Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Farrell J. Webb / The current study was focused on the role Black grandmothers played in biraical (Black and White) racial socialization process of their grandchild or grandchildren. Racial socialization process where by the grandmothers engaged in a systemtic and deliberate attempt to ensure that their grandchildren develp an awareness and sensibilty toward their Black hertiage. There were several criteria the grandmothers had to meet. They included being born before 1975, ensuring that the grandmothers expereienced the post 70s Black pride movement. The grandmother also needed to have contact with the identified grandchild. Qualitative methods with a phenomenological lens were employed. The Black grandmothers are seen as the experts on their experiences, thus phenomenology allowed me to probe deeper into the experiences of these grandmothers and their reality. One-on-one interviews were conducted with the participants at the location and time of their choice. The results revealed the perspective and methods they exercised in racially socializing their biracial grandchildren. The participants had similar beliefs as it related to what their role in the racial socialization process was supposed to be. There were eight primary themes that emerged were community influence, spirituality, social adjustment, feelings toward “the other”, social perception, cultural indoctrination, grandma’s burden, and the road ahead. Although, each grandmother had a different journey their conclusions regarding the way to socialize their biracial grandchildren as Black was unanimous.

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Thesis advisor: Zine Magubane / Interviews with 20 members of Black female-White male intimate couples were conducted and, utilizing a grounded theory approach, revealed multiple situations where members of these couples had to self-disclose to others that they were romantically involved with a person of a different race. Using one of the largest study samples to date of Black female-White male couples, I demonstrate how race and gender affect these unplanned and strategic self-disclosure events that members of these couples engage in, and how members of these couples make sense of these public inquires that are the remnants of our country's racially-charged history. I argue that the ways in which privilege is uniquely distributed within these relationships -- where White men simultaneously possess racial and gender privilege and Black women possess neither -- makes these couples structurally and fundamentally different than other interracial couples, and, ultimately, exemplifies that race and gender matter in the experiences of these couples and how society-at-large views them. Therefore, it is pivotal that experiences of interracial couples are not generalized and that each race and gender pairing receives its own individualized study. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

Thesis advisor: James O'Toole / This dissertation examines the development of historic house museums in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the present to unravel the complex relationship between public presentations of slavery and popular perceptions of the institution. In conducting the research for this project, I examined the historic and contemporary public programming at nineteen separate museums. This sample of museums includes both publicly funded and private sites in both the North and South. By bringing together a diverse group of museums, this project examines national trends alongside regional traditions as well as the role of organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and a host of private institutions in determining different interpretive foci. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

The cross-race identification effect is a phenomenon anecdotally experienced by many people in viewing, perceiving, and recalling human faces when the perceiver and target individual are not of the same race. In popular vernacular, the idea that ‘they all look alike’ when referring to people from other racial groups has been studied extensively with results providing evidence that “people of other races appear more similar to each other than people of [ones] own race” (Maclin & Malpass, 2001, p. 99). While the cross-race identification effect (or the greater ability to accurately recall same-race than other-race faces and the poorer ability to correctly recall other-race compared to same-race faces) has been found across all racial groups with Whites or Caucasians exhibiting the strongest effect, scholars continue to be challenged with understanding what factors contribute to the effect. An aspect of the cross-race effect that has received minimal attention is the notion of race as a construct in and of itself. Utilization of White racial identity (Helms, 1990) as a psychological variable in social science research is posited to provide a more precise evaluation of White individuals’ social attitudes with respect to race and racial group membership, as compared to the racial socio-demographic categories commonly used in research studies. Based on this contention, the current study sought to empirically explore whether White perceiver’s racial identity status attitudes were associated with Black (or other-race) facial recognition. The sample included 269 White adults from across the U.S. Through an online survey platform, participants viewed a series of White and Black facial images. After completing an intermediary task, they were shown the old in addition to new White and Black facial images and were asked to determine which faces they had and had not seen before in the study. Respondents also completed the White Racial Identity Attitude Scale (Helms & Carter, 1990) and a demographic questionnaire. Results indicated that the cross-race identification effect was present in the current study, with White participants demonstrating greater overall accuracy, fewer inaccurate identifications, and a more cautious decision strategy (that generally leads for fewer false identifications) when responding to White (same-race) faces as compared to Black faces. Additionally, Black (cross-racial) facial recognition was significantly related to White racial identity with participants who endorsed an absence of racist views and internal conflict in reaction to race-salient information displaying high rates of correct Black identifications. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

Drawing on practitioner-research and case study methods, including interview protocols, this study aimed to explore the insights and experiences, as described by four teachers, of developing and teaching racial-justice curriculum for predominantly White 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in their course: Sparking Courageous Conversations: Discussing Race and Racism. This study was framed in critical literacy theories that are grounded in the work of Freire (2000) but draw on the work of contemporary critical scholars and practitioners with the knowledge that critical literacy pedagogy can provide a powerful means for interrogating how larger structures, texts, individuals, and groups are constructed. Data collection took place in four phases across three months. Primary data sources included analysis of: curriculum and emerging curricular artifacts, in-depth interviews, surveys, teacher journals, researcher journal, and memos. The findings of this study emerged from the curriculum development that occurred the summer prior to the 2017-2018 academic school year as well as the teaching that occurred that year. The reflections of each of the teachers about their development and teaching of the racial-justice curriculum demonstrated the breakthroughs and boundaries of teaching about race and racism with predominantly White middle-school students. Further, their reflections illustrated the ongoing, internal work required to facilitate conversations about race with students more effectively. Such work included monitoring for how race affected their lives as well as the lives of others, and how race as one of their identities affected the ways in which they developed and taught curriculum. Finally, the teachers discovered that facilitating courses on race required moving from a content-based approach to a consciousness-based approach where they each, alongside of their students, assumed a researching-the-world stance to learn about race and confront and challenge racism.

