<p> This qualitative single case study is designed to address the prevalent issues of disproportional disciplinary actions with African-American males. This study investigates whether culture intersects motives such as race and class privilege when perceptions lead the decision for exclusion and other disciplinary actions with African-American men in an alternative middle school. Numerous studies support the findings suggesting African-American males face discipline more often than any other group of students in schools. Consequently, these students receive alternative middle school placement as punishment and that may be the result of perceptions from other key stakeholders involved with metering out these disciplinary actions. To test this idea of unfair disciplinary actions this study uses qualitative single case design because the results may provide dialogue and opinions that otherwise would not surface. Qualitative research is well suited because it encompasses interviews and interview data. The targeted population consisted of African-American males, teachers, administrators, and other academic stakeholders at an alternative middle school in Little Rock, Arkansas. This research investigates the students' behavior and teachers' control beliefs as those factors correlate with perceptions of the diverse culture that defines African-American males. The investigation purposefully uses CRT because this theoretic framework has been proven to challenge, disclose, and change attitudes regarding race relationships in America. Using CRT as a framework, to review literature, provides a point of reference that links the history and matters of race relations to the present situations with African-American males at an alternative middle school.</p>

Framing a Blaxicana Identity: A Cultural Ethnography of Family, Race and Community in the Valley Homes, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, 1955-1960 (Blaxicana Identity) is set within the construct of identity formation, against a backdrop of color and culture clash, and the social construction of race. The author's narrative will constitute contextual introductions to discussion topics and iterate direct correlations of her lived experience to larger community and cultural accounts that helped to shape aspects of her Blaxicana identity. The individual and community perceptions of what it means and what it feels like to grow up Negro, Mexican and female in an all black town will determine the scope and complexity of the identity formation factors that may be brought forth in Blaxicana Identity. Geographically situated in the Valley Homes housing projects located in Lincoln Heights, Ohio, just north of Cincinnati, this ethnography will engage the area's background, environment and residents in a dialogue with the larger arenas of race and racism, history, migration, critical race theory, interracial marriage, cultural studies and black towns as they inform the aspects involved in the creation of the author's Blaxicana identity. This multi-perspective engagement will produce a cultural ethnographic portrayal of the Valley Homes, its residents and the author and comprise the ways in which the social and cultural phenomenon of mixed-race identity may be constructed, observed and understood - a depiction that may differ from the historical concepts of identity formation based on color and race. This research will draw its conclusions regarding the construction of a Blaxicana identity by using a critical, self-reflexive method of inquiry that incorporates the author's memories, impressions and artifacts from the 1950's. The author's interracial family experience, defined by an African American father from Nashville, Tennessee and a Mexican mother from Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, presents the opportunity to examine what was then, considering the time and place, an uncommon combination.

This study examines trauma, particularly in the thematic contexts of the individual and the community as reflected in her novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. By utilizing the specific theoretical modes of new historicism and trauma theory, the veil of double consciousness imposed on African Americans is explicated and exposes various forms of trauma in the individual and the community. The unspoken atrocities experienced as a result of slavery, Jim Crow, and physical and sexual violence in many of Morrison’s novels, suggest the common thread of trauma. The particular traumas depicted in Morrison’s novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, damage agency, lead to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The scope of this study is limited to the novels Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved as they best illustrate trauma in Morrison’s characters and the damage it causes to agency, leading to detachment and paralysis in the individual. The literary theories of new historicism and psychoanalysis provide cultural and literary context for the novels and allow for a deeper rendering of the characteristics of trauma and provide the context for the term dynamic trauma. of oppression as a mean of dysfunction in the thematic These novels reveal a pathology of trauma disguised as normalcy in the African American community, which leads to disrupted lives, relationships, and communities. Morrison not only depicts these dysfunctional behaviors due to traumatic circumstances but also offers a remedy for the dysfunction—acceptance without acquiescence.

