This thesis examines the expression of anger and aggression in interactions of 6 black and 4 white female siblings on family sitcoms from the 1980s, 1990s and the 2010s. The interactions were examined to determine whether black girls on TV sitcoms were depicted as more conflictual than their white counterparts, whether the content of the portrayals of black girls differed from white girls based on racialized gender stereotypes related to female anger and aggression, whether these depictions changed over three eras of television ranging from the 1980s-2010s, and finally, whether birth order and relationship to the girl (family vs. non family) determined whether relationship context influenced conflict. The findings revealed that by race and across time black girls are less conflictual than their white counterparts. This contradicts the acceptance of solely black girls as representations of the violent and aggressive “bad girl.” / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Quiet Dawn: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism traces the unfulfilled utopian aspirations of the revolutionary past that haunt the present of the African diaspora. Taking its name from the final track on famed black nationalist musician Archie Shepp’s 1972 Attica Blues, this dissertation argues that the defeat of black radical and anticolonial projects witnessed during the turbulent years of the sixties and seventies not only represent past “failures” but also point to a freedom that has yet to arrive. Working at the convergence of literature, performance, and visual culture, Quiet Dawn argues that the unfinished projects of black and anticolonial revolution live on as radical potentialities that linger in the archive like a “haunting refrain.” Quiet Dawn offers a theory the haunting refrain of black sociality that emanates across seemingly disparate geopolitical nodes. The concept of the haunting refrain designates an affective register through which otherwise hidden and obscure regions of the past can be apprehended. The dissertation attends to the traces of black sociality that linger in the archive through an examination of the literary and critical works of black intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Rather than lay claim to political heroes, Quiet Dawn turns to the past in an attempt to give an account of the dispersed social forces that gathered around the promise of a black world. Each chapter offers an example of the haunting refrain of black social life that lingers in the past. In this way, the dissertation as a whole gives an account of the radical potentialities that register as hums, echoes, muted chants, and shadow songs of the “long sixties.” Quiet Dawn contributes to scholarship on black internationalism and intervenes in current critical debates around race, gender, and sexual violence in the fields of black studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. Its theorization of black social life as a spectral presence is an attempt at attending to the other others that haunt contemporary critiques of power which merely seek redemption in an irredeemable world. To be sure, this project strikes neither an optimistic nor pessimistic note. Rather, it is rooted in the belief that there are infinite amounts of hope that we have yet to apprehend.

This thesis maps and re-maps literary London through an engagement with selected novels by Diana Evans, Bernardine Evaristo and Andrea Levy. The thesis builds on the work of very strong strands of black British women's writing, an area of writing that remains committed to the necessity of having to defend it. I argue that the literature of this group of contemporary women writers re-orientates trajectories of black British writing to focus on emerging distinctive London identities in the twenty-first century. The thesis charts a shift in black British women's writing which rewrites familiar postcolonial tensions around nationhood, displacement and unbelonging to articulate a rootedness in London. Evans', Evaristo's and Levy's sense of belonging stems from the city in which they were all born and raised, their 'London-ness' rendering a new form of selfhood which informs who they are and what they write. The study is motivated by an agenda to critique black British women's writing outside of the historical paradigmatic racial and gendered identities through which it has traditionally been read. I wish to attend to women's writing in a way which disturbs the canon of contemporary British fiction, reconfiguring predominately male narratives of London life to present an alternative view of the city. The study assesses Evans', Evaristo's and Levy's contributions to and reappraisal of long traditions of women writing novels of family and home. The novels I engage with are localised within a particular London postcode, foregrounding the importance of microcosmic conceptions of home and domestic spaces to constructions of belonging in a multifaceted, complex urban environment such as London. The role of family is central to the authors' narratives and the thesis explores familial women's relationships which are both nuanced and complicated. The trope of sisterhood is deployed across the texts and raises profound questions concerning ideological constructions of belonging and home. The thesis grounds itself intellectually at the nexus of debates in the fields of feminist discourse, postcolonial theory and contemporary urban theory, implementing them within a more fluid critical framework capable of reading the literature by this group of writers outside rigid categorising partitions. To not attend to questions of race and gender within their works would be to distort the thematic framework underpinning the novels. Nevertheless, I wish to re-inflect the ways in which we critique London writing to encourage the emergence of a new language which allows us think about it as organically diverse, rather than consciously or systematically 'multicultural'.

This dissertation is a comparative and transnational study of the techniques of racial impersonation used by white performers to represent black Afro-diasporic people in early modern England, Spain, and France. The racialization of blackness that took place in England at the turn of the sixteenth century has been well studied over the course of the last thirty years. This dissertation expands English early modern race scholarship in new directions by revealing the existence of a multi-directional circulation of racial ideas, lexemes, and performance techniques that led to the development of a vivid trans-European stage idiom of blackness across national borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While early modern race scholarship has traditionally focused on the rhetorical and dramatic strategies used by playwrights to create black characters, this dissertation brings to the fore the ideological work inherent in performance. It does so by arguing that the techniques of racial impersonation used in various loci of European performance culture, such as blackface, blackspeak (a comic mock-African accent), and black dances, racialized Afro-diasporic people as they led spectators in a variety of ways to think of those people as belonging naturally at the bottom of any well-constituted social order. This dissertation shows how the hermeneutic configurations and re-configurations of techniques of racial impersonation such as blackface, blackspeak, and black dance responded to social changes, to the development of colonization and color-based slavery, and to changing perceptions of what Afro-diasporic people’s status should be in European and Atlantic societies across the early modern period.

