The Black Family and Society 2014034993, 9781412856041

Table of contents :
Contents
1 Introduction • James L. Conyers, Jr.
2 A Biscuit for a Letter: Black Children and Education in the Antebellum South • Vincent Willis
3 Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family: Coping with Prejudice • Jason Thompson and Rockell Brown-Burton
4 Black Intellectuals on Trial: Debating Race, Community, and Responsibility • Marcia Walker-McWilliams
5 African Perspectives on Race in the African Diaspora: As Understood by Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah • Rita Kiki Edozie
6 Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family: Ideological and Methodological Contestations • Theresa Rajack-Talley and Latrica Best
7 “It’s Gonna Be Some Drama!”: A Content Analysis of HBCUs on BET’s College Hill • Siobhan Smith
8 African-centered Research Frameworks: Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural Competence in Evaluation • Sarita Davis
9 “Work to Be Done”: Democratic Pursuits and Black Women Activists, 1940s–1965 • Courtney Thompson
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Copyright © 2015 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American ­Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval ­system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction ­Publishers, 10 ­Corporate Place South, Suite 102, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854. www.transactionpub.com This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014034993 ISBN: 978-1-4128-5604-1 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Black family and society / James L. Conyers, Jr., editor. pages cm. -- (Africana studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-5604-1 (alk. paper) 1. African American families. 2. African American families--Social conditions. I. Conyers, James L., editor. E185.86.C586 2015 306.85′08996073--dc23  2014034993

Contents 1

Introduction James L. Conyers, Jr.

2 A Biscuit for a Letter: Black Children and Education in the Antebellum South Vincent Willis

1

5

3 Examining Memorable Messages in the  African American Family: Coping with Prejudice Jason Thompson and Rockell Brown-Burton

21

4 Black Intellectuals on Trial: Debating Race,  Community, and Responsibility Marcia Walker-McWilliams

49

5 African Perspectives on Race in the African  Diaspora: As Understood by Chimamanda  Adichie’s Americanah Rita Kiki Edozie 6 Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family:  Ideological and Methodological Contestations Theresa Rajack-Talley and Latrica Best 7

“It’s Gonna Be Some Drama!”:  A Content Analysis of HBCUs on BET’s College Hill Siobhan Smith

67

87

103

8 African-centered Research Frameworks:  Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural Competence in Evaluation Sarita Davis

125

9 “Work to Be Done”: Democratic  Pursuits and Black Women Activists, 1940s–1965 Courtney Thompson

139

Contributors

163

Index       

167

1 Introduction James L. Conyers, Jr. Technology, globalization, information systems, and energy are terms used frequently as dispatches to describe modes of communication among individuals, groups, and families in coeval society. Still, direct contact with humans is almost a lost way of communication. Perplexing is this direct and indirect correlation toward the current structure of African American families. Text messages and social media—Facebook, ­Twitter, and Instagram—have become the streams through which familial and extended groups converse and network. Intriguingly, the idea of the familial is now inclusive of cell phones, iPads, laptop computers, and social media. Furthermore, this study focuses on the social construction of the Black Family and health care. The two topics are interrelated: family is the cornerstone of society, with emphasis on the kindred unit that provides support for the advancement of education, fiscal acquisition, and prosperity. In lieu of African Americans being the descendants of involuntary migrants, the concept of family is kin, while engaging the continuity of disparity and inequality on a daily basis. Family can be defined as the social unit of biological relations among a group of people. Of course, there are threads of ethnicity adjoining the group along familial bases. In some cases, there will be ethnic and racial aggregates, comprising of familial groupings. Equally important, the concept of Black Family is aligned to prioritizing the African American kinsperson and adjoining supplemental ethnic groups from the continental and diaspora experiences. Still, the concept of order and cultural difference supports the idea of pluralism without hierarchy. Within ethnicity, the 1

2   The Black Family and Society

concept of race addresses physical description and not cultural variation. However, the differential is precedent concerning linguistics, culture, and location of the group. Societies, then, are a primary aspect of how families manage and maintenance themselves, regarding their physiological conditioning. On the other hand, there is correlation between access to resources and information and the deterioration of one’s physical health and existence. Whereas if Black families have regressed resources, then diet, education, employment, housing, and life chances of advancement are virtually motionless. In closing, the topic of family and more accentuation on the Africana kinsperson is relative while we exist, communicate, merchandise ideas, and function in a technologically driven society. In this context, the crossroads of engagement, within this volume, provides an interdisciplinary approach to examining the survival, retention, and function of the Black family, drawing emphasis on a cultural analysis of health care. Volume 6 begins with Vincent Willis, in his article “A Biscuit for A Letter,” where he proffers a decisive interrogation of African American children and education in the Antebellum south. Cardinally, Willis deposits an extensive review of literature, with emphasis on enslaved African American children’s trust to attain formal and informal modalities of education. What is more, the author presses education as tool of liberation for people who have been systematically subordinated. Jason Thompson and Rockell Brown-Burton wrote the seminal “Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family,” in which the two authors focus on coping strategies and prejudice, aimed at ranking as less important, people of Africana decent. The article is organized into the following subsections: racial prejudice memorable messages—support and family; inter-generational transmissions within the African American trust; method, with emphasis on participants, procedure, instrumentation, data analysis; results of the data collected, with emphasis on self-concept, behavior, popular sayings, self-improvement; research question on memorable messages transmitted, with emphasis on discussion; and directions for future research experienced by African Americans. In summary, the authors have tendered a mixed-method approach to the study of racial prejudice in America. Marcia Walker-McWilliams, in her essay titled “Black Intellectuals on Trial,” acquaints the concept of race and community. In this context, the author organizes her ideas into the following categories: general overview; Black intellectual tradition from the late nineteenth century to the Civil Rights era; and post–civil rights era and the emergence of the