<p>This dissertation draws on American literature from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression to fashion a theory of abandonment, a term that designates both a material reality and a conceptual framework; abandonment names what remains unincorporated into the governing economic, political, gender and racial logic. This study examines, therefore, literary representations of poverty, homelessness, forms of working-class labor, and the work that race and gender do within these conditions of existence. It arises from the intersection of the Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theory that has sought not only to account for the inequitable economic distribution of goods but also to confront the deeper problem of injurious power structures and hierarchies. </p><p>The literature of abandonment discounts the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power; rather, abandonment brings to light the spatial practice of the subject’s struggle for re-signification of such structures. Thus, one can begin to conceive of the abandoned subject by asking what one produces when one inhabits a space typically deemed uninhabitable—by discovering forms of being where one’s being is impossible or illicit—because it is in this act that subjectivity for the otherwise abject becomes possible. This study asks more specifically how literature as an aesthetic practice imagines the production of an abandoned subjectivity and, by extension, alternative social, economic and political structures. </p><p>The driving question of this dissertation is, how can a concept such as abandonment allow one to address without interpellating its subject? That is, can one value the abandoned as such, without incorporating it into an injurious system of evaluation or the prevailing neoliberal discourse of recognition? This entails asking how these processes are represented as being deeply aesthetic and what the relationship is between literary form and “habitat.” That the fact of abandonment is not quite available for representation, at least not without recovering it from itself, but is available for inhabitation, is illustrated in each of the texts this dissertation examines. In bridging socioeconomic material and thematic readings with a study of literary form, this dissertation argues that literature itself performs the very calling into being and inhabitation of this spectral space; which is to say, literary form lays bare the spatial underpinnings of narrative, allowing one to enter into the currents of dispossession rather than their fixed social positions.</p> / Dissertation

<p> Parent income and educational attainment (EA) influence children&rsquo;s eating behaviors (EB). Psychological distress and socioeconomic disadvantage can trigger maladaptive EB that cause obesity (Hemmingson, 2014). Associations between Latino and African American (AA) parents&rsquo; income and EA with the child&rsquo;s EB and psychological distress were explored. Baseline data for 79 AA and Latina 8-11 year old girls were collected via self-report surveys and 24-hour recalls; parent data was derived from demographic forms. T-tests, one-way independent ANOVA, and correlations assessed relationships. Children&rsquo;s total fat intake differed by EA (<i>p</i>=.001) and income (<i> p</i>=.022). Total sugar intake (<i>p</i>=.011) differed by income. Fruit intake differed by income level <i>F</i>(2, 47)=4.93, <i> p</i>=.011. Number of fruit servings was inversely correlated with children&rsquo;s depressive symptoms (DS; <i>p</i>=.009) and trait anxiety (TA; <i> p</i>=.018). Emotional eating (EE) was positively related to DS (<i> p</i>&lt;.001), TA (<i>p</i>&lt; .001), and perceived stress (PS; <i>p</i>&lt;.001). Findings indicate that higher parent EA and income are associated with higher fat intake in children; higher income was associated with higher sugar intake. Fruit consumption seems to decrease with lower income, and higher DS and TA. Further, increased DS, TA, and PS are related to increased EE. Findings are contrary to expectations that poverty and low-education are associated with poor eating habits.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to investigate which of the 7 motivational factors measured in the Student Motivations for Attending University-Revised (SMAU) survey developed by Phinney, Dennis, and Osorio (2006)&mdash;career/personal, humanitarian, prove worth, default, expectation, encouragement, and help family&mdash;if any, contribute to African-American male and Latino male community college completion/graduation at a 2-year community college in Southern California and transfer to 4-year universities. This study employed a survey design and the target population included MOC that were enrolled in a community college in Southern California. This study used a quantitative, correlational method to measure men of color (MOC) students&rsquo; perceptions of persistence, academic success, and motivational factors related to enrollment and persistence at a community college in Southern California. The participants were selected through non-probability sampling in a non-controlled setting utilizing the target population from a community college in the South Bay area of Southern California. The population of African-American and Latino males is steadily rising, thus increasing the prevalence of these 2 ethnic groups at 2-year community colleges. An extensive literature review demonstrated that both male African- American and Latino community college students are the most prominent groups by ethnicity and gender, yet both groups are the least likely to graduate and transfer to 4-year universities. After reviewing the literature regarding MOC in postsecondary education and considering the findings from this study, the foremost leading motivational factor for male African-American and Latino community college students to enroll and persist in college is their desire and priority to help improve the condition of their family&rsquo;s financial status. The second highest rated motivational factor for MOC to enroll and persist in community college is based on their career/personal goals and pursuits. The least motivational factor promoting academic success for these 2 male racial/ethnic groups included feeling pressured by friends and feelings that they had no other alternatives.</p>

