This creative project has been a poetic attempt to deal with the inner experience of black culture. Many schools of thought have been explored in relating the peculiar plight and circumstances that surround the black man in American society today. This study follows the conditions and thoughts of the black man during slavery up until the present day in America. The topics explored are: On Slavery, On The Ghetto, On Equality, On The Believers, On Black Education And Miseducation, and On Black Beauty.Much of the poetry and interpretations in this creative project speaks directly to black people. However, a large proportion speaks directly to white people; hopefully it will stir both race's social imagination to right the critical racial problems that plague the United States.

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Transracial adoption occurs when a child of one race is adopted by parents of another race. Transracial adoption increased in the 1960s as racial integration policies developed. In the 1970s, however, transracial adoption became a controversial issue. The National Association of Black Social Workers posed several problems with this practice such as institutional racism, cultural genocide, and providing inadequate coping skills to combat racism.This study examines the racial identity of White parents who adopt transracially or inracially. It provides a racial identity profile to determine if White parents who adopt a Black or Biracial child encourage the transracially adopted child to experience Black culture. Currently, adoption agencies utilize some selection process for parents who adopt transracially. This study will further examine the White parents' racial identity and the level of commitment they have to exposing the transracially adopted child to Black culture in an effort to instill a positive Black racial identity in the adopted child. / Department of Counseling Psychology and Guidance Services

There is no abstract available for this thesis. / Department of Communication Studies

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of Project BIG on the self-concept and black pride of urban black children at the fourth-grade level. The study was conducted as a part of Project BIG (Black Image Growth), a Model Cities-supported inservice social studies program, which emphasized the concerns and contributions of black people in the study of Indiana history. The curricular emphasis was implemented by project teachers who used image-rehabilitation social studies materials developed in consultation with Project BIG directors.The sampling population was restricted by grade level and Model Cities School membership. Enrollment in a graduate course, "Seminar in Elementary Education," and participation in bi-weekly teacher training workshops during the 1971-72 school year were additional requirements for the teachers. Four of the original twelve project teachers met these criteria. Students of these four teachers were considered the experimental group. Students from the remaining nineteen Model Cities fourth-grade classrooms were considered the control group.

When in 1928 Alain Locke coined the phrase "social document fiction" to describe W.E.B. DuBois' 1911 novel Quest of the Silver Fleece, he magnified a tenuous interplay between aesthetics, politics, and social science that underpins nineteenth and early twentieth century black intellectual activity. For Locke, social document fiction describes the small body of literature that, although important as "sociological" treatises, had yet to achieve the aesthetic sophistication that writers of the Harlem Renaissance would master. Even in his dismissal, Locke's phrasing suggests that black authors had succeeded in connecting two representational forms that continue to be positioned as polar opposites: those that use objective observation to index social life (surveys, statistics, photographs, and catalogs) and the imaginative realm of fiction. Indeed, in Quest of the Silver Fleece, DuBois combines technical analyses of agriculture, Southern economy, and Post-Reconstruction education with tales of magic cottonseed in order to convey a social world that remained opaque to positivist analysis. Belonging to neither the sphere of slave narratives, domestic family romance, or Realism, social document fiction combines formal innovation with scientific discourse to produce racial knowledge that exceeds the nineteenth century's emergent regimes of truth. This understudied genre of literature invites us to consider a simple but fraught question: what does it mean to think of social document fiction as a tool for the study of black life? This dissertation answers this question by reconstructing African Americans' responses to key moments between 1850 and the late 1920s when visual technology, like the microscope, the photograph, and film, joined with emerging fields of natural history, sociology, and anthropology to render black subjects as intelligible objects of scientific inquiry. Immersed in this "racial data revolution," blacks grappled to identify a strategy for transmitting new "facts of blackness." I consider social document fiction as an important strategy for reassembling racial epistemologies and reorienting the public's racialized gaze. I extend this genre beyond the work of DuBois to consider how literature by Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs, and Zora Neale Hurston each manifest a struggle to articulate a poetics and politics in relationship social science.

