Neoliberalism operationalizes the White Supremacist narrative of meritocracy in spaces like no-excuse charter schools in order to coerce teachers to obediently turn out data that is productive for investors, at the expense of both teachers and Black and Brown students’ humanity. This dissertation defines the coercion teachers experience as a process of mechanization, whereby they are inducted into the narrative of meritocracy and threatened with material loss if they do not comply. However, contrary to current research that illustrates their repeated mechanization, I draw from my own experiences as a teacher at a no-excuse charter school to assert that teachers in these spaces do have the capacity to enact anti-racist teacher agency and resist. This dissertation therefore asks, How do educators at no-excuse charter schools engage anti-racist teacher agency to negotiate mechanization and the narrative of meritocracy? Over the course of 13 months, I engaged with six self-described social justice-oriented teachers from three schools across two New Jersey cities through a methodology I developed called critical storying. Functioning in two parts--The Spiral and Speculation--critical storying first pays attention to participants' affective tensions through dialogic spiraling in order to identify mechanizations they experience, and ways the negotiate those mechanizations. Then, using participants’ own narrative imagining, I wrote each participants’ story centering them as a cyborg protagonist confronting and overcoming a core mechanization. The findings, as well as the framework and methodology developed for this study, contribute to research concerned with no-excuse charter schools, anti-racist teacher agency, speculative fiction, and dismantling White Supremacy from school systems.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / Between 1859 and 1909, the African-American press in Boston, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia nurtured a radical black political consciousness that challenged white supremacy on a national and local level. Specifically, black newspapers provided the ideological foundation for the New Negro movement of the 1910s and 1920s by cultivating this consciousness in readers. This dissertation examines black newspapers as political texts through what I have called figurative black nationalism in the ante-bellum Anglo-African, Douglass' Monthly, and Christian Recorder; through the political independence advocated in the post-Reconstruction New York Age, Cleveland Gazette, and Boston Advocate; and through the tum of the century Woman's Era, Colored American, and Boston Guardian. This study challenges fundamental assumptions about race, politics, and African-American activism between the Civil War and the Progressive Era. First, analyzing how ante-bellum African-Americans used the press to define radical abolition on their own terms shows that they adopted what I call figurative black nationalism through the Anglo-African's serialization of Martin R. Delany's 1859 novel Blake, or The Huts ofAmerica. Second, even as this press moved to the post-bellum south, northern African-Americans became increasingly alienated from the conservative rhetoric of racial spokesmen, particularly as the fall of Reconstruction led to repeal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act and failure of the 1890 Federal Elections Bill. Frances E.W. Harper's serialized novel Minnie's Sacrifice perpetuated the idea that free and freed people shared a post-bellum political outlook in the Christian Recorder, but such unity was elusive in reality. Consequently, northern African-Americans adopted a form of "mugwumpism" that questioned notions of blind African-American loyalty to the Republican Party. Finally, black northerners at the turn of the century reclaimed the radical abolition and political independence of the past in a successful assault on Tuskegee-style accommodation through a radical version of racial uplift. This radical racial uplift was shaped through northern black women's appropriation of Anna Julia Cooper's feminism, through Pauline Hopkins' serial novel Hagar's Daughter, and through William Monroe Trotter's participation in the Niagara Movement. Northern black politics, rather than white Progressivism or southern black conservatism, nurtured twentieth century civil rights activism.

