Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Black Racial Grievance, Black American Identity, and Black Political Participation(2024) St Sume, Jennifer; Laird, Chryl; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship among Black racial grievance, Black American identity, and Black political participation. Black racial grievance is defined as the extent to which Black individuals believe their racial group is mistreated in the United States. This study is divided into three articles. The first article explores the link between Black racial grievance and Black American identity. Political science research has found that racial discrimination makes Black people feel less American (Huddy and Khatib 2007; Kam and Ramos 2008; Theiss-Morse 2009; Levundusky 2017). However, the consequences of discrimination and how they shape what it means to be a Black American remain underexplored. This paper addresses this critical gap, arguing that Black Americans consider their racial group’s treatment and the consequences of this treatment in their self-conception as Americans. I propose a new six-item measure of Black racial grievance, capturing Black perceptions of unfair treatment regarding their racial group, the current significance of racial grievance, and their awareness of these grievances across social, political, and economic domains. Using two national samples, I find that Black people who score higher on the racial grievance measure—indicative of a belief that the mistreatment of their racial group is a problem to be addressed across American society —feel less American. These findings underscore the importance of institutional inequality in Black politics. The second article examines the relationship between Black racial grievance and Black political participation. Previous research has employed measures such as relative deprivation, group consciousness, politicized collective identity, and linked fate to predict Black political participation. However, these measures fail to explain how individuals define their personal Black racial grievance, overlooking how these grievances shape Black participation. These shortcomings are driven by the assumption that little variation exists in Black political behavior. Accordingly, I argue that Black Americans rely on specific evaluations of racial grievance to determine whether to participate in politics. I develop a refined measure of Black racial grievance that captures the extent to which an individual perceives their racial group as being treated unfairly across various domains. I validate this measure through factor analysis and assess its robustness by comparing it to previous measures. As a proof of concept, I find that Black people who score higher on the racial grievance scale—those who feel their group is treated unfairly in more domains of society—and feel strongly attached to their racial group are more likely to participate in politics. The third article investigates the causal links among Black racial grievance, Black American identity, and Black political participation. Current research suggests that Black participation is motivated by perceptions of discrimination (Klandermans, 2014). To date, scant research has explored the interplay among Black racial grievance, Black American identity, and Black political participation. Therefore, this study addresses this gap by evaluating how Black racial grievance shapes political behavior among Black Americans. Using data from a national survey of 505 Black adults, I introduce a new measure of Black racial grievance and explore its impact on political engagement. The findings reveal that while experiencing racial discrimination increases racial grievance, it also complicates the relationship with political participation. Specifically, elevated levels of racial grievance correlate with decreased political participation in contexts where individuals feel disillusioned with the prospect of systemic changes. Thus, Black people with high Black racial grievance may choose not to vote or engage in political campaigns if they believe these actions will not lead to meaningful change. This article illustrates how Black racial grievance can sometimes hinder political action. Overall, this dissertation offers three significant contributions to the study of Black political behavior. First, it provides a novel framework to explain how Black people process racial mistreatment. Second, it highlights the intricate interplay among racial grievance, identity, and political action. Third, it lays the groundwork for future research on policy interventions tailored to the unique challenges faced by Black Americans. Ultimately, this work enhances the understanding of systemic marginalization and improves the ability to foster a more inclusive and equitable democracy.Item Crossing the Cultural Bridge: Examining the Cross-Ethnic Interactions and Relationships Between Black Immigrant and Black American Students at a Predominantly White, Public, State Flagship Institution(2024) Ogwo, Ashley; Fries-Britt, Sharon L; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The discourse surrounding Black immigrant and Black American student relationships in higher education has often centered tensions between the two groups related to their enrollment in private elite institutions (e.g., Bennett & Lutz, 2009; Charles et al., 2008; Massey et al., 2007). However, both inside and outside of the private elite context, there is little research that intentionally examines the cross-ethnic interactions and relationships between Black immigrant and Black American students (Awokoya, 2012; De Walt, 2011; George Mwangi et al., 2016; Jackson & Cothran, 2003). Existing literature’s primary focus on circumstances surrounding Black immigrant and Black American undergraduates that are out of their control, such as