Racial inequalities in health are well documented in the literature, specifically with respect to Blacks and Whites in the United States (U.S.) These stark racial differences in health may be explained by the weathering hypothesis, whereby Blacks experience earlier deterioration of health resulting from cumulative stress from living in a race-conscious society. Despite the abundance of research on the weathering hypothesis to account for racial disparities, few research studies have attempted to empirically test this theory as it relates to cardio-metabolic disease disparities. Using nationally representative data from the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) and the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R), the weathering hypothesis was examined in the context of cardio-metabolic disease disparities among a U.S. sample of Whites, African-Americans and Caribbean Blacks. This dissertation was organized into three main papers: The first paper (“Application of the Weathering Hypothesis: A Systematic Review of the Research”) is a systematic review of the existing literature that empirically tests the weathering hypothesis, which informed the methods in papers 2 and 3 of this dissertation. The second paper (“Cardio-Metabolic Disease Disparities: Comparisons between Caribbean Blacks, African-Americans and Whites to Test the Weathering Hypothesis”) tests the weathering hypothesis as an explanation for health disparities compared with other potential explanations (e.g. minority stress, socioeconomic status, health behaviors and genetics). The third paper (“Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Cardio-metabolic Disease: The Role of Racial Group Identification and Discrimination-Specific Coping”) assesses whether and to what extent racial socialization factors (racial identity and coping strategies) affect racial disparities in cardio-metabolic disease, as well as influence the effect of racial discrimination on cardio-metabolic disease. The systematic review informs future studies of the weathering hypothesis as a comprehensive framework for understanding racial disparities in health outcomes, but highlights the need for additional studies examining the impact of weathering on health outcomes other than birth outcomes. In paper 2, the results showed some support for the weathering hypothesis, but the patterns were not fully consistent with the predictions of this hypothesis. The results in paper 3 revealed racial differences in racial socialization factors (racial identity and coping strategies), but these factors did not explain racial/ethnic disparities in cardio-metabolic disease. Future studies should examine the effect of structural racism on racial disparities in cardio-metabolic disease as another test of the weathering hypothesis.

The present study examined a model of Black Cultural Strength and its relation to psychosocial health (N = 496). The purpose of the current study was to test a model of Black Cultural Strength, an interdependent combination of Black racial identity, communalism, cultural spirituality, positive racial socialization, and effective racism-related coping. Further, the study sought to understand if Black Cultural Strength could predict psychosocial health, a combination of life satisfaction and psychological well-being. The Black Cultural Strength model, which was tested through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), hypothesized that higher levels of Black Cultural Strength lead to increased self-reported psychological well-being and life satisfaction. Results from this study indicated that Black Americans’ levels of mature racial identity, exposure to positive racial socialization (preparation for bias and cultural socialization), effective racism related coping (constrained resistance, empowered action, confrontation, and spiritual coping), culturally-based spirituality, and communalism were all interdependent and loaded onto one factor, Black Cultural Strength. Further, results showed that Black Cultural Strength was positively predictive of Blacks’ psychosocial health. Although the proposed hypotheses were supported, and an overall acceptable model fit was found, two modifications were made to the original proposed model. These modifications were conducted with theory and past empirical findings in consideration, therefore the current study provides strong evidence to support that interdependent Black cultural values are positively predictive of psychosocial health. Limitations, clinical implications, and further directions of research are discussed.

Thesis (M. Ed.) -- University of the North, 1992 / Refer to the document

In two separate studies, I examine the relationship between skin tone and important psychological well-being, delinquency, and social integration outcomes for Blacks, testing not only if skin tone is important in determining these outcomes but attempting to disentangle the mechanism by which the inequality is produced. More specifically, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), in study one I draw on important propositions of Agnew’s (1992) General Strain Theory to investigate the extent to which darker skin impacts youths’ feelings of strain, psychological well-being, and delinquency. The study found skin tone to be significantly associated with certain facets of well-being but surprisingly there were no direct effects on various types of strain. Skin tone is a strong predictor of one’s involvement in serious weapon violence, controlling for prior delinquency. Results also show that skin tone matters more for female adolescents’ odds of being suspended compared to their male counterparts, while certain forms of strain significantly impact the effect of skin tone on one’s involvement in delinquent activity. In study two, I continue my investigation of skin tone as an external or interracial source of discrimination using the National Survey of American Life (NSAL). In this study I am concerned with whether Blacks with darker skin tones are more likely than their lighter-skinned counter parts to live in neighborhoods that they perceive as more segregated and with fewer amenities and community resources. Although these data did not allow me to directly test how the respondents came to reside in their present community (i.e. racial steering or neighborhood choice), I examine skin tone discrimination as well as major types of everyday discrimination (e.g. being denied a bank loan or housing opportunity) experiences reported by Blacks. Overall, findings suggest that darker-skinned Blacks fare worse in regard to frequent experiences of skin tone discrimination from Whites. Skin tone is significantly related to respondent’s perceived seriousness of drug activity in their current neighborhood, suggesting that skin tone may have some impact on one’s perceived neighborhood quality. Further results, implications, and conclusions are discussed.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. Y. Barry Chung, committee chair; Joel Meyers, Leslie Jackson, Catherine Y. Chang, committee members. Electronic text (104 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 19, 2007. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris, 1943. / Includes bibliographical references.