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White ways of understanding, perceiving, and knowing continue to be centered in the field of psychology, leaving a deficit of knowledge around effective antiracist pedagogy, research, and training. Although psychologists have a natural place in strengthening social justice initiatives to broader antiracist advocacy, the field has had a long history of perpetuating racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in the United States. White Supremacy Culture, outdated professional socialization practices, and hostile training environments continue to lead to high attrition rates, racial trauma, and compounding mental health issues for BIPOC. Moreover, epistemic restrictions and the lack of precise guidelines on implementing antiracism practices remain barriers to advancing racial equity within the field. Using Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR), this study identified antiracist frameworks and guidelines that psychology training programs could construct from the experiences, motivations, and practices of White activists in Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), one of the most visible racial justice organizations in the United States. Through semi-structured interviews with 14 SURJ activists, this study generated eight major domains with three to five themes per domain. Applying theoretical frameworks of Critical Whiteness Studies, White Supremacy Culture, and spatial justice, findings revealed the range of ways in which SURJ activists used spatial justice praxis or counter-spaces against White Supremacy Culture to work through the barriers of being an effective White activist and to advance antiracism by finding their mutual interests, or personal stakes, in the racial justice movement. Implications for psychology training programs, study limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The most recent racial justice movement that emerged in the United States beginning in the summer of 2020 in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd laid bare the overdue need to revisit white America’s legacy of racist violence against its Black citizens. Historians can help bridge the gap between past and present and urge more Americans to identify and confront racial violence. As a born-and-raised Hoosier, I wanted to contribute to social change and racial justice at home. The historical silence on the history of racist violence in Indiana supports the myth that Indiana was a free state where Black citizens found refuge from the racist violence they experienced in the South; thousands of primary source newspapers containing details of white perpetrators lynching and violently attacking Black Hoosiers refute this myth. This paper identifies white perpetrators’ acts of anti-Black violence and Black Hoosiers resistance to anti-Black violence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis of racial violence in Indiana shows that white perpetrators employed violence in defense of white supremacy and that Black Hoosiers resisted anti-Black violence and white supremacy. The record indicates that racial terrorism has been embedded in the fabric of Indiana since its founding. Grassroots efforts, such as the Facing Injustice Project’s work to acknowledge the 1901 lynching of George Ward in Terre Haute, Indiana, are starting to recognize the harm white Hoosiers did to Black Hoosiers and bring repair to victims’ descendants and communities. More public history projects are needed to engage all Hoosiers in reckoning with the history of anti-Black violence. Activists and organizations have shown that Wikipedia is one digital institution where anyone can do the work of rooting out inequalities and injustices. This digital public history Wikipedia project challenges the historical silence on Indiana’s racially violent past by telling the truth about the history on one of the most-visited websites in the world. Using Wikipedia to do public history invites Hoosiers of all backgrounds to take up the work of acknowledging Indiana’s history of anti-Black violence, updating the historic record, and reevaluating the narrative constantly.

Most research on the effects of race on people’s lived experiences focuses on how race affects the lives of people of color. Since the 1990’s, a growing body of literature has focused on “Whiteness” in society. Most “Whiteness Studies” focus on how “White” developed as a racial category and how various ethnic/national groups (e.g., Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans) came to be included under that racial label. However, nearly a century ago, in 1935, sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois referred to the public and psychological wage for Whiteness—in part, meaning the societal gravity or weight that the label “White” tends to carry. Du Bois’ oft-quoted proposition has never been empirically tested. The present study used the experimental method to empirically test Du Bois’ proposition. Using mock job applications that were identical except that (1) the applicant’s photograph had been electronically manipulated to vary race (Black or Caucasian) and sex (male or female) and (2) the application either did or did not suggest the applicant had a pending criminal charge. Each participant evaluated one mock applicant on a variety of employment and personality scales. Major findings show a main, usually negative, effect of criminal records status on ratings. Interaction effects show that participants ranked Black applicants with a pending criminal record higher than Whites with a pending record, while the reverse was true when applicants had no criminal record. Social desirability bias, and other possibilities (e.g., heightened socio-political consciousness and identification) – are discussed as possible explanation effects, including absence of prominent race or sex effects. / African American Studies

Research on social illiteracy (Rand, 2021) and the demographic imperative (Jupp et al., 2019)—as well as teachers’ stated responsibilities in teaching about race and racism in schools (Rand, 2021)—convey the urgency of attending to both barriers and possibilities for white literacy and English Language Arts (ELA) teachers. As literacy is inextricably linked with equity, literacy classrooms mark a site of sanctioning or resisting oppressions rooted in the white supremacist status quo. Following recent articulations of critical race and whiteness frameworks—particularly white supremacy logic (Enumah, 2021)—this research aims to explore white anti-racist educators teaching in the post-2020 evolving and contested field of education. Rooted in a theoretical framework of “rehumanizing praxis,” or simultaneous inward and outward pedagogies, this inquiry prioritizes humanizing research with participants through interviews, observations, reflections, and artifacts. Situated in critical constructivist grounded theory methodology, I enacted a research design intended to explore the internal and external barriers, possibilities, and pedagogies six white anti-racist teachers experience in their endeavors to participate in liberatory education.

For decades, scholars have debated the significance of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), emphasizing its political, economic, and artistic impact. This historiography is dominated by the accomplishments of white men. In an effort to highlight the long-neglected legions of black women who contributed to WPA projects and navigated the agency’s discriminatory practices, this paper will examine WPA operations in New Orleans where unemployment was the highest in the urban south, black women completed numerous large-scale projects, and white supremacist notions guided relief protocol. By analyzing the New Orleans WPA Photography collection, along with newspapers, government documents, and oral histories, a new perspective of the WPA emerges to illuminate the experiences of marginalized black women workers, illustrate how the legacies of slavery and effects of segregation impact black women’s employment opportunities, and highlight how black women made substantive contributions to public projects in the face of societal constraints.