Black women in the United States belong to several demographic groups that are marginalized and devalued by society (Fleming, 1983; Helms, 1979; Hargrove, 1999). Membership in marginalized groups (i.e., race, gender, or class) and feelings about belonging to such groups may have a significant impact on the identity development of Black women and their body image satisfaction (Turner, 1982; Helms & Richardson, 1997). For groups experiencing multiple sources of oppression, multiple factors should be examined while exploring body image satisfaction (Thomas, Witherspoon, & Speight, 2004). This study examines body image and racial body attitudes of Black women through the constructs of racial identity, feminist attitudes, and socio-economic status (SES). Using several sampling methods, the researcher recruited 164 participants from the student population at the University of Texas at Austin and from predominately-Black local churches. Four hierarchical regression procedures assessed the impact of the predictor variables (racial identity, feminist attitudes, and SES) on the outcome variables (body image and racial body image) as they were added to the equation. Results indicated that racial identity was not predicative of body image attitudes; however, racial identity was predictive of racial body image attitudes. Feminist attitudes did not predict body image, but did predict racial body image. SES was divided into two variables--income, and racial diversity composition of high schools attended by participants. Income levels were predictive of neither body image nor racial body image among this sample of Black women. However, the racial diversity composition of high schools attended by these participants did significantly affect racial body image. Additionally, racial diversity of high schools significantly moderated the relationship between racial identity and racial body image. This study suggests that racial identity and racial diversity of environment is predictive of racial body image. Furthermore, racial features are more salient to Black women and may not be captured on the frequently used body image attitudes measures. / text

This dissertation comprises a literary investigation of the way in which Toni Morrison is able to transcend stereotypes associated with African American masculinity within a selection of her works namely, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Paradise. I apply Carl Jung’s transcendent concept of the paradoxical Self as a lens through which to analyse Morrison’s different representations, illustrating how this concept affects the formation of identity and an understanding of masculinity. I also make use of Frantz Fanon, who suggests that Jung’s concept of the Self is a way in which black men are able to understand their experience of the world, in that such an experience is paradoxical in nature. It is this paradoxical experience of the world that I argue Morrison highlights in her male characters. In examining Morrison’s representations of masculinity, I also illustrate the intersection of race and gender and how this intersection affects identity creation, given the unique position that African American men occupy within American society. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 515-535). / Microfiche. / 2 v. (536 leaves), bound 29 cm

The Black population in the United States is undergoing a significant transformation. Over the last four decades, the African immigrant population has increased from 130,000 to 2 million, making them one of the fastest growing groups in the United States. Yet, notably absent from much of the discourse on how immigration is changing our society is a serious engagement with the dynamic changes happening within the country’s Black population. This dissertation examines how these demographic realities are experienced in young people’s daily lives. I use the case of low-income, adolescent children of West African immigrants to understand how processes of immigrant integration and racialization unfold generationally across racial and ethnic lines. I focus specifically on their identity-work and acculturation in the context of families, local institutions, and transnational social fields. Methodologically, I draw on ethnographic observations and interviews with 71 second-generation West African teenagers in three New York City public high schools. The dissertation consists of five substantive chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the ethnic and racial identifications of second-generation West Africans, some of the meanings they make around these identities, and begins to delve into the contextual mechanisms shaping these identities, namely their families, neighborhoods and law enforcement. Chapters 3 and 4 respectively analyze the role of transnational visits to parent home countries and religion on acculturation and understandings of Blackness and Africanness, among other identities. The final chapter, Chapter 5, explores three mechanisms shaping the selective acculturation of African immigrant youth: adoption of American cultural features, maintenance of ethnically distinct features, and the introduction of African cultural forms. My research makes three contributions. First, by placing adolescent children at the center of my analysis, I show how these young people are both making and made by a unique sociohistorical and political context that has significant consequences for their racial and ethnic identity-work. Second, it contributes to understandings about the relationship between socioeconomic status and second-generation immigrant integration. Contrary to arguments that second-generation identification and acculturation are patterned by class, I find that low-income African immigrant youth selectively acculturate into American society and maintain strong ethnic identities similar to their middle-class counterparts. The third contribution provides evidence that as immigrants, their children and their host communities continually interact through institutions like schools and neighborhoods, a mutual cultural reconstitution process occurs that fundamentally transforms both immigrants and the cultural landscape from which communities in the host society fashion an “American” identity. Taken together, in shedding light on second-generation Black immigrant racialization processes, this dissertation challenges assumptions about low-income Black youth and offers a dynamic, agentic and relational understanding of immigrant integration. It also highlights how broader meanings of immigrant integration and Blackness in the United States are fundamentally changing.