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The purpose of this study was to document the racial attitudes and racial identity development scores of White students in a liberal arts environment. of particular interest was gender differences, classification differences, and Greek/nonGreek affiliation differences. Furthermore, an effort was made to predict the racial attitude and racial identity development scores using self-report biographical variables.;The College of William and Mary, a public liberal arts university was the institution studied for this project. A stratified random sample was obtained of all White students attending the College. Participants completed the White Racial Identity Attitude Survey (WRIAS), the Racial Attitude and Opinion Scale (ATTW), and a personal data sheet.;It was hypothesized that there would be a significant difference in scores between those with a Greek affiliation and those without a Greek affiliation, males and females, and freshmen and seniors. More specifically, Greeks, males and freshmen would score higher on the ATTW and lower on the WRIAS than would nonGreeks, females, and seniors, respectively. This would signify more negative attitudes toward Blacks and a less healthy racial identity.;The results indicated five of the six hypothesis to be supported to a certain extent. Even though the total population reported positive racial attitudes, Greek males and freshmen may need to be provided with additional educational opportunities concerning race to bring them closer to the same level as the other groups.;It was also concluded that colleges need to address the issue of race and racism. High scores on the lowest stage of the racial identity development model indicated that respondents were naive about the topic of race in general.

African American cultural and social history has neglected to interrogate fully a crucial facet of African American political, economic, and social life: African American Freemasonry. "The Freemasonry of the Race": The Cultural Politics of Ritual, Race, and Place in Postemancipation Virginia seeks to remedy this neglect. This project broadly situates African American Freemasonry in the complex and evolving relations of power, peoples, and polities of the Atlantic world. The study develops an interpretative framework that not only recognizes the organizational and institutional aspects of African American Freemasonry, but also interprets it as a discursive space in and through which articulations of race, class, gender, and place are theorized and performed.;"The Freemasonry of the Race" presents a critical cartography of African American Freemasons' responses to the social and political exigencies of the postemancipation period. The study connects the developments of African American Freemasonry in the Atlantic world with the every day culture of African American Freemasonry in Charlottesville, Virginia from the conclusion of the Civil War until the turn of the century. Utilizing African American Freemasonry as a critical optic, the major question this study attempts to respond to is: How can we historicize and (re)present African American Freemasonry in order to rethink the cultural and political space of the postemancipation period in the United States?;Borrowing and blending a number of methodologies from social history, literary theory, and cultural studies, "The Freemasonry of the Race": The Cultural Politics of Ritual, Race, and Place in Postemancipation Virginia presents a set of analytic essays on African American Freemasonry, each intimately concerned with deciphering some of the principles that organized and (re)constructed various regimes of power and normality along the fault lines of race, sex, gender, class, and place. By thinking and working through African American Freemasonry in such a manner, this project seeks to open up new interdisciplinary horizons in African American cultural and social history.

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This dissertation examines how race and gender interacted with economic variables to shape a class transition involving African American domestic laborers from 1863 to 1980. African American women performed household labor traditionally assigned to their racial group during slavery under new economic conditions that developed after emancipation. After slavery, these women were forced to contract their labor to white households and produce feudal surplus. The analysis suggests that African American women radically transformed the feudal economic and social conditions of paid household labor well into the twentieth century. These women were agents of a class transition from feudalism to independent commodity production. African American women, gradually and through small-scale incremental changes, redefined and standardized their jobs as household workers so that they were increasingly able to exchange pre-specified services for a given amount of money. These workers also developed creative strategies to break the continued association of their race with servitude. Rather than being inherent attributes of paid domestic work, flexibility and autonomy were outcomes of strategic choices made by African American women establishing themselves as independent producers of a service. This dissertation also examines how the material conditions and changing economic subjectivity associated with this class transition profoundly affected the construction of race and gender identities. By engaging in individual and collective actions that radically transformed the domestic labor process, African American women not only challenged and subverted the racialized and gendered associations of such work, but also produced new meanings of Blackness and womanhood. An understanding of the complex interactions of race, class, and gender in this historical example helps us make sense of contemporary inequalities as well as identify strategies for social change.