their respective over- and underrepresentation at elite colleges (Bennett & Lutz, 2009; Charles et al., 2008; Jaschik, 2017; Massey et al., 2007), has left a significant gap in the knowledge base regarding the actual communicative experiences of these student populations across ethnic lines. Few studies have ventured beyond the private elite institutional context to explore these relational dynamics, resulting in limited scholarly understanding of the benefits and challenges of Black immigrant and Black American interactions and relationship-building from the perspectives of students themselves. This study aims to address these knowledge gaps by examining the cross-ethnic relationship dynamics between Black immigrant and Black American undergraduates in the institutional context they more frequently attend: a predominantly white, moderately selective, public, state flagship institution (U.S. Department of Education National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, 2016, as cited in Espinosa et al., 2019).Utilizing communication theory of identity and case study methodology, this study empirically unpacks the cross-ethnic interactions and relationships between Black immigrant and Black American undergraduates at a predominantly white, public, state flagship institution in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. This study was guided by the following two research questions: 1) What do Black immigrant and Black American students at a predominantly white, public, state flagship institution perceive to be the role of their ethnic identities in their cross-ethnic interactions with one another? And 2) What do Black immigrant and Black American students at a predominantly white, public, state flagship institution perceive to be the benefits and challenges of Black cross-ethnic interactions and relationship-building? My study uncovered six themes that were prevalent across participants’ case narratives, including three challenges and three benefits to cross-ethnic interactions and relationship-building between Black immigrant and Black American students: 1) Challenge #1: “I Don’t Really Have Time”: How Students’ Schedules Limit Their Cross-Ethnic Engagement; 2) Benefit #1: “For the Sake of Community”: Developing Strong Cross-Ethnic Bonds to Support One Another at the PWI; 3) Challenge #2: “Instilled from Childhood”: The “Cycle” of Passing Down Cross-Ethnic Stereotypes and Preconceived Notions; 4) Benefit #2: “Breaking Generational Curses”: Combatting Instilled Interethnic Stereotypes through Cross-Ethnic Communication and Relationship-Building; 5) Challenge #3: “Trying to Reach and Understand the Other Side”: How Lack of Cultural Knowledge Limits Cross-Ethnic Interactions and Relationships; and 6) Benefit #3: “There’s So Much to Learn and Love”: Building Cross-Cultural Understanding through Cross-Ethnic Interactions and Relationships. The study’s findings provide critical insight into existing relational dynamics between Black immigrant and Black American undergraduates, detailing how these students perceive, describe, and make meaning of the relationship between their ethnic identities and their cross-cultural communication experiences with one another as well as the utility of their cross-ethnic interactions.Item Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence(2024) Donnell, Dallas Taylor; Bruce, La Marr J; Avilez, GerShun; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence” is an interdisciplinary examination of the Black Nightmare Imaginary, a form of ideological common sense about the precarity of Black life and the necessity of various modes and maneuvers of contestation and escape needed to survive. I argue that Black Americans have shared access to a psychic repository of scenes and scenarios of antiblack violence that exist in vivid detail out of a collective awareness of the omnipresent violence foundational to Black life itself. Black musicians can tap into this shared terrain of terror through creative works that return us to these traumatic moments and perform perseverance in the face of that trauma. These scenes of violence include the horror of the auction block, the humiliation of the minstrel show, the degradation of the social services visit, the tension of a traffic stop, and more. This is the stuff of our nightmares—the full spectrum of antiblack violence that persists through what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlives of slavery.” Foregrounding these scenarios of violence, Black musicians create works that can be read as enacting tactics of resistance to that violence. These tactics include vigilantism, nihilism, opacity, and marronage. Incorporating sonic, visual, literary, and discursive methods, I use the theoretical lens of the Black Nightmare Imaginary to do interdisciplinary analyses of the songs, music videos, album covers, and journalistic representations of a set of post-Civil Rights era Black musicians—including Mary J. Blige, Prince, N.W.A, 2pac, and Sister Souljah. This work challenges prevailing attitudes that misunderstand and devalue Black creative works with simplistic binaries of good /bad, positive/negative, political/apolitical. To the contrary, these are complex works that reckon with both the life and death stakes of the violence foundational to Black American life and the irreducibility and irrepressibility of that life to its influence.Item Sport, Race, and Grassroots Activism: A Contextual Analysis of Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp as a Sporting Social Movement Organization(2024) Wallace, Brandon T.; Andrews, David L.; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation engages Know Your Rights Camp for Black Liberation (KYRC) – founded and led by athlete-activist Colin Kaepernick – as a case study for critically analyzing the contemporary intersections