<p> This research attempts to discover teaching principles and practices that create more equitable learning environs for African American students as the most at-risk group in United States schools. The Rhythm of teaching Black students refers to pace-setting and the teacher to student and student to student to interactions that take place during math. The Rhyme of teaching mathematics to African American students is a reference to demonstrating dedication toward all students by providing compassionate, equitable, rigorous, learning environments. This study examines the historical and social similarities between Cambodian American teachers and inner-city African-American students. The purpose of this research is to provide insights into the beliefs held by participants, and the pedagogical practices that assist Black students toward proficiency and advanced proficiency in mathematics.</p>

<p> Cultural beliefs on healthcare in the 21st century by the African immigrants in the United States have contributed to the severity of illnesses in their communities. The results of this research identified the healthcare barriers experienced by members of the Bronx Ghanaian Immigrant Muslim Community (BGIMC) in New York City. The purpose of this research was to investigate the influence of education, immigration status, health insurance status, and cultural beliefs on the BGIMC members' perceived access and willingness to use healthcare services for various ailments. A sample of 156 male and female members of the BGIMC completed the survey questionnaire. The study was grounded in the conceptual frameworks of critical theory and complexity theory. The results of logistic and linear multiple regressions indicated that those with insurance were 9 times more likely to report that they had access to healthcare than those who did not have insurance. Additionally, those with health insurance were almost 7 times more likely to report using healthcare services in the past 12 months. Results of the multiple linear regressions indicated that immigration status, health insurance status, and education levels did not predict willingness to use healthcare when an arm was broken, nor did they predict willingness to use healthcare for a severe fever. However, immigration status, health insurance status, and education levels did predict willingness to use healthcare when experiencing dizziness. Understanding the social and cultural factors related to use of health care services will lead to tailored health insurance and access initiatives for the BGIMC; this increased understanding will also promote positive social change in their community and serve as a model for other African communities in the United States.</p>

<p> The purpose of this research was to examine the link between obesity and stroke rates among African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos. Secondary data set was utilized to test the hypotheses of this study. Previous studies have indicated that the link between obesity and stroke is environment, poor nutrition, and socioeconomic status. Increasing health awareness about obesity and stroke prevention by having health fairs can promote a healthier lifestyle in the community. The study aimed to determine the causes of obesity and stroke among African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos in the underserved population. This research was intended to examine the risk factors that can lead to obesity and stroke among this population. The findings of this research concluded the acceptance of both hypotheses that in the underserved population, obesity and stroke rates are higher in the rural areas; and African American and Hispanic/Latino men have a higher risk of being obese and having higher risk of stroke. </p>

One of the most consistently reported challenges in the education literature is the underachievement of African American males at all levels of the education pipeline - from elementary and secondary schools through to postsecondary education. African American boys are falling behind and they are falling behind early. This research focuses on resources within the home environment that are available to support the educational achievement of African American boys. There are a number of mechanisms through which parental involvement in the home and at school may promote academic success that are being examined: parental involvement in school activities, expectations that parents share with their sons and for which they hold them accountable, and parental trust and support for both their sons and their sons' schools. This research sampled families of African American boys in the eighth grade attending Middle Schools in the North Long Beach area of Southern California. It employed a mixed methods approach in using both questionnaires and surveys for collecting data. Thirty two parents were selected at random and completed questionnaires about attitudes and behaviors related to the home environment that impact their sons' educations. An additional group of randomly selected parents were personally interviewed to gain more in-depth responses. The sample was then divided into two groups according to the STAR Math scores attained by eighth grade boys in the families responding. This measure was used as an indicator of academic success because the STAR test score determines the Math class level for children in the local school district - with those scoring above 325 advancing to Geometry and those scoring below 325 taking lower level classes. The results of the questionnaires and interviews indicate an overall relationship in both groups showing trust and high expectations as being very important in fostering academic success in African American boys in the eighth grade. The consistency of positive home structural factors contributed to the academic success of boys in the families studied in spite of negative factors such as economic deprivation, parental unemployment, previous parental incarceration and lack of transportation.