A (dis)Assemblage of the Gallery-Growlery exhibition and writing presents itself as a site of a morphological exploration of language, sound, and objects in tandem with the irreducibly venting black expression. Venting, the black expression never seeks wholeness within objects or language itself for it is a thing-in-itself. Its presence affords critical reception to a residue of delimiting forms. All growls eschew verbal objects for the manifestation of pure phonetics. A growl in a gallery is the growl. The growl resounds through the physicality of the objects and gallery. Also, it unwinds the object-among-objects as the phono-present stretches the discursive and existential limits of the Fanonian phenomenon. Hence, the contention and conjunction between physicality and acoustics—the visual and sonic—is the gallery-growlery.

This thesis asserts that Marcus Bruce Christian (1900-1976), a New Orleans, Louisiana, black poet, writer, and historian, used his diary and notes as a site of rhetorical education and as a space in which he constructed and reinforced a Duboisian ethos, a particular type of black identity and character shaped by the political rhetoric of W. E. B. Du Bois. Maintaining this ethos, Christian, an autodidact throughout most of his life, negotiated a society strangled by white supremacist ideology and resisted being interpellated into the negative black identity constructed by a hostile and stifling Jim Crow South.

Master of Science / Department of Family Studies and Human Services - Marriage and Family Therapy / Joyce Baptist / There has been a decline in marriage rates in the U.S., with Black persons showing the lowest numbers in relation to other racial groups. Unlike previous generations where marriage was associated with a sense of familism, today marriage is associated with individual growth and the creation of a fulfilling relationship. To better understand how single Black women manage the tension between individuality and togetherness, a phenomenological study was conducted to explore the lived experience of singlehood of six Black women. Findings support Knudson-Martin‟s (1996) reframed concept of differentiation and previous studies pertaining to family and community values' influence on perspectives about gendered roles in marriage. Gendered power imbalance appears to be a main contributor to ambivalence about marriage although marriage remained to be valued and desired. Findings can prevent helping professionals from imposing our socialized worldview that values intact families, marriage, and gendered power equity on single Black clients. Clinical and research implications are discussed.

Master of Science / Department of Special Education, Counseling and Student Affairs / Doris Wright Carroll / Privilege and its’ impact on the racial and social constructs of fraternity and sorority life is an issue that has plagued the past and continues to determine the future. The examination of literature and the application of both Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminist Theory provides the theoretical framework for defining this issue. While White privilege does not answer all questions regarding race and how it determines sorority and fraternity membership, it does seek to address issues surrounding the traditions and customs in fraternity and sorority life. Additionally, in using a Critical Race Feminist perspective it seeks to address issues regarding the formalized sorority recruitment process used by traditionally White sororities and its impact on multicultural students. As a result of the findings within the literature, the traditional practices fraternities and sororities cling to only further draw discriminatory barriers between traditionally White Greek organizations and potential multicultural members. Furthermore, if this issue is not addressed within both higher education and Greek life it could signal further racially dividing issues. With the impact of biracial and multiracial students becoming more prevalent on campuses, student affairs practitioners must work to redefine what race and ethnicity mean in terms of student affiliation and involvement. Future research must study the impact of segregated governing organizations and their impact on creating cohesion between multicultural and traditionally White fraternal organizations.