The main concepts addressed within this study are neighborhood security, culture in cities, immigration, White flight, and gentrification. Although Whites originally settled in cities, an influx of foreigners encouraged racial dispersion and seclusion. Ultimately, Whites fled to suburban and rural areas while racial minorities remained in the city. The historic relocation of Whites led to the neglect of the city and its occupants, Thus, the motivation for this study revolves around the idea that race-related exclusion influences quality of life and residential satisfaction in cities. Data were obtained from the General Social Survey to examine the relationship between quality of life and the presence of multiracial neighbors. Conflict theory guided the analysis under the assumption that residential segregation persists through White avoidance of minority neighbors. Various statistical methods were performed to confirm this speculation including frequencies, Pearson correlations, crosstabulations, chi-square tests, and multiple linear regressions. The findings reflect a precise association among life satisfaction and homogeneous communities. Variables such as race, class, wealth, and willingness to live alongside Black inhabitants structured the argument regarding neighborhood integration or lack thereof.

The emboldening of white supremacist groups, as well as their increased mainstream presence in online circles, necessitates the creation of studies that dissect their tactics and rhetoric, while offering platform-specific insights. This study seeks to address these needs by analyzing white supremacist content and framing devices on the video hosting website, YouTube. Data were collected through a multi-stage sampling technique, designed to capture a 'snapshot' of white supremacist content on the platform during a 45-day period in 2019. After line-by-line coding and qualitative thematic analysis, results showed that sampled channels varied between different levels of color-blindness and overt racialization in their framing. Furthermore, channels containing more color-blind approaches yielded higher subscriber counts than their counterparts. What this indicates is that sampled channels use framing to both activate racial threat and minimize race, attempting to reproduce racism while avoiding coming off as racist in the color-blind, mainstream political climate. Secondary findings also show how sampled channels (a) rhetorically bridge the gap between fascism, nationalism, hegemonic gender roles, and mainstream conservative thought; (b) reconcile the idea of political action within a perilous and conspiratorial worldview; (c) leverage interactive, visual media to engage, manage, and collect funding from their audiences. This study is unique because it unpacks the discursive intricacies of white supremacist messaging, while showing the processes by which a racist society is reproduced in the cosmopolitan, digital hub that is YouTube. It sets precedent and opens doors for future inquiry into how social media platforms are used as tools to mainstream white supremacist ideas.

The purpose of this study is to determine the possibility of the occupational interview utilizing tests that prove to be bias towards one particular race or another. This study is a pilot study and represents the first step in developing a more extensive research design to examine testing bias within the occupational employment interview setting. Ten black students and ten white students are asked to complete two types of occupational interview samples. Those samples are then reviewed by two black hiring managers and two white hiring managers. The results are examined to determine if one test had a greater impact on the manager's hiring decisions. The findings indicate that when compared to the unstructured interview, the structured interview was associated with less bias in the hiring selection. From the data reviewed, possible limitations and future research was discussed.

This dissertation questions: How is the social imaginary about the meaning of being white in Mexico produced, reproduced, and problematized in Twitter Discourse? How is the social imaginary about the meaning of being white in Argentina produced, reproduced, and problematized in Twitter Discourse? How are the social imaginaries in Twitter Discourse in Mexico and Argentina related to the cultural and symbolic power exercised by the United States, and does US power influence the structure of privileges built around Whiteness? For doing that, I collected up to 10K tweets using two keywords to identify discourses surrounding Whiteness in tweets from users in Mexico and Argentina and analyzed up to 300 tweets per keyword using Critical Discourse Analysis tools. The findings demonstrate that research on Twitter is valid to explore communities from inside and interpret problems that go beyond digital environments. Furthermore, Twitter provides a unique opportunity to review Whiteness and question its privilege structures. In addition, the tweets operate as a cultural manifestation of the latent social unrest gruesomely exposing racism, dehumanization, eliminationism, and contempt for otherness favored by the affordances of the medium. My approach focused on Argentina and Mexico tweets as selected cases able to reflect the reality of the region in order to explore the function of Whiteness in everyday conversations, considering the impact of digital technologies in society. Both countries represent well-differentiated social structures, and embody particular ways of living ethnicity, cultural capitalism, and globalization. Although to be considered 'white' in Argentina is not the same as in Mexico, they also retain certain identity features related to conceptions of Whiteness that allow its study. Even more interesting, I found that studying Whiteness in these two countries also illustrated the influence of the United States as a cultural and symbolic power in the development of white supremacist ideas.

This thesis will determine the validity of the claim made by Joseph Califano, an aide to President Lyndon Johnson, that the film Selma is not historically accurate, especially regarding the Johnson character. This topic was picked to critique historical accuracy in the film and provide a framework to determine if the film would be suitable for use in an educational setting. This thesis used multiple academic monographs, telephone conversations, interviews, and presidential archives to come to a conclusion. After thorough research, it has been determined that Selma can be used as an educational resource with appropriate cautions stated beforehand regarding President Johnson. This thesis is important as it may help ease the load on educators when trying to find suitable materials to teach the complicated subject of civil rights.

A rise in racial disparities in maternal health has become an ongoing issue in the United States. This study uses a scoping literature review method to examine the effect of implicit bias on racial disparities in maternal healthcare. Multiple articles in this study provide sufficient evidence to prove that implicit bias is a contributing factor to the alarming rise of racial disparities in maternal health outcomes. The study revealed two distinct categories that elaborate on the health crisis that has been a continuation of practices traced backed to slavery. The analysis for this research is grounded in lack of quality care and socioeconomic factors. The thesis demonstrates the underlying issues in maternity care. Black women are the core group represented in this research because of an increase in premature births, maternal mortality, and morbidity rates. Prevention strategies are elaborated in the study to reduce racial inequality.

