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This study explores creative expression as a form and function of activism, self-determination, self-actualization, community transformation, and cultural resilience/survival. Initiating this probe into the vast topic, the study begins with the following set of research questions: What is the highest responsibility of African artists? Is it to the work of art itself—to pursue an object perceived as an island of form and symbol with little or no reference to other life experiences that lends itself to urgent, relevant social interpretation; is it to identify and promote one’s self as an individual seeking self-glorification and or commendation, to prove humanity and/or worthiness to others, or to intensify the advancement toward the total liberation of all African people? This decidedly theoretical endeavor primarily concerns itself with African creative expressions (literary creations, cultural performance, visual and musical expressions) within the constructed boundaries of the United States of America that included not only a historical overview of the earliest extant Black cultural creations, but also an evaluation of the socio-historical and political context in which African artists—with distinctive attention on musicians and visual artists—flourished within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including those contemporary artists who continue to thrive in the twenty-first century. Among other issues, this treatise specifically ponders relative to the moral and ethical obligation of African artists’ is the challenge African creatives face in making political and creative expressions synonymous. / African American Studies

This dissertation analyzes and broadens the discourse regarding the impact of culture and the emergence of the social movement by focusing on some of the links between culture and social movements. Drawing upon the idea of cycle of protests this work explains how African Americans were able to materialize, communicate, and ultimately sustain separate identities under antagonistic social conditions. Critical to the understanding of this work is the role the "free space" had in shaping the identity of both African Americans and the movement which occurred as a result of their attitudes. The free space can be described as a protected area, haven, or a small-scale setting which provides activist autonomy from dominant groups where they can nurture oppositional movement identities. This study is a multifaceted account of the Black Greek-letter organizations that explains the creation of these organizations within the Black community. There are four steps or levels which were examined in order to understand the rise or the establishment of the Black organization as a means of social protest. They are: 1) mediating factors or social grievances within a community, 2) the creation of the cultural free space, 3) the framing of the organization in relation to other social movements, 4) the personal orientation or cultural affiliation (African agency) of the organizations' members. Subsequently, this study analyzed how internal conflicts, hostile social and political environments, the creation of new organizations, and the dissemination of community grievances combine to create an atmosphere which allowed the African American community to create its own separate conscious identity. By dissecting the anatomy of the social movement and the interrelated patterns that define them one will be able to recognize and ultimately predict the rise of future social movements. / African American Studies

This research investigates the role of Afrocentric consciousness within African Aesthetics as it relates to liberation for African American communities, more specifically young black millennials. “Welsh-Asante’s Nzuri Model of Aesthetics” is utilized as a theoretical guide to evaluate Hip-Hop artist’s Afrocentric location or lack thereof. Kendrick Lamar’s album titled “To Pimp a Butterfly” is closely examined in this thesis for its lyricism, aesthetics shown in cover illustration, and music production. This close analysis of “To Pimp a Butterfly” serves as an archetype or manifestation of Welsh-Asante’s “Nzuri” model in Hip Hop form. This thesis analyzes “To Pimp a Butterfly” to assert the notion of spirituality as the key component to black liberation. Other Hip-Hop artists such as Kanye West, NWA, Tupac Shakur, and DMX are critiqued and measured for its Afrocentric location; determining whether the artistic production of these artists upholds an Afrocentric consciousness. Ultimately, this thesis argues that in order for African art to liberate African (American) communities, the art must have spirituality at the center of its artistic production. Because Afrocentricity is used to place African culture, values, and ideologies at the center of its own reality, an Afrocentric consciousness can be used as a tool to evoke a conscious transformation that aids in decolonizing European thought. Ultimately, this research adds to the conversation of Hip Hop music as an art that can be spiritually healing in its process of awakening one’s African consciousness in the wake of cognitive hiatus. / African American Studies

Properly understood, Africana Studies is a stand-alone "discipline." One that goes beyond, and disengages the normative boundaries and understandings of Western disciplinarity. This work is premised on such an understanding of autonomy. It reifies such a proposition by compiling scholarly literature on the subject of Africana intellectual traditions as a point of departure for articulating a rationale for viewing Africana Studies' disciplinary history as inclusive of the expansive tradition of Africana intellectual thought. It posits several generations of thinkers associated broadly with what can be referred to as Africana Studies have determined that African intellectual traditions should influence and often provide the methodological direction for disciplinary Africana Studies. It assembles much of the literature that attempts to contextualize disciplinarity firstly, and then those that theorize connections of Africana Studies disciplinary work to intellectual traditions arising out of the African experience. Through a process of culling the intellectual commitments of Western structures of knowledge from general intellectual historical texts and other disciplinary histories, this work situates its development of communities of thought and their academic and ideological legacies. From there it assesses how Africana thinkers understood these knowledge formations, a process Cedric Robinson considers to be the beginnings of a Black intelligentsia. The combination of all these reviewed literatures will be analyzed to reveal why and how, if at all, Africana thinkers have developed work that contributes to the construction of its own disciplinary space--with its concomitant methodological considerations. / African American Studies