of sport, race, and grassroots activism. Among other related initiatives, KYRC hosts “camps” across the U.S. designed to facilitate empowerment, solidarity, and critical education about structural racism for Black and Brown youth in marginalized communities. KYRC is illustrative of the recent resurgence of sporting activism in the 2010s and early 2020s, in conjunction with the broader Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement. Not only is Kaepernick a symbolic figure of both athletic protest and Black resistance more generally in this era, but KYRC is representative of how contemporary sporting activism has evolved in more radical, coordinated, and grassroots directions. Because these emerging sporting initiatives more closely resemble the character of social movements organizations than traditional sport-for-development or sporting philanthropy initiatives, I propose conceptualizing these grassroots organizations as Sporting Social Movement Organizations (SMOs). Borrowing from social movement frameworks, I examine KYRC as a Sporting SMO, defined as an organization that utilizes its connection to sport or athletes to pursue social, political, or cultural change in a coordinated, strategic, and sustained manner. While scholars within Physical Cultural Studies and related fields have outlined the historical significance of and public reactions to this resurgence in sporting activism, there remains a considerable lack of theoretically and empirically rigorous research into Sporting SMOs, let alone with data collected in collaboration with organizations that can speak to their inner workings and on-the-ground mechanics. This project fills these gaps. The underlying research question is: in what ways, and within what broader sociopolitical contexts, does Know Your Rights Camp conduct grassroots sporting activism? First, based on in-depth interviews with KYRC associates, content analysis of KYRC’s social media, and textual analyses of KYRC’s public-facing pedagogical documents, I conduct a micro- and meso-level sociological analysis of KYRC’s mechanics, logics, strategies, messages, tensions, and challenges of KYRC’s model of grassroots activism. Second, based in the methods of radical contextualism and articulation, I conduct a macro-level cultural studies analysis of the social, political, economic, historical, technological, and ideological contexts within which KYRC is situated. Overall, this dissertation contains a precise sociological analysis of what KYRC is and does, as well as a broader cultural studies analysis of what KYRC tells us about sport, race, and politics in contemporary America. To summarize the key findings, I suggest that KYRC is simultaneously a Black Radical political project, a form of celebrity sporting activism, a team-based Sporting SMO, a grassroots pedagogical project, and an anti-essentialist progressive conjunctural response to racial capitalism/neoliberalism. KYRC’s blueprint of grassroots activism can be characterized as the symbolic mobilization of high-profile celebrity association and the material mobilization of philanthropy/donor contributions for the purposes of youth empowerment, collective community uplift, and critical public pedagogy. KYRC is propelled by the Kaepernick Brand – referring to Kaepernick’s stature as a global commercial symbol of bold and authentic political resistance – which uniquely affords the organization material and symbolic resources that the KYRC team strategically channels into navigating the non-profit sector and serving its communities with critical education and rapid community response. Based on these findings, I argue that KYRC reveals the political and transgressive potentials inherent to the immense economic and cultural expansion of sport, in ways that urge us to reconsider our assumptions about sport’s emancipatory potential and heighten our expectations of Black (celebrity) athletes. More broadly, KYRC demonstrates how the Left can intervene through the terrain of popular culture to resist neoliberalism and the Right’s reactionary authoritarian populism, and instead articulate a vision for America based in abolition, solidarity, and liberation from all forms of oppression.Item AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM: THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN RACIAL MICROAGGRESSIONS, COPING, AND HEALTH AMONG BLACK COLLEGE STUDENTS(2024) Brown, Rabia; Lewis, Jioni A.; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black college students endure racial microaggressions in higher education, and current research highlights how racial microaggressions can negatively impact the health of Black college students. The purpose of this study was to investigate the associations between racial microaggressions in higher education, coping strategies (education/advocacy, resistance, detachment, drug/alcohol use, and internalization), and health quality in Black college students. Participants included 155 Black college students that took an online survey as a part of a larger study conducted at a large Southeastern historically white university. Results from the hierarchical linear regression analyses indicated that racial microaggressions were significantly and negatively associated with mental and physical health quality in Black college students. Additionally, results from the mediation analyses found that detachment coping significantly mediated the association between racial microaggressions and mental health in Black college students. This study provides further evidence of the negative impact of racial microaggressions on the health and well-being of Black college students.Item Haptic Listening: Analyzing Black Women’s Witnessing, Fugitivity, and Refusal in the 1990s and Early 2000s(2024) Young, Dominique; Avilez, GerShun; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 