Introduction   3

new Black intellectuals, or Black public intellectuals. Consuming a note from the Harold Cruse paradigm of the Crisis of the Black Intellectual, Walker-McWilliams has innovatively pressed defining the contours of intellectualism and accountability of Africana academics. Rita Kiki Edozie in her article titled “Africans’ Perspectives on Race in the US,” renders a political-literary review of Chimamanda Adichie’s novel Americanah. Communicated from the prism of the social scientist, Kiki engineers a political history of this text in the following: Introduction; Racialization, Immigration, and Transnationalism in Amerikah, Ifemelu and the Non-American Black; Blogging about Race; Engaging and Negotiating Race through Historic Diasporas; Engaging and Negotiating Race through White Americans; Structural Racism, Transnationalism, Postcolonialism, and Globalization; and the Conclusion. Heart-warming, Kiki unfolds our analytic thinking from a quantitative appraisal to a triangulated canon of mixed methods in describing and evaluating the continental and diasporic Africana experiences. Theresa Rajack-Talley and Latrica Best in their essay “Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family,” straddle a treatment of data collection and interpretative analysis. Adventitiously, the article is unionized into the following points: an overview of defining the term feminization of poverty; critical analysis of feminization of poverty; structural barriers and struggles; cultural biases; methodological challenges; and the conclusion. Equally important, the authors take exception to conventional wisdom concerning the disparity of social stratification of gender, racial, and ethnic groups. Sibohan Smith in her article titled “It’s Gonna Be Some Drama” lays out a qualitative appraisal of BET’s reality show College Hill. Smith expounds on this dialogue cracking off a content analysis literature review, extracting themes and issues of race, gender, and class. Overall, the essay yields researchers to extract alternative feelers of outlining and measuring ethnic groups, with emphasis on Africana phenomena. Sarita Davis offers an insightful article, “African-centered Research Frameworks: Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural Competence in Evaluation.” The kernel of this essay probes cultural competence and valuation. Using an interdisciplinary matrix of Africana Studies and accesses of social work, the author has organized this study into the following areas: Introduction; The American Evaluation Association and Cultural Competence; World-view and Methodology; African-centered Research Frameworks; and Conclusion. Inside an enclosed space, Davis queries the openness and balance of Eurocentric hegemonic models of evaluation.

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Courtney Thompson in “Work to Be Done” renders a narrative that inspects African American female activists from 1940–1965. Throughout an area in this period, American historiography, is in a political transition from a Democratic to Republican presidential administration. Resiliently, this idea pushes forward resource personnel from Rosa Parks to Septima Clark. Creatively, Thompson infixes a thorough study of Africana families and leadership. Finally, Thompson exhibits a mixed-method estimation of the continuity of Black leadership, with emphasis on Africana womanism.

2 A Biscuit for a Letter: Black Children and Education in the Antebellum South Vincent Willis Due to the nature of slavery and the possibility of black people being sold off, enslaved people had to continuously adapt and recreate their culture and family. One of the ways black people reconstructed their community involved finding subtle ways to educate themselves, either formally or informally. As scholars produced pioneering work on slave communities, other scholars began to examine enslaved people more intimately. The late twentieth century produced scholarship that held that black people were not merely pawns who accepted their cruel position, but people who resisted and survived an unjust system. One subject that scholars began to focus on was education.1 Scholastic work noted that education was consistently present within the enslaved communities. Legal historian Heather Andrea Williams investigated how aggressively enslaved people pursued education from slavery to freedom. Since it was unlawful for slaves to read and write, she discussed creative ways in which enslaved people taught themselves. Her work illustrates how the desire for education has always been instrumental to the survival of black people. Black people’s desire for education eventually “transformed public education, in the American South, to the great benefit of both black and white people.” Williams’s work illustrates that enslaved people linked freedom with education and when whites were not willing to educate them, they took it upon themselves to learn to read and write. She also shows that black people’s desire for education existed during slavery and remained centrally important once they obtained their freedom.2 5