The aim of this critical interpretive work is to demonstrate the leadership, guidance, and guardianship of Harriet Tubman as factual productions of historical memory as a soldier, Underground Railroad conductor, organization founder, and Women’s rights campaigner. Thus, this study is a meta-interpretation and historical narrative account based on a montage of common facts about Tubman’s life as re-examined in an Africological frame. By surveying the historical and social data related to Tubman’s life this work lays the ground for an authentic account of the role Harriet Tubman played as an agent, in the Afrocentric sense, as she carried forward her self-given obligations to liberate her people. Using many of the commonly known experiences of Tubman’s life I applied cosmological, epistemological, aesthetics, and axiological canons to reveal the critical core of an interpretive memorial narrative of Tubman as a social movement leader. / Africology and African American Studies

<p> The purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate the perceptions of African American farmers&rsquo; regarding the use of organic farming as a viable business model to prevent land loss. The exploratory case study design was used to explore the perceptions and opinions of 13 African American participants regarding their experiences farming. Interviews, field notes, and observations were used to collect the data, and the data were analyzed to identify themes. The study results indicate that discriminatory practices, little access to government aid, and ineffective business models are reasons for land loss. The findings also show that organic farming is a sustainable solution that African American farmers can use to impede land loss. Based on the study results, leaders in the African American farming community are encouraged to adequately address the issues of the organic farming in the African American community, including discrimination, lack of knowledge about organic practices, and infrastructure issues. The results of this study can be used as the basis for quantitative research that involves gathering information from a wider range of African American organic farmers. Research could also be conducted to investigate whether farmers of other ethnicities have faced the phenomenon explored in the current study.</p>

<p> This study builds on research that explains <i>why</i> differences in drug arrest rates exist across space and by race, and sheds light on <i> how</i> these differences are produced. By identifying police organizational arrangements and practices associated with race-specific drug arrest rates, this research highlights the influence law enforcement agencies have on producing drug arrests, and identifies potential mechanisms that help to explain how disproportionate drug arrest rates across space and by race are produced. Using data gathered from the Law Enforcement Management and Administration Statistics: 2000 Sample Survey of Law Enforcement Agencies, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data: Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race 1999, 2000, and 2001, and the 2000 decennial Census for city-level demographic information, findings demonstrate that police organizational arrangements and practices influence drug arrest rates.</p><p> Key findings from this study indicate that (1) the presence of specialized drug unit personnel and the practice of police agencies supplementing their budgets with drug asset forfeitures are significantly associated with higher drug arrest rates. The positive associations are twice as strong on the black population as the white population; (2) indicators of bureaucratic conditions of structural control, structural complexity and officer diversity are associated with drug arrest rates; and, (3) the practice of police agencies supplementing their budget with drug asset forfeitures is not significantly associated with black or white drug trafficking arrest rates, but is significantly and positively associated with black and white drug possession arrest rates. This indicates that drug asset forfeiture programs may not be achieving their originally intended goals of reducing drug crime by attacking the economic viability of the drug trade (i.e., drug trafficking), and provides preliminary evidence that drug asset forfeiture programs incentivize police agencies to target low level drug users, and minority drug users more specifically.</p>

<p> African American males are typically subjected to unbelievable barriers and negative trends, which include institutional racism, discrimination, multigenerational poverty, lack of education, chronic unemployment, and fatherlessness. These findings are rooted within historical contexts that paint a picture of American schooling filled with the denial of educational opportunities for African Americans. However, using a critical lens these descriptors are challenged and dispelled by critical educators, who examine the bleak historical and contemporary circumstances that African Americans and other communities of color experience as a result of structural inequality perpetuated by white-dominated systems of power. In this study, the framework of Critical Race Theory is used to make sense of how race and racism shape the experiences of historically oppressed people, and to tell the story of eight African American high school males in a Northern California city, who describe factors that contributed to their failure and success as high school graduates, and how these experiences shape their college pursuits. This study uses the methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology as a tool to focus on the voices of African American male students in an effort to centralize these voices. This ensures that educators are not speaking for these students, but rather are listening to their stories.</p>