There has been a stunning build-up of prisons and a growing trend in prison privatization in the last 30 years, including the rise of maximum security units. The goal of my dissertation is to understand the ideological, historic, political, and economic processes behind the changes in the criminal justice system of the United States. I analyze this problem from multiple angles—labor and policy history, discourse and public opinion, and race in America. The aim of this analysis is to uncover the reasons why crime legislation became progressively more punitive, reaction to African Americans gains in post-Civil Rights more hostile, and the manifold ways in which these phenomena drive the expansion of the prison system and its increasing privatization. In the process of this expansion, a racial caste system which oppresses young African Americans and people of color has become recast and entrenched. Specifically, I offer the notion that in the last three decades, punitive crime legislation focused on African Americans and served to deal with labor needs and racial conflict with harsher penal legislation; in doing so, it depoliticized race, institutionalized racial practices, and served the interests of private prison businesses in new ways oppressive ways. Using interdisciplinary methods which weave together qualitative and quantitative analysis, I find that punitive crime policies in the last thirty years used the concept of crime as political currency by government officials in order to appear tough on crime, and by business representatives interested in exploiting the prison industry. The conflation of business and political interests, and the recasting of crime as a race problem, served to taint public institutions and media dissemination with racist imperatives which stereotyped poor African Americans. The end result is a constant re-positioning of young black males as fodder for economic exploitation. The dissertation also addresses the high cost of imprisonment and the multiple social problems brought from shifting inmates from wards of the State to profit-making opportunities in the hands of private entrepreneurs. The result is high numbers of recidivism, and a growing underclass of people who will always be unemployed or underemployed and return to low income communities that suffer from the endless cycle of poverty and imprisonment. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This project is a relational ethnography that explores valuation as a social process and its relationship to the production and reproduction of inequality in urban space. I connect the subjective valuation process with struggles over material resources and the politics of recognition. With each chapter of this dissertation I demonstrate that race and ethnicity are encoded in the value of urban spaces through analyses of various micro-level meaning-making practices and structures that constitute cultural processes relevant to valuation. In addition to participant observation, I incorporate semi-structured photo-elicitation interviews, unstructured interviews, a semiotic analysis and analyses of existing literature to historicize the project. My overall epistemological objective is to marry a political and material focus on worth with a study of the mechanisms through which culture enters into valuation processes and, consequently, inequality.

When a black student threw feces against a bronze statue of British imperialist, Cecil John Rhodes, located at the University of Cape Town (UCT), it sparked the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) student movement in March 2015. The Black-led #RMF movement sought to decolonize the university by confronting institutional racism and patriarchy at UCT through a series of disruptive and creative tactics including occupying university buildings and erecting a shack on campus. As part of their decolonization process, black students tried to make sense of their experiences in a predominantly white university by de-linking from UCT’s dominant model of Euro-American knowledge to construct their own decolonial framework comprised of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black radical feminism. A few weeks later in May 2015, students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who were inspired by the student movement at UCT, created the #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement, using the Rhodes statue at Oriel College as a focal point in their call to decolonize the university. This dissertation explores the formation of the radical #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford—referred to as the Fallist movements. I first consider what led the #RMF movement at UCT to adopt a decolonial framework centered on Black radical feminism, Black Consciousness, and Pan-Africanism, and then examine how the #RMF’s decolonial framework generated the emergent idea of “Fallism” that extended beyond the students’ demand for the Rhodes statue to fall. Finally, I assess the ways in which the formation of #RMF Oxford was influenced by the #RMF movement in Cape Town. The #RMF mission statement characterized the black experience at UCT as “black pain” or as “the dehumanization of black people” informed by the “violence exacted only against black people by a system that privileges whiteness”. In order to better understand their experiences of black pain, student activists de-linked from the university's dominant knowledge production systems that privileged whiteness through its epistemic architecture. The #RMF UCT movement’s de-linking or “epistemic disobedience”, was also employed by students at Oxford who wanted to integrate “subjugated and local epistemologies” into the Eurocentric university curriculum. Based on this empirical analysis of the #RMF’s engagement in epistemic disobedience at both UCT and Oxford, I argue that the university occupies a paradoxical position for Black and other marginalized bodies: it is simultaneously empowering and dehumanizing; it offers the possibility of acquiring knowledge that could serve as a liberatory tool from the violence of socio-economic marginality (Black liberation), while at the same time, the physical and epistemic architecture of the university can create an oppressive, alienating space for Black, queer and disabled bodies among others (Black pain). This assertion leads me to experiment with developing Fallism into an emergent decolonial option that emanates from acts of epistemic disobedience to unveil the hegemonic intellectual architecture of the university. Through a combination of 98 interviews, one year of observations, and document analysis, this study offers insights into the formation and evolution of the #RMF student movements at UCT and Oxford, while contributing to a critical understanding of the university’s paradoxical epistemic architecture.

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.