According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), maternal death ratios are severely racially stratified as African American women face the most significant risk. Currently, Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related death in the United States than white women. Race disparities in maternal health outcomes may be exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic as preliminary research suggests that the pandemic's disproportionate impact on Black communities and existing concerns about Black women's medical treatment may indicate an increase in mortality within the next few years. Racial health disparities reflect the nation's flawed maternal healthcare system and highlight a need for alternative healthcare models, including the increased use of doulas, who provide physical, emotional, and educational support during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. Research has shown that doula care effectively mitigates adverse perinatal outcomes for socially disadvantaged women and their infants. Black doulas have distinct knowledge and insights about how race operates in the maternity care system as birth workers who serve Black birthing women, however, there is little research illuminating their perspectives. The current study is a qualitative analysis of the perspectives of Black doulas on their experiences with birth work in the U.S. maternity health care system during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond using a critical intersectional lens. Data consist of in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with 11 Black doulas throughout the U.S. Interviews were transcribed with the aid of Otter.ai and coded and analyzed thematically using NVivo. The results yielded four overarching themes: Advocacy and Trust are Key Components of Doula Work, Barriers to Accessing Doula Services and a Need for New Hospital Policies, COVID-19 Worsened Restrictions on Doula Work, and Increased Distrust of Hospitals among Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). The final theme focused on the History of Racism in Reproductive Health affects the Quality of Care Today and included a sub-theme regarding the Prevalence of Dismissive and Abusive Care. This study expands existing knowledge of race inequalities in maternal health by contributing the experiences and perspectives of Black doulas, who are uniquely positioned to observe Black patients' treatment in maternity care. Findings demonstrate a need for medical institutions to address systemic racism within their policies and procedures and highlight actionable solutions proposed by doulas to mitigate existing injustices.

Public housing authorities (PHAs) have enforced banishment since the late 1980s by granting police the authority to ban non-residents from public housing neighborhoods and arresting them for trespassing upon violating the ban. PHAs justify banishment by stating that issuing bans and arrests for trespassing aid in crime prevention by removing non-residents who may commit criminal acts if left unguarded. Nonetheless, there has been no scientific evidence to suggest that banishment works to reduce crime. Similarly, the role community policing can play in enforcing banishment is unclear and scarce research has considered the effects of banishment on racial and ethnic minorities at neighborhood and individual levels. To address these issues this three-part study examined the enforcement of banishment on Kings Housing Authority (KHA; Southeast, US) public housing property from 2004-2012. Collectively these studies address the following overarching research questions: Does banishment reduce crime in public housing neighborhoods? Does banishment disproportionately target racial and ethnic public housing neighborhoods? Does banishment prevent banned individuals from re-offending in public housing? Does banishment disproportionately ban racial and ethnic individuals? What are the residential perceptions of banishment and its effectiveness? How does race and ethnicity affect perceptions of banishment and its effectiveness? Results suggest that banishment is better at reducing property crime than violent crime, though the reductions are modest at best. Increases in bans predicted decreases in drug arrests the following year and predicted that drug offenders can be deterred. Despite these crime control benefits results also suggested that the enforcement of banishment comes at a cost. First, a significant amount of banned individuals are not deterred. Second, while trespass enforcement is used in communities other than public housing, the issuing of bans is concentrated only within public housing communities and bans are predominantly issued to African-American males. Finally, results found that residents are not likely to find them effective if they think they are policing too much or policing too little. Future directions and implications are discussed given the dynamic between the crime control benefits of banishment and its social consequences. / Ph. D.

My project explores the ways in which racial equity is addressed in a predominantly white school, through a study of Washfield High School in Seattle, WA. Through semi-structured interviews with three administrators, six teachers and two alumni, I examine themes including the prominence of blackness, segregation, curricular strategies, differential expectations across races, campus efforts and leadership. Through this study, I focus on the role that predominantly white schools have in increasing racial equity in education.

No description available.

This paper begins by establishing a theory of systemic racism that has three aspects: a genetic, functional, and ontological aspect. I aim to show the anti-black racism meets all of these three aspects of systemic racism. I base my conception of systemic racism in the theories of Joe Feagin, Cheryl Harris, Christopher Lebron, Charles Mills, and Tommie Shelby. I understand anti-black racism to be pervasive amongst U.S institutions and the ideologies of citizens in a way that facilitates the school-to-prison pipeline. I present evidence of anti-black racism in the education system, the policing of Blacks, and the sentencing of Blacks. I ultimately propose a partial remedy to systemic racism through a change in the history curricula across American schools.