<p> INTRODUCTION: Hypoxia is a potent stimulus that induces neuropsychological and physical impairments in humans. It is documented that ethnic differences exists across various physiological parameters. There appears to be a varying metabolic response across ethnicities, specifically African-Americans and Caucasians. Purpose: To further elucidate physiological and cognitive performance differences between African-American (AA) and Caucasian individuals (CAU) before, during or after hypoxic and normoxic exercise. Methods: Twelve college aged (18-25) apparently healthy African-American (six volunteers) and Caucasian (six subjects) males took part in two trials consisting of normobaric normoxia and normobaric hypoxia (12% oxygen). Each subject cycled at 50% of their altitude adjusted VO2max (-26% of normoxia VO2max) for one hour after a two-hour baseline. Subjects were monitored for cerebral and arterial O2 saturation, as well as the Trail Making Test A and B (TMT) psychomotor performance. Results: Arterial saturation proved to be significantly higher in AA (86.0&plusmn;4.7) compared to CAU (79.5&plusmn;4.8) during the first 60 minutes of exposure to hypoxia at rest (p=0.039), but not during exercise. Cerebral oxygenation to the left frontal lobe was decreased near the conclusion and 30 minutes after normoxic exercise. TMT B data revealed that CAU (79&plusmn;12.7) had faster scores than the AA subjects (98&plusmn;25.1) at all time points and was significantly different at the 115 minute time point of the hypoxic trial (p=0.024). Conclusion: Data suggests that before, during and after normobaric normoxia and hypoxia trial there is a differential response between AA and CAU in regards to arterial and cerebral oxygenation and psychomotor tests.</p>

<p> Juvenile delinquency continues to be a major social problem in the United States. One of the more salient problems with the juvenile justice system in the United States is its staggering incarceration rate, which poses a significant problem for youth exposed to the juvenile justice system, and the community as a whole. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to understand the perspective of the program facilitators about the effectiveness of the restorative justice program in reducing recidivism for African American males aged 12 to 17 in Baltimore City's urban community. This study relied upon restorative justice theory as conceptualized by Braithwaite as the theoretical framework. Using intrinsic case study design, data were collected from 7 restorative justice facilitators, who participated in face-to-face interviews using semistructured, open-ended questions. Miles and Huberman's qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data and to record emerging themes and patterns. The key finding of this study indicates that facilitators believe restorative justice results in a reduction of the recidivism rate specifically through the conferencing program when Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming is incorporated into the process. According to the program facilitators, the conferencing program is effective in reducing juvenile recidivism as it promotes transparency and openness to all stakeholders through being very clear and upfront on all levels with the juveniles, parents, and volunteers. As such, there are implications for positive social change by involving all the stakeholders&mdash;family, community, policy makers, and juvenile justice practitioners&mdash;that may result in reduced incidences of juvenile offending, thereby promoting safer communities.</p>

<p>This study explored the opinions and feelings of urban African American young adults and sought to investigate their perception of discrimination and negative labeling by agency professionals and the impact it had on their attitude and behavior. Furthermore, it sought to discover how personal and vicarious experiences with discrimination shape youth identity, community help seeking patterns and generate a mistrust of service providers. </p><p> Results found that majority of the subjects reported that they felt mistrust and disconnect from agency professionals based on their personal experiences and those communicated to them by friends and family members. In addition, subjects described a reluctance to get involved or voluntarily engage with law enforcement based on acquired knowledge or past experiences or treatment. </p>

<p>In jazz circles, someone with "big ears" is an expert listener, one who hears the complexity and nuance of jazz music. Listening, then, figures prominently in the imaginations of jazz musicians and aficionados. While jazz scholarship has acknowledged the discourse on listening within various jazz cultures, to date the actual listening practices of jazz musicians and listeners remain under-theorized. This dissertation investigates listening and aural experience in a New York City community devoted to avant-garde jazz. I situate this community within the local history of Manhattan's Lower East Side, discuss the effects of changing neighborhood politics on music performance venues, and analyze social interactions in this scene, to give an exposition of "listening to music" as a practice deeply tied into other aspects of my interlocutors' lives. I engage with cultural anthropology, urban sociology, and media studies, applying insights from those fields while engaging perennial concerns and topics of jazz scholarship: the nature of musical improvisation, and relatedly, the dynamics of listening and aural perception, as well as the complex, changing, but continuing relationship between African American cultural practices and jazz.</p><p>This project makes several contributions to the ethnomusicology of listening and to jazz studies. First, I argue for and demonstrate an ethnographically-informed mode of music analysis: I use ethnographic data on participants' aural experience as the basis for</p><p>fine-grained sound analysis. Second, in attending to the processes that produce alternative, parallel, and sometimes intersecting canons, I locate the work of canon formation in the everyday lives of listeners and reveal its political and ideological implications. Finally, building on the previous two arguments, I propose that listening, though often experienced as subjective and private, takes place in networks of social relationships that listeners constitute both through real-time interaction and through engagements with history. Although scene participants vary widely in their theories of how to listen, it is through interactions around shared aural experiences that they carry on the ethos of the 1960s countercultural and Civil Rights movements and reproduce their investments in the ideas of social and musical marginality in the post-Fordist New York of the early 21st century.</p> / Dissertation

