Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-283). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

The purpose of the present study was to explore the endorsement of racial colorblind attitudes among partners in heterosexual interracial romantic relationships, as well as identify the potential effects of a colorblind ideology upon mental health and wellbeing. For interracial partners, race is simultaneously a fundamental part of their relationship with far-reaching implications, and also, simply put, one of many parts. Research attests that while some interracial partners proactively acknowledge race and initiate racial dialogue, others avoid or choose not to “see” race with their significant others (Killian, 2012; Steinbugler, 2012). From a counseling psychology framework, racial colorblindness, or the denial of the importance of race, minimizes the centrality of race and racism – when in fact race continues to hold the power to define social reality (Neville, Awad, Brooks, Flores, & Blumel, 2013). This study investigated the degree to which different interracial partners in heterosexual relationships report racial colorblindness or strategic colorblindness, and if such views impacted self-esteem and relationship satisfaction. Significant differences between partners of color and White partners in strategic colorblindness were indicated from independent-samples t-tests, and a series of one-way between-group analyses of variance found significant differences specifically between Asian and White partners. Multiple regression analyses found no significant associations between any type of colorblindness and relationship satisfaction and no significant associations between self-esteem or relationship esteem and strategic colorblindness. Additional post-hoc analyses that examined demographic characteristics of the sample found specific intersections of gender and race to be associated with strategic colorblindness. History of being in an interracial relationship and relationship length of time were also significantly associated with relationship satisfaction and colorblind racial attitudes, respectively. Limitations of the present study and directions for future research are discussed. Results from this study can be used to identify multiculturally considerate strategies for clinicians working with interracial partners, and bridge growing interracial scholarship with emerging research on racial colorblindness.

Post racialism has emerged as a new racial project that could impact the distribution of resources in society. The resources that stand to be impacted by this ideology are social reform policies, social capital availability, access to professional and academic opportunities. This study explored how post racial ideology impacted the professional development of college students between the ages of 18-30. Students were recruited through flyers and snowball sampling. Ten students participated in semi-structured interviews that lasted from 30-60 minutes. Interviews were the sole source of data for this study. A qualitative case study methods was used to gather information in this study. Data was analyzed using a two level thematic coding approach. An analysis of the data revealed categories and properties related to participant’s professional development experiences in relation to race. Three general conclusions were drawn from findings. Implications for policy, theory, study limitations, and recommendations for future research are provided.

Colorblind TV: Primetime Politics of Race in Television Casting posits that in our current racially colorblind society, oftentimes actors of color are cast to prove that multiculturalism is important. However, the characters often have little cultural specificity and are only different in terms of skin tone. While this type of sameness on the surface may appear to offer a sense of racial parity, it actually encourages the opposite. Colorblindness works to make race immutable and objective, which inevitably disallows difference and instead outputs “whiteness” as the normative standard. Through a series of interviews with casting directors and actors guild diversity representatives as well as an ethnographic account of an actual casting audition, the dissertation argues that for the media industry, colorblindness is both a way of avoiding the messiness of race and of denying actors of color the ability to be culturally specific. This denial occurs because ultimately the desire to work supersedes the desire to reject role universality. As a case study, I examine the hit ABC primetime show Grey’s Anatomy (2005- ) as a way of illustrating how the blindcasting process became a part of public discourse that the television industry both praised and disowned. / text

While research on the different expressions of racism in media has been closely linked to the understanding of stereotypes in a plethora of research, little is known about the journalists' perspectives and experiences of racism. However, in 2020, an anti-racist manifesto called “Whose SR?” (Vems SR?” 2021) was published online where the Swedish public radio Sveriges Radio (SR) was criticized by current and former employees for its lack of diverse representation and for having a work-environment where non-white journalists are marginalized.  Drawing upon the framework of grounded theory (Charmaz 2006), this thesis is an attempt to respond to the lacuna in media research and add new insights to the limited understanding of how women in news practices are affected by racism. Based on data generated from interviews with eight women who signed the anti-racist manifesto, this research aims to conceptualize how female journalists with minority backgrounds experience racism at SR and how such experiences affect their working identity. Utilizing the anti-racist manifesto as a case study situates the results in a specific environment which was understood as post-racial throughout the research.  Considering the findings of this study, participants developed a journalistic working identity to counter negative stereotypes associated with their minority identity and based on their perceived position of power at SR. This case study demonstrates how the anti-racist manifesto heightened the interviewees’ post-racial understanding and that SR’s response to the manifesto can be interpreted as an expression of how post-racial societies manifest. The main takeaway from the findings is how the inability to admit the different ways racism continues to shape contemporary media will negatively affect both journalists and the media's ability to represent diverse perspectives objectively.