While many studies of U.S. immigration highlight the diversity within other racial and ethnic groups, scholarly attention to the significance of ethnicity among black people in this country is still sorely underdeveloped. This dissertation project explores how black identities are constructed not only through the prism of race in the U.S. context, but also through other social dynamics that operate "in the shadow of race," such as differences in class, color, country of origin, and circumstances of migration. Instead of a singular black identity fueled by our political discourses and popular culture, my project treats "blackness" as a floating signifier that is constructed both within the racial organization of the U.S. nation-state and among the peoples of the black diaspora within its borders. In short, blackness is a matter that has become national, international, and transnational in scope. Ethnicity and its implications for how we think about black identity and group representation in U.S. society is the other "layer of blackness" this dissertation addresses. The formation and reshaping of American identity among various immigrant groups have historically involved complicated relationships between race and ethnicity, two concepts scholars have used to articulate group identities in the U.S. The history of U.S. racial and ethnic relations reveals the complicated processes through which some social groups have been able to establish their place in the American mainstream by adapting to the cultural and institutional norms established by mainstream white society. Non-white immigrant groups have been forced to find their American identities on the margins of U.S. society because of their purported inability or unwillingness to assimilate to established cultural and institutional norms. Sometimes this alienation from the American mainstream takes on a purely racial dimension. At other times, the prejudices of U.S. society are directed at particular ethnic groups. But in spite of the status ascribed to them, these immigrants have also proven to be empowered agents in their implicit and explicit critiques of the U.S.'s social order. Historically, non-white immigrants in the U.S. have demonstrated the power to question, disrupt, and resist cultural and institutional forms of discrimination even as they are incorporated into them. My interrogation of black ethnic identity and what it brings to bear on how we define blackness in the U.S. begins by asking what cultural capital black immigrants bring with them in their sojourn to America rather than assuming what is lost in the process of their incorporation into U.S. race relations. Patterns of immigration, return migration and circular migration that have come to characterize the experience of many foreign-born blacks in the U.S., as well as the circulation of ideas, culture, and history between sending and receiving countries are all issues germane to the process of black immigrant incorporation and black ethnic identity in the U.S. As such, the argument I proffer in my dissertation project is this: because of the myriad processes at play in formulating black racial and ethnic identities in America (i.e., historically established structures of race as well as an unprecedented surge in foreign-born black migration this country)-how we define blackness in the U.S. context is more fruitfully theorized as a matter that is at once national, international, and transnational in scope. It is at the nexus of these fronts that the historical and cultural constructions of blackness are currently defined among the diversity of black people in the U.S.

This study examines the youtube series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and how it challenges representations of Black women in media, television and film. I argue that the director of the series, Issa Rae challenges predominant images of Black womanhood through her character "J". Through a historical framework I examine the mammie, jezebel, sapphire and the tragic mulatta as predominant images of Black women. I argue that these images function within oppressive institutions to maintain a social heirarchy in which Black women are inferior. Moreover, my content analysis examines how the character "J" negates these predominant images of Black womanhood through her use of rap as a coping mechanism, sexual agency and the ability to negotiate racism in the workplace

In the study, I assessed the persistence of students who joined fraternities at Western Kentucky University. Also included is a comparison between them and the general student population. The study includes 1467 students who joined fraternities between the Fall 1986 to Spring 1991 semesters. A five-year time period was used as the benchmark for graduation from the institution. Factors that were explored included race, initiation status, year in school when pledging, and organizational affiliation. Pearson Product-Moment Correlations and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were used to analyze the data. The results illustrated that students who join fraternities graduate at a higher percentage than the general student population. Black students who join fraternities graduate at a significantly higher percentage than black students who do not join. Pledge Year and Initiation Status proved to be significant factors.

Self-determination is a much researched topic in transition literature. However, very little is known about self-determination experiences in transition-age young adults who are racially/ethnically diverse with developmental disabilities as relates to their home/personal life and school/work life. It is recognized that differences do exist of self-determination by these individuals in various settings but the specifics remain unknown. / text

This dissertation investigates the human dimensions of environmental transformations spurred by international climate change mitigation agreements—such as the Kyoto Protocol—that encourage lowering greenhouse gas emissions with ‘green’ market strategies like biofuel and ecological services development projects. It is methodologically grounded in “collaborative activist geographical methods” and theoretically based at the nexus of development, political ecologies, neoliberalization of Nature, and geographies of hope literatures. It examines the contradictory and complex ways that state “climate change mitigation development” projects surround and infiltrate the Indigenous and Afro-ecuadorian ancestral territories of the canton of San Lorenzo (Esmeraldas Province), located in the “Northwest Pacific Fronter Territory-region of Ecuador”. This research asks to what degree the Ecuadorian state’s support and investment in oil palm plantation expansion—designed to meet biofuel crop demands—in the coastal rainforest regions results in the rearrangement, and often times, devastation of Indigenous Awá and Chachi and Afro-ecuadorian communities’ natural and human geographies. It also inquires into the Ecuadorian government’s recently approved (October 2008) state level conservation incentives project called Socio-Bosque (Forest Partners) developed to do the following: protect the rainforests and its ecological services, alleviate poverty in rural areas, and position the country as an ‘environmental world leader’ for taking concrete actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from avoided deforestation. Socio Bosque claims to be progressive and even revolutionary, but may enact new forms of exploitation and governance in Indigenous and Afro-ecuadorian territories that are specific to time and place, but are enduringly colonial. Nevertheless, this research also highlights geographies of hope by demonstrating that, contrary to the surrounding sea of monoculture oil palm plantations and the CO2lonial air of contradictory laws in relation to biofuel and ecological services development, Awá, Chachi, and Afro-ecuadorian communities maintain sustainable practices and enhance agricultural diversity within their territories. Additionally, it emphasizes the emergent place-based social movements in relation to defense of their territories and identities; Indigenous and Afro-ecuadorian communities avoid conflict pressures by creating interethnic networks. By casting social nets between their territories, their communities stay connected and, together, defend their rights to territorial self-determination and “Living Well” and the rights of Nature.