<p>"Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution" examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors' rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony-as-utopia.</p><p>In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution--which was also the beginning of France's unexpected first postcolonial moment--colonial reform, abolitionism, and women's political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women's empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy.</p><p>My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin's <italic>La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires</italic> (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore's <italic>Sarah</italic> (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras's <italic>Ourika</italic> (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the "Creole" colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti's first novel, <italic>Stella</italic> (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, <italic>Stella</italic> imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power.</p> / Dissertation

<p>What happens when the dominant binary categories used to describe American race relations--either "black and white," or "Anglo and Mexican"--are examined contemporaneously, not comparatively, but in relation to one another? How do the long African American and Chicano/a struggles for racial equality and economic opportunity look different? And what role did ordinary people play in shaping these movements? Using oral history interviews, the Texas Labor Archives, and the papers of dozens of black, brown, and white activists, this dissertation follows diverse labor, civil rights, and political organizers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.</p><p>Tracing their movements revealed a startling story. Beginning in the mid-1930s, African American and ethnic Mexican working people across Texas quietly and tentatively approached one another as well as white laborers for support in their efforts to counter discrimination at work, in their unions, and in the cities in which they lived. Such efforts evolved in different ways due to the repression of the early Cold War, but most organizers simply redirected their activism into new channels. By the close of the 1950s, new forms of multiracial alliances were beginning to take hold. Mutual suspicion slowly gave way to mutual trust, especially in San Antonio. There, and increasingly statewide, black and brown activists separately developed robust civil rights movements that encompassed demands not only for integration but also equal economic opportunities and the quest for independent political power.</p><p>The distinct civil rights and labor movements overlapped, especially in the realm of electoral politics. By the mid-1960s, what began as inchoate collaboration at the local level had gradually expanded from its origins in the barrios, ghettos, union halls, and shop floors to become a broad-based, state-wide coalition in support of liberal politicians and an expansive civil rights agenda. At the same time, African American and ethnic Mexican activists were engaged in new waves of organizing for both political power and civil rights, but they encountered opposition from members of their own ethnic groups. Thus the activists' efforts to forge inter-ethnic coalitions coexisted with protracted intra-ethnic conflict. In many cases distinctions of class and political philosophy and tactics mattered at least as much as did ties of ethnicity. Activists learned this lesson experientially: in the trenches, through countless small conflicts over several decades, they slowly separated themselves from their more conservative counterparts and looked to multiracial coalitions as their primary strategy for outflanking their intra-ethnic opponents. Meanwhile, organized labor and white liberals had been searching for allies in their efforts to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from its conservative wing. In the early 1960s, they reached the conclusion that black and brown voters would prove key to their own success, so they gradually transitioned toward civil rights organizing in order to build a coalition with the black and brown civil rights movements.</p><p>After decades of fighting separately and dabbling in experimental partnerships, veteran ethnic Mexican, African American, and white labor and liberal activists finally came together into a powerful statewide Democratic Coalition. Between 1962 and 1964, their collaborative campaign for civil rights, economic opportunity, and political power reached a fever pitch, resulting in the state's largest ever direct action protests, massive door-to-door electoral initiatives, and an ever-deepening commitment by labor to putting boots on the ground for community organizing. In the late 1960s the statewide multiracial coalition reached its apex and began to lose steam. At the same time, local multiracial coalitions continued to thrive, underpinning both the African American and Chicano/a urban electoral mobilizations and the rising Black and Brown Power movements. At the local level and in the short term, black, brown, and white working-class civil rights activists won--they achieved a degree of economic and political democracy in Texas that was scarcely imaginable in the age of Jim Crow just a few decades earlier. But as they won local battles they also lost the larger war.</p><p>Working-class civil rights organizers thus failed in the end to democratize Texas and America. Their goals remain distant to this day. Yet they were themselves transformed by their experiences in the struggle. Most transitioned from near-complete political and economic exclusion to having a voice. Their collective story indicates that scholars have much to gain from studying organized labor, electoral politics, and the African American and ethnic Mexican civil rights movements simultaneously. Doing so not only adds to the emerging historical sub-field of black-brown relations but also makes each of the individual movements look different. It reconnects class to the black freedom struggle, militancy to the ethnic Mexican civil rights movement, organized labor to community activism, and all three movements to the creation of today's urban politics.</p> / Dissertation