90s through early 2000s was an era marked by vociferous noises. This noise included Black popular cultural expansions in art, sonic waves of resistance via protests against police brutality, the crackling of arson fire expressing the Black community’s rage in response to anti-Blackness, and calls for reproductive justice for poor Black women among other sounds. While this era maintained the loudness of both prosperity and protest, it also nurtured quiet resistances against the U.S. carceral State. Specifically, Black women’s and girls’ vociferous and less discernible practices of refusal situated within film, literature, and music videos also propelled narrative resistance against the atmospheric violence of the State. What were the quiet and less discernible ways that Black women and girls challenged the U.S. carceral State during the 90s and in the early 2000s? What are the lenses or methodologies that make this resistance legible? What Black feminist scholars have already practiced the method of listening to that which is illegible or does not exist? What do Black girls and women gain when we can see their quiet refusal in this way? What is at stake if we cannot see this refusal? These are some of the questions that underscore this dissertation. In my dissertation I argue Black women and girls vociferously and quietly challenge the 1990s and early 2000s U.S. carceral State in film, fiction, and music videos. I maintain that the excavation of their less discernible (or “quiet”) practices of refusal within these cultural texts require a focused attention to detail and a counterintuitive practice of listening to that which is illegible, indiscernible, or hidden. In this way, Black popular culture is a site for the emergence and existence of resistance that brings to the forefront the efforts of Black women and girls who are often marginalized in resistance discourses. Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images at the intersection of Haptic Media Studies, I use a framework—haptic listening—for discerning and excavating their practices of refusal that are illegible to cursory analyses. Following my introduction chapter, in chapter two I center my analysis on Leslie Harris’ film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) and F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off (1996). Through haptic listening, I trace a cartography of witnessing informed by Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, Dwight McBride’s Impossible Witnesses, and Angela Ards’ Words of Witness. I argue that specific instances of witnessing that reify Black women’s and girls’ subjection, fracture Black kinship, and disrupt Black futures are the catalysts for their resistance to the carceral State. In chapter three I examine protagonist Winter’s fugitive journey in Sister Souljah’s 1999 novel The Coldest Winter Ever. Drawing from Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds, and Jennifer Nash’s “Black Maternal Aesthetics,” I argue that her fugitive journey begins and ends with her own vociferous haptic encounters—a process I call Circular Fugitivity. In the end, I trace a panoptic cartography that honors the emergence of her own political potential as she attempts to escape the grasp of the carceral State. And finally in chapter four I analyze the music video performances of Charli Baltimore in “Down Ass Chick” (2002) and Meagan Good in “21 Questions” (2003). Drawing from the work of Tina Campt in Listening to Images at the convergence of haptic media studies, I argue that their transformative practices of refusal are legible within and imbued by their identificatory photographs in each music video. These aesthetic practices of refusal, made obvious through haptic listening, appear throughout the music videos signaling the movement toward freedom. In the end, my project honors the less discernible practices of resistance by Black women and girls during the 1990s and early 2000s.Item Racial Moderation as Preference or Constraint? Examining Racial Pragmatism Among Black Americans(2023) Bishop, William B; Banks, Antoine; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I offer a theory of racial pragmatism to explain how the broader social context influences the social and political behavior of Black Americans. I define racial pragmatism as a Black belief system where through double consciousness (DuBois 1903) and their use of the pragmatic method (Dewey 1929), adherents are aware of Americans’ opposition to Black voters’ desired social changes. This reality has led pragmatic Black Americans to conclude that as a group, Black Americans are hampered in their ability to articulate and enact a progressive and racialized political agenda that uniquely benefits members of their racial group. Behaving similarly to pragmatic Black elites such as David Dinkins and Barack Obama (Harris 2012; Marable and Clark 2009; Reft 2009), when striving for social progress, I argue that pragmatic Black voters are hesitant to embrace race conscious political strategies, policies, and candidates, not because they oppose them outright, but rather they view these race-conscious options as ineffective in the current social environment. To evaluate my theory, I created an 8-item survey measure of racial pragmatism. I find that racial pragmatism is a statistically reliable measure and I found repeated support for my theory through a series of observational and experimental studies. As racial pragmatism increases, Black Americans are less likely to vote for racially progressive Democrats, offer more moderate positions on racial policies such as reparations, and envision greater political backlash from white Americans when politicians speak out about racial issues that affect Black people. I also find that pragmatists are more reactive to threat when