions and portrayed positively by the media, but that some racial inequality still exists. Whites and light-skinned Latinos are more likely to hold leadership roles than blacks and dark-skinned Latinos. In addition, media narratives reinforce the mind/body dualism by emphasizing the character make up of white players while highlighting the physicality of darker skinned players. Despite this evidence, fans from all ethnic and racial groups spoke highly of sport as a space that represented racial progress and a place where they felt comfortable are interacting with others who were different from themselves. These narratives were closely connected to fans' desires to maintain positive emotions within the leisure context of sport. Ultimately, I argue that baseball can serve as a site of racial progress and change but that it does so partially within a narrow cultural context. Baseball thus alters symbolic meanings of race but simultaneously misses important opportunities to make deeper social change at the material level. / Sociology

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Structural and systemic mechanisms reinforce institutionalized racism, whiteness, and white supremacy in the United States. These mechanisms prove adaptable and resilient, shifting and changing to continuously restructure and reinforce the material reality that people experience within a racialized social order. White people's incomprehension of complicity in racism and privilege, along with color-blind ideologies, perpetuate racialized disparities resulting from this social order and render white superiority as "normal" and "universal." This underlies an often internalized sense of normative, white American identity interconnected with racism and white supremacy. In a society where many white Americans remain sheltered from and/or resistant to acknowledging the material realities of institutionalized racism and white supremacy, how and why do some white people become racially aware and take action in favor of equity? That was the focus of this research project. In applying a multifaceted theoretical and methodological framework rooted in critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, grounded theory, and narrative approaches to the analysis of 33 interviews of white Americans, it emerged that the process of becoming racially aware is a complex process of ongoing identity (re)construction. Participants actively push against a normalized white identity to (re)construct an alternative white, racially aware identity, making sense of this identity (re)construction through three components of this process: (1) becoming aware through several stages; (2) making sense of the meaning of being racially aware; and (3) engaging in social action. Together, these components formulate this process of identity work and expand existing critical whiteness studies scholarship by deepening our understanding of how some white Americans attempt to deconstruct systemic inequities through their own identity (re)construction. Such understandings inform potential interventions that could be utilized for collective social change.

Race and Christianity are inseparably intertwined in the U.S., past and present. While there has been much scholarship at this intersection recently, this study focuses on less explored areas: the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)--the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, and the somewhat neglected period between 1970-2000. The objective: ascertain how Southern Baptist leadership attempted to address the "problem" of race during this period. Of special significance is the transition during these years from more moderate/conservative leadership to a Fundamentalist/Conservative regime. This study focuses in particular on the Race Relations Sunday (RRS) initiative promoted and observed annually by Southern Baptists beginning in 1965. I accessed archives of the RRS materials and used a grounded theory method approach to analyze the content of these documents. After hundreds of documents had been coded and analyzed, I found that: 1) the SBC saw individual-level sin as the primary cause of racism and racial inequality throughout the 30 years, but there was also some expression of institutionally embedded causes earlier on—a focus that became almost non-existent by the 1990s; 2) the way the SBC tried to diversify changed as the decades passed, from attempts to integrate churches or create multiracial churches to recruiting or creating majority non-white churches; 3) the pursuit of individual- and small group-level racial reconciliation was evident and pronounced throughout the thirty years; an alternate solution calling on white people to pay the price of giving up their unjust privileges and advantages was found somewhat in the earlier years, but nearly disappeared in the later years; 4) "Observing" Race Relations Sunday became less about concrete action, and changed into a more passive, positive public relations effort as time went on; 5) The goal or hoped-for outcome was "improved race relations" all along, with the colorblind approach coming to more prominence as the years passed; a parallel emphasis on establishing justice and equality was apparent in earlier years, but less so in later years. I take up the problem of defining "the race problem" for the SBC and our society in the concluding chapter. / Doctor of Philosophy / This study focuses on Southern Baptists--the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, and their attempts to address racial issues through observance of a "Race Relations Sunday" initiative. Of special significance is the transition during the years studied (1970-2000) from more moderate/conservative leadership to fundamentalist/ conservative leadership. The annual Race Relations Sunday materials were coded and analyzed. The findings included that the race-centered focus was primarily on individual-level sin throughout the 30 years, with whatever focus on society-wide issues fading over the years. Also, the SBC stopped focusing so much on integrating or creating multiracial churches and turned the focus to majority non-white churches joining the denomination.; individual racial reconciliation was a focus throughout; any expectation that whites pay a price to make things right nearly disappears in the later years. Race Relations Sunday became less about community action and more about passive, positive public relations. And an ill-defined hope to "improve race relations" became the almost sole focus as earlier concern for justice and equality faded. The problem of defining "the race problem" is taken up in the concluding chapter.

No / Well-informed, thoughtful and transnational in its perspectives, Downing and Husband¦s work is likely to become the key text in the field. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of race and representation - Professor Daya K. Thussu, University of Westminster, UK The Media play a diverse and significant role in the practical expression of racism and in the everyday politics of ethnicity. Written by two veterans of research on media and 'race', this book offers a fresh comparative analyses of the issues and sets out the key agendas for future study.

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This thesis explores the intersections between practices of epistemic production and distribution and material violence. Following the work of Sylvia Wynter, a framework of "genre" is engaged to provide an account of intersectional social identities, disproportionately distributed hegemonic violence (including both state and non-state actants), and the traditions and technologies of anti-colonial theoretical modeling, material praxis, and political work engendered by the rich, interdisciplinary body of Black Feminist thought. To address the continued practices of social, political, and material violence which sustain the Wynterian onto-epistemological "Overrepresentation of Man," an emergent archipelagic politics of heterogenous coalition-building presents a viable path of becoming for liberatory political projects. / Master of Arts / Racialized violence and state violence against racial minorities enjoys a long history within the United States and remains a topic of both popular controversy and political urgency. In more recent years, owing in part to several high-profile cases which have managed to garner significant media attention, a cultural conversation has emerged around topics such as representation, cultural biases, police brutality and militarization, and the Black Lives Matter movement (among others) has managed to inject popular American discourses on race with a more pointed critical edge. While cases of Black men’s unjust deaths have galvanized much of this revitalized political discourse, Patrisse Khan-Cullors reminds us that Black Lives Matter is not “just about boys and the police,” but rather addresses a problem which is part of a deeper systematic intersection of race, sex/gender, class and so on. Sylvia Wynter’s concept of “genre” provides a framework through which to explore these and other intersections, account for racialized violence, and to think toward the political work required to move toward a more liberatory and just frame of social existence.

This study builds on previous research that demonstrated that disabled men and racial/ethnic minority men are more likely than non-disabled white men to work in female-dominated occupations, while at the same time not reaping the same privileges in those occupations as non-disabled white men do. Using an intersectional approach and a large, nationally representative dataset, this study explores how race, gender, and disability intersect to sort workers into occupations. It also examines how advantage and disadvantage cluster with regards to income inequality within and across occupation types. My research finds that disability has an impact on how people are sorted into occupations; however, that impact varies with race as well as by gender. In addition, disability leads to income disadvantages for disabled white men, but has no additional impact on the earnings of white women and racial/ethnic minority men and women. Race has a larger impact on the earnings of racial/ethnic minority men than on racial /ethnic minority women; the latter are already disadvantaged based on their gender. Class, measured by education and professional occupation, had the strongest impact on workplace outcomes both occupation and income for Hispanic men. / Ph. D.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2999-01-01