Browsing by Subject "racial identity"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Exploring Risk and Protective Factors Among African American Males in Alternative and General Education Settings
    (2012-02-14) Crossley, Tia Billy
    A large number of African American males have experienced risk and protective factors that may impede or enhance their success in the school setting. As a result of these risk and protective factors, they may or may not be at-risk for adverse outcomes behaviorally as well as academically. As indicated throughout the literature, to better serve behaviorally at-risk students, the educational system has responded by implementing methods such as zero-tolerance policies, increased security, and alternative education programs. While the former has been established throughout the literature, there has been a paucity of research on alternative education programs in general and even less with regard to African American male students. This study examined four levels of risk and protective factors, individual, school, community, and family, among African American males in both alternative and general educational settings. One hundred fifteen students ages 11 to 16 were assessed for demographics, self-efficacy, school engagement, and racial identity measures. The purpose of the study was to examine the differences between risk and protective factors among African American males in alternative and general education settings. Specifically, the individual level was examined in detail using the following risk and protective factors: self-efficacy, school engagement, and racial identity. This study also examined the impact risk and protective factors have in predicting the likelihood that an African American male would be placed in an alternative education setting. Both independent samples t-tests and hierarchical logistic regression analyses were used. Results indicated that there are statistically significant differences in levels of self-efficacy and school engagement between African American males in alternative education settings and general educations settings. No difference was found in levels of racial identity among the groups. Results from the hierarchical logistic regressions indicated that self-efficacy is a significant predictor. These findings show the importance for school psychologists to work with students to instill confidence to be successful in school settings. Also, since self-efficacy was shown to be a significant predictor of placement status in alternative school settings, it is important for school psychologists and school personnel to get involved with these students before they even become at-risk.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    National and Racial Identity and the Desire for Expansion: A Study of American Travel Narratives, 1790-1850
    (2011-08-08) Jeong, Jin Man
    This dissertation aims to investigate the shaping of a national literature within travel narratives written by William Bartram, Washington Irving, George Catlin, Thomas L. McKenney, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, and Francis Parkman. I focus attention on two issues: (1) National and racial identity, and (2) Territorial, cultural, and capitalist expansionism. National and racial identity construction is examined by clarifying how the narratives? underlying voices?the National Symbolic and the Racial Symbolic?encourage the reading public to embrace the values vital in forging American collective identity. Identity invention is also seen in romantic representations of the American landscape and Native Americans. Between 1790 and 1850, the widespread trope of the Noble Savage and ?distantiation? working in the Burkean aesthetics of the sublime were used as ideological frames for viewing ?Others,? crucial in defining the American ?self? by making the white Americans? shift of association/dissociation with their primitivized Others possible. In order to analyze the narratives? representation of expansionism as a national desire, this study investigates how romantic rhetoric and the appeal to morality (or the Law) were employed as decisive ideological foundations for rationalizing expansionism. Chapter I establishes the legitimacy of evaluating travel narratives as a significant part of America?s national literature. Chapter II reveals that democracy, masculine robustness, and the myth that Americans are a chosen people of progress are featured aspects in the portrayals of American pathfinders. Chapter III shows that the racial identity of ?civilized whites? is forged in accordance with a miscegenation taboo informing negative portrayals of half-breeds and racial boundary crossing. Chapter IV illustrates that American freedom, simplicity, wholesome civilization, and youthfulness are presented as national characteristics through adapting the romantic tropes of the Noble Savage and the aesthetics of the sublime. Chapter V investigates the perverse mode of desiring in the iterative triangular relationship between romanticism, morality, and expansionism?the nation?s civilizing project par excellence. Chapter VI appraises the travel narratives? roles in defining American selfhood and reflecting (and promoting) an imperialistic desire for expansion.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    "Our Generation Had Nothing to Do with Discrimination": White Southern Memory of Jim Crow and Civil Rights
    (2012-07-16) Lavelle, Kristen Marie
    The ways in which white Americans understand the racial landscape and their own racial identities are not well understood. Through the lens of the racial past, in this study I investigate how memory operates within the white racial frame, the dominant white-centric worldview, to uphold systemic racism and to maintain whites? collective and individual identities. Through a narrative analysis of original in-depth interviews conducted with 44 ordinary white southerners ? lifetime residents of Greensboro, North Carolina ? who lived through the legal segregation and civil rights eras, this research demonstrates the interviewees? contemporary investment in positive notions of the white self and white society. The respondents' autobiographical narratives of life during legal segregation, a time of overt white supremacy, are typified by nostalgia for a childhood era of safety, security, and "good" race relations. Interviewees' narratives of the civil rights era, including nonviolent student sit-in protests for which Greensboro is known and school desegregation, have themes of disruption, danger, and white victimization. Overall, respondents portray Jim Crow segregation as a calm and peaceful time and the civil rights era as chaotic and harmful to whites, at the same time as they acknowledge, to a limited extent, the unfairness of Jim Crow's blatant racial inequalities. In this work I propose the concepts white victimology, white protectionism, and white moral identity. I argue that white victimology ? whites' perception, largely imagined, of their own racial victimization ? is a major ideological and emotional facet of the white racial frame, whereby whites dismiss the historical and contemporary reality of white racism. My analysis demonstrates that white victimology is a primary way in which whites assert themselves, individually and collectively, as racial innocents and "good" people. In this work I also conceptualize the dynamic of white protectionism, explanatory and rhetorical ways in which whites "rescue" white acquaintances and family members from potential accusations of racism. Ultimately, I argue that whites' investment in perpetuating white dominance and upholding the white racial frame occurs through white moral identity-making, myriad active and subtle ways that whites continue to construct themselves positively and construct people of color, especially black Americans, negatively.