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Amid concerns of increased populist right-wing movements in Europe and the US, this dissertation research uncovers a core contradiction at the heart of modern nation-states: the ethnic underpinnings of the “civic nation.” In recent years, nativist and ultra-nationalist movements opposing immigration have gained popularity in Western democracies. These movements draw on “hard” boundaries such as race or religion to exclude “others” from the “nation.” However, sociological research on the nation has consistently found that most people in Western countries publicly oppose these ideas and embrace civic conceptions of the nation. At the same time, research on immigrants' experiences in these same countries suggests that “civic” conceptions of the nation may be much more exclusionary than what survey research has shown. To reconcile this tension in the nationalism and immigration integration literature, I label the mismatch between people’s stated preferences and their actual behaviors as “colorblind ethnocentrism.” By analyzing the extent to which nations are imagined to be racially restrictive by their inhabitants, my research offers a new understanding of national identity that has consequences for the integration of non-white groups into Western societies. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I analyze the way that the category of “nation” is socially constructed, and in what ways this social construction overlaps with the socially constructed category of “race,” particularly in countries where “race” does not exist as a state-sanctioned classificatory system (unlike the US). Finally, I use these theoretical insights to reframe a classic debate in political economy and show that natives' normative understandings about national belonging moderate the way that non-White populations are perceived as an outside group and a threat to economic redistribution. This dissertation combines novel methodology from political science with advanced statistical analysis as well as qualitative content analysis research to investigate (1) the role of ancestry, and race in defining the imagined community, (2) the ways that race and nation are empirically related, and (3) to what extent different ideas of the “nation” mediate the relationship between increased racial diversity and decreased support for redistribution. Building on previous work, in chapter 1, I consider the “nation” as a cognitive category used to create social distinctions between those who “belong” in the nation-state and those who do not. Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment fielded in representative samples across France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, I challenge the long-standing assumption in the literature that the dominant conception of the “nation” in the West is based on inclusive and civic symbolic boundaries. I show that the most important characteristic across all country contexts for natives when making decisions about who is and is not a member of the nation is their ancestry: whether a given profile's parents and grandparents were all born in the country or not. I also find that people who answer in surveys that ancestry is important to be truly national in fact are espousing a racial and religious preference for White and Christian nationals. Then, I show how this colorblind ethnocentrism affects symbolic integration of non-white profiles with immigrant backgrounds. Finally, I find that racial preferences in who belongs in the nation are the most pronounced in continental Europe, where “race” is not an institutionalized categorization system (i.e. countrieswhere racial statistics and “race” is taboo). This provides some evidence in favor of my theory that countries that do not have an available discourse around race tend to use “nation” as a proxy for it. I further investigate the origins of this discrepancy in the next chapter. In chapter 2, I leverage a drastic change in curriculum in the mid-1990s in Spain that led to the sudden and (almost) complete removal of racial vocabulary from social-science textbooks to explore what happens to the construct of race once racial language has been removed. Through my analysis of 82 textbooks from 1975 to 2017, I find that a racial classification system was replaced by one based on cultural categories. Yet, far from moving away from essentialist beliefs about human nature, culture continues to reproduce the social hierarchies previously associated with phenotype. Because the books present culture as a scientifically valid classification system, the use of culture legitimizes and entrenches those same beliefs in racial differences, while creating a new double meaning for cultural categories (often “national cultures” or “nation”), i.e. its purported meaning and a short-hand for “race”. In chapter 3, I follow up on a question that emerged from my textbookstudy: to what degree do Europeans believe (or not) in biological racial differences? I find that people in Europe hold racist beliefs at similar rates to the United States. I also show that an under-studied source of variation across countries is the differences within a country between the proportion of people who believe in one racial belief but not another. In my final chapter, I investigate the consequences of this racialized “imagined community” for support for welfare in contexts of increased immigration. In this chapter, I shift the focus of attention from “immigrants” to “natives.” I argue that the well-documented reduction of native support for redistribution in the presence of immigrants is moderated by how strongly the natives imagine the “nation” as racially white. Using survey and census data from 30 European countries and 270 regions, I show that the negative association between the share of immigration and support for welfare is driven by those who imagine the nation in racial terms. Moreover, I show that ethnic nationalists’ support for welfare policies is only sensitive to non-European foreign-born immigration, not European foreign-born immigration. This suggests that racism, more than xenophobia, is the mechanism behind the withdrawal of solidarity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of implications and directions for future research.

There is increasing concern in news media sources regarding police killings of unarmed Black males. However, there is limited research on the portrayal of such incidents in the news and the implications for police-community relations in African- American communities. In order to address this gap, this study analyzed 120 experts’ quotes provided by two of the largest and most respected newspapers in the United States -- the New York Times and USA Today. This research comprised a content analysis of quotes related to the deaths of Eric Garner (Staten Island, New York), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), and Freddie Gray (Baltimore City, Maryland). A number of factors are discussed: The news organization’s predominate category and specialty of experts selected; whether the experts’ quotes attributed to pro-police or community bias; if the experts’ quotes discussed social or racial inequalities in the cities selected; whether the experts addressed evidence-based strategies necessary to improve police-community relations in the Black community, and whether experts’ quotes discussed solutions to improve police and community relations in the Black community. The findings suggest that the selected national news sources, in the one year following the deaths of each of the unarmed victims, highlighted quotes from state manager, particularly politicians, at a much higher rate than intellectuals. Although revealing a substantial level of procommunity bias, the quotes presented very little regarding evidence-based strategies for improving police-community relations in the Black community and reducing the number of unarmed deaths caused by police. The implications for research on media and crime as well as policing strategies are discussed. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection