Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Very limited research exists on middle class African American families doing math homework. The present study examines the real life experiences of African American families doing math homework, with special emphasis on emotional and motivational factors that contribute to African American homework practices. This study focuses on 3 African American middle class families, all in 1 elementary school, doing 4th grade math homework. Students in Grade 4 and their parents are interviewed to examine what math homework means to them and what they believe about math homework. In addition, two teachers are interviewed to provide their perspectives of the aforementioned subject matter. Both parent and child in each case study are interviewed using open-ended topics to examine the motivational and emotional factors of homework practices among the three families. The researcher observes the students’ homework experiences for about 1 hour. Documents from all families are collected to gain insight into the homework experiences. These case studies combine interviews, observations, documents, and data analysis to look closely at the homework experiences of these students. Major findings include atypical math homework practices in terms of Caucasian middle class norms: The families believed that math homework was challenging and a serious business matter. Therefore, they worked twice as hard with a sense of urgency and priority at completing math homework. The mothers approached math homework with a warm, yet firm demeanor by providing external motivation through pushing their daughters, who lacked interest in math homework.

This dissertation considers the early career of Boston-based, African American artist Allan Rohan Crite (1910-2007) and situates his central artistic Goal--to present uplifting images of middle class black Bostonians--within the ideological framework of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s-1940s. In each of the chapters, I consider one of the four bodies of work Crite produced simultaneously during his early career--painted portraits, neighborhood street scenes and church interiors and brush and ink illustrations of African American spirituals. I focus on these subjects in order to explore Crite’s desire to portray the middle class status of his family and community and to redefine the spirituals in terms of his own middle-class sensibility. I describe Crite’s visualization of his black middle class Episcopal and Bostonian identity in these works as performances or enactments created through a series of repeated gestures of “respectable” appearance and behavior. My analysis also considers the artist’s motivations to preserve, in the physical form of his artworks, the black middle class values and way of life in Boston that he feared was in danger of being lost and forgotten. Rooted in the Community is also a revisionist account, for it seeks to revise the notion of an African American artistic “rootedness” to mean an artist rooted in his own immediate community rather than in a search for his cultural roots in the African past or within the rural folk culture of the American south. This study challenges a bias within the discourse on racial identity in art that privileges a notion of racial authenticity, or an essentialized conception of black identity centered upon the “folk,” or working and lower class African Americans. I also challenge the negative assessment of the black middle class as a group devoid of interest in the black community and propose that early twentieth century definitions of black middle class identity embodied in the notions of the “talented tenth” and the “race” man or woman best define Crite’s sense of himself as a black artist, for he felt a responsibility towards the black community and was not alienated from it. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-198).

This ethnographic study investigates conditions in which groups often found to be at odds with each can instead form mutually productive and supportive relationships. As an Anglophone West Indian immigrant man myself, I am personally interested in how members of my group find success in the US and fit into the larger US African descendant sphere of Black people. As a clergyman, I am professionally interested in how different Black ethnic groups find ways to get along and even appreciate each others’ differences, as part of a larger whole. Since much of my working life is keyed to creating conditions for a positive climate in which people can be the best of themselves, I hypothesized that in the right environment groups known to be suspicious of and stereotype each other, and even engage in outright conflict, could reach a workable resolution over time. That of Afro Caribbeans and Southern African Americans presented an exemplary case. To investigate whether this positive outcome was possible in the right conditions, I selected St Albans, Queens, 1965-present, as a site to conduct research that would help me learn a) how Anglophone Afro Caribbean immigrants made successful places for themselves in the US and the neighborhood; b) from their point of view, found paths to acceptance and even mutual appreciation of African Americans of Southern migrant backgrounds; and c) test whether particular characteristics of a neighborhood environment offer support for mutual acceptance and appreciation, without either group having to give up what it culturally values. The study found that because of several factors St. Albans indeed promoted a context which fostered getting along, and even getting along well. These included sufficient employment and housing opportunities, similarities in income and middle class status, numerous churches that reinforced positive values, and the fact that the racial tensions characteristic of many parts of the US were not prevalent in the daily life of the neighborhood.