compared to co-racial group members who scored lower in racial pragmatism. As racial pragmatism increases, Black Americans are more likely to compromise and abandon their liberal policy positions when responding to threat stimuli. Finally, I also found that my theory and measure of racial pragmatism has important social implications outside of politics. As racial pragmatism increases, Black Americans are more likely to both support and engage in strategic deracialization efforts such as codeswitching to mute their racial identities and increase their chances of fair treatment in American society. This research provides insight into the complex actions that Black Americans employ in their daily lives to compensate for prejudice and strategically develop tactics for achieving uplift in a country that is hostile to their interests and rights. Through racial pragmatism, some Black Americans make strategic and deliberate choices to deemphasize their racial identities and relegate racial issues in politics to decrease their chances of experiencing prejudice and backlash from non-Black Americans.Item "We Heard Healthcare": The Long Black Freedom Struggle as Health Justice(2023) Catchmark, Elizabeth; Enoch, Jessica; Fleming, Jr., Julius; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her project, Elizabeth Catchmark traces the ways Black liberation organizers have positioned a guarantee of health as a prerequisite for citizenship since Emancipation. Their challenges to white supremacy named the violence of the state in making Black America sicker and organized communal acts of care to enable their survival in the wake of state neglect. By situating health justice as key to full participation in civic life, these activists refuted a disembodied interpretation of citizenship and offered instead an embodied, capacious vision of racial justice that acknowledges the entanglements of our environments, bodies, and minds. The genealogy Catchmark develops demonstrates that the right to health is a constituent feature of the Black political imagination across the long Black freedom struggle. Ultimately, she finds that Black liberation organizers, through their racial-justice informed theorizations of health and citizenship, illustrate that democracy and health are inextricable from the eradication of white supremacy while offering new ways forward for public policy, racial justice organizing, and interpersonal care.Item Like I'm Kin to Him: Black Trans Publics, Relational Bonds, and Collective Creation(2023) Lundy-Harris, Amira Naima; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Like I’m Kin to Him: Black Trans Publics, Relational Bonds, and Collective Creation traces a history of Black trans relationality in the United States since the 1970’s, investigating what possibilities these connections offer, examining what challenges they present, and exploring what they might mean for the making of the self. This dissertation utilizes a mixed-methods approach, bringing together archival readings, literary analysis, and interviews to theorize the creation and cultivation of Black trans kinship bonds. Taking up Black trans studies, digital studies, public spheres theory, and kinship studies across disparate yet interconnected media contexts, the project tracks how Black trans people meet each other (from support groups to parties to YouTube), how we come to see each other as family, and how these connections help shape who we understand ourselves to be. This dissertation looks to four different sites— a home built for trans youth, a memoir, a social media platform, and a contemporary movement—and explores what kind of shelter they may offer. To this end, the chapters of Like I'm Kin to Him weave together to elucidate a genealogy of Black trans community and life over the last 50 years.Item The Geographies and Entanglements of Education and Mobility: A Focus on Black Nations and Black Immigrants, Past to Present(2022) Brantuo, Nana Afua Yeboaa; Brown, Dr. Tara; Turner, Dr. Jennifer; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using Black geographies – a deliberate, decolonial examination of racialization, spatialization, and Black life, situated at the nexus of Black intellectual traditions and modes of inquiry – this study centers and interweaves the narratives of Black im/migrants, along with their artistic, cultural, and intellectual knowledge and artifacts, to interrogate and revise historic and contemporary understandings of Black im/migrant students’ mobility, migration, and agency. The study answers the following questions: 1) How have Black im/migrants, and Black im/migrant students specifically, understood their multiple, intersecting identities, and how do these understandings shape how they navigate societies? 2) How do they understand and engage with/disengage from advocacy, activism, and politics, 3) What do they envision for themselves as students, as migrants, and as citizens (a status that continues to hold loosely for Black people across borders)?, and 4) What bonds and/or communities sustain them transnationally and how do they envision the roles of those bonds and communities in their futures? Also drawing on and in conversation with scholarly literature, archival materials and documents, reports and white papers, government surveillance records, journal entries, letters, laws, policies and treaties, news periodicals, interviews, organizational records, photographs, and speeches, the study elucidates the politics and interrelationships of education, migration, and empire for Black im/migrants across time and space. Implications for theory and research are presented with an emphasis on students’ Diasporic worldmaking praxes and networks as central to reviving and revising the historical and contemporary record of educational and migration research and scholarship.