This research examines connections between race, ethnicity, and professional baseball. I use a multi-method approach looking at secondary source data on player positions and contemporary stacking, media analysis, fan narratives and sport blogs in the two contexts of Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I find that minorities are well represented in leadership positions and portrayed positively by the media, but that some racial inequality still exists. Whites and light-skinned Latinos are more likely to hold leadership roles than blacks and dark-skinned Latinos. In addition, media narratives reinforce the mind/body dualism by emphasizing the character make up of white players while highlighting the physicality of darker skinned players. Despite this evidence, fans from all ethnic and racial groups spoke highly of sport as a space that represented racial progress and a place where they felt comfortable are interacting with others who were different from themselves. These narratives were closely connected to fans' desires to maintain positive emotions within the leisure context of sport. Ultimately, I argue that baseball can serve as a site of racial progress and change but that it does so partially within a narrow cultural context. Baseball thus alters symbolic meanings of race but simultaneously misses important opportunities to make deeper social change at the material level. / Sociology

This thesis argues that the Gospel of Mark reflects a social location within the social boundaries of the Jewish ethnos and outlines relevant features of Mark’s configuration of Jewishness. It is divided into two parts. Part one provides a flexible definition of Jewishness in antiquity in order to assess what it meant to be Jewish and what characterized the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. It makes an independent contribution to the study of Jewishness in antiquity by using a recent sociological model that explains how and why ethnicity matters in certain societies and contexts to map changes and features of Jewishness during the Hasmonean and Early Roman periods (129 BCE–132 CE) in the Southern Levant. It also addresses the relevant methodological issues for locating texts in relation to a social category such as “Jewish.” Part two addresses the Gospel of Mark through the same methodological lens and in light of the re-conceptualization of Jewishness. It both argues that Mark should be read as a Jewish text and addresses how Mark configures Jewishness. It shows that the categorical boundaries in the text reflect a common Jewish way of categorizing and ranking people. In particular, Mark’s narrative assumes a hierarchical relation between the Jews and other people groups (i.e., “gentiles” or “the nations”) in which Jews are to the nations as children are to dogs. In addition, Mark’s narrative employs the concept of the kingdom of God to remake the boundary system of Roman Judea in two ways. First, Mark attempts to overturn the hierarchical Roman/Jew boundary by presenting the kingdom of God as imminent, earthly, and entailing the end of Roman power. Second, Mark subdivides the Jewish ethnos by limiting kingdom membership to “righteous” members of the Jewish ethnos, a strategy shared with the majority of Jewish texts examined in part one. The concluding section addresses the configuration of Jewishness in Mark’s narrative in terms of six common features of ethnic identity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis argues that the Gospel of Mark should be read as Jewish literature and examines how Mark configures Jewishness. Part one provides a flexible definition of Jewishness in the Southern Levant during the Hasmonean and Early Roman periods (129 BCE–132 CE). Part two shows that the categorical boundaries in the Gospel of Mark reflect a common Jewish way of categorizing and ranking people groups. It then examines how Mark uses the concepts of the kingdom of God and Torah observance to overturn the hierarchical Roman/Jew boundary and limit kingdom membership to the righteous ones among the Jewish people. While Mark may assume that non-Jews participate in the expected kingdom, the absence of direct evidence highlights the Jewish-centric perspective of Mark’s Gospel.

Structural and systemic mechanisms reinforce institutionalized racism, whiteness, and white supremacy in the United States. These mechanisms prove adaptable and resilient, shifting and changing to continuously restructure and reinforce the material reality that people experience within a racialized social order. White people's incomprehension of complicity in racism and privilege, along with color-blind ideologies, perpetuate racialized disparities resulting from this social order and render white superiority as "normal" and "universal." This underlies an often internalized sense of normative, white American identity interconnected with racism and white supremacy. In a society where many white Americans remain sheltered from and/or resistant to acknowledging the material realities of institutionalized racism and white supremacy, how and why do some white people become racially aware and take action in favor of equity? That was the focus of this research project. In applying a multifaceted theoretical and methodological framework rooted in critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, grounded theory, and narrative approaches to the analysis of 33 interviews of white Americans, it emerged that the process of becoming racially aware is a complex process of ongoing identity (re)construction. Participants actively push against a normalized white identity to (re)construct an alternative white, racially aware identity, making sense of this identity (re)construction through three components of this process: (1) becoming aware through several stages; (2) making sense of the meaning of being racially aware; and (3) engaging in social action. Together, these components formulate this process of identity work and expand existing critical whiteness studies scholarship by deepening our understanding of how some white Americans attempt to deconstruct systemic inequities through their own identity (re)construction. Such understandings inform potential interventions that could be utilized for collective social change.

This study investigated the link between instances of overt prejudicial behavior, especially in times of emotional upheaval, and deeply held feelings of bias that may lead to much more frequent instances of covert prejudicial behavior. One form of covert discrimination is withholding helping behavior, such as returning a lost letter of apparent importance. In this study, two hundred copies of a completed application for a pseudo honor society, with an addressed and stamped envelope, were left in public places in central Florida. The applications contained either a stereotypical Arabic name or a stereotypical American name. The forms were split evenly between Arabic and American names, and also divided by gender. This study examined whether prejudice felt by Americans toward Arab-Americans was enough to influence the return rate of the letters.