6   The Black Family and Society

Despite all the scholarly interest in slavery, enslaved families, and education, few people have paid much attention to children. The scholars who have are Wilma King and Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Before the late twentieth century, little was known about enslaved children. Both of these scholars understood that children had been silenced, and each of their works shifted the focus of slavery to include the experiences of children. King stated, “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, childhood and adolescence have a more prominent place in the national discourse than at any other point in American history.”3 Therefore, this article attempts to elevate how black children used their white playmates to acquire an education, which meant that black children played a pivotal role in the early stages of the freedom struggle because educational obtainment was in direct contrast with the ideals of slavery. Enslaved children who desired to read and write often used white children to achieve this goal. The method used most during this transaction involved trading something based on both group’s agreeing on trade value. Black children did not sit idly by waiting on their slave assignment. Being cognizant, to some extent, of the social norms of slavery, they used white children for their benefit and therefore exercised some form of agency.4 Enslaved Children’s Desire for Education The United States Constitution did not forbid slaves from learning to read and write; however, Southern states adopted statutes that prohibited slaves from being educated.5 These statutes were known as slave codes and addressed every aspect of slavery. Black people were seen as property, which prohibited them from suing their masters, earning wages, and learning to read or write. Slave codes not only reflected the laws by which enslaved people were governed, but also illustrated the ideology of an enslaved African American. William Goodell, an abolitionist during the nineteenth century, stated, “The mere bestowal of privileges, with the permission to enjoy them, is not the recognition of rights; it is rather an implied denial of their existence. Men do not grant permission nor confer privileges where they recognize rights. The power to permit and to confer carries with it the power to refuse and to withhold.”6 Although Goodell does not agree with the institution of slavery or the execution of slave codes in South, his work illustrates the power structure of slavery. These were the social norms through which enslaved blacks had to navigate to maintain and prove their humanity.

A Biscuit for a Letter   7

According to historian John Hope Franklin, the primary purpose of the slave codes was to give maximum protection to the whites, thus maintaining discipline among the slaves.7 Slave codes sought to preserve the hierarchy of slavery in which whites were the superior race and blacks the inferior race. One of the methods used to reinforce this notion was keeping enslaved people illiterate and punishing the majority of slaves who learned to read and write. For example, Georgia’s slave codes in 1755, specifically section II, made it unlawful for whites or freed black persons to teach slaves to read or write, and anyone caught educating a slave would be fined and/or whipped.8 Although statutes made it unlawful to teach slaves to read and write, enslaved blacks, including enslaved children, defied the law by creating ways to be educated. Black children may not have been as cognizant about resisting slavery as their parents, but they were aware that learning to read and write was against the law and the social norms of slavery. Throughout the slave states, masters and overseers thought the best way to keep slaves subordinate was to keep them illiterate. This idea can be seen throughout the slave narratives, specifically those of Frederick Douglass and Hannah Craft, which will be discussed later. Whites believed that if adult slaves were forbidden to read and write then their children would be uneducated, which created a succession of uneducated but hard and loyal workers. Nevertheless, blacks were never completely uneducated throughout the history of slavery, which is one of the reasons why the institution was so peculiar and complex. Enslaved blacks were never content with their slave status. Black parents made sure that their children understood the social norms of slavery and did everything within their power to protect their children, but they were not always successful.9 Black children realized at an early age that they were in a unique situation. Marie Jenkins Schwartz stated, “The children occupied an unusual position in that two sets of adults valued them, laying claim to their economic worth and attaching an emotional significance to their presence.”10 Masters wanted black children to grow up and be productive laborers, while their parents wanted them to more than slaves. Black and white adults battled for the loyalty of black children for completely different reasons. Unfortunately, enslaved children had to navigate through the peculiar institution appeasing their parents and their masters and mistresses because they depended on both groups for their survival. Although adults, both black and white, were pertinent to the survival of enslaved children, it was their interaction with white children that may have been the most liberating.

8   The Black Family and Society

This article examines how black children found agency using their white counterparts. Black children rebelled against the social norms of slavery and used white children to teach them how to read and write. Since black children were too young to work in the fields, their interaction with white children was more personal. The social norms of slavery forged liaisons between white and black children, which black children used to their advantage. This is not to say that black children did not experience the harshness of slavery, but the relationships that black children were able to establish with white children gave them some type of agency. Scholars such as John Blassingame, Herbert G. Gutman, and Eugene D. Genovese have discussed in great detail how blacks, mainly adults, resisted the institution of slavery, but few have looked at ways in which children resisted. By framing resistance as actions carried out by adults, it silences the contribution that enslaved children made to the slave community and the history of slave resistance. Ultimately, this article shows that black children developed different methods to obtain literacy using white children, which means that they rebelled against the social norms of slavery and developed agency. Before addressing black children’s desire to learn to read and write and the different ways they used white children to attain literacy, it is important to understand the impact the slave codes had on enslaved children. The slave codes differed depending on the slave state, but few of the laws had a direct impact on enslaved children. Slave codes that prohibited slaves to be educated, however, had the most detrimental and direct impact on black children. Other slave codes discussed property, punishment, family, and wages, which did not affect enslaved children directly. Although black children were part of the slave family, their ability to understand the majority of the slave codes was limited or out of the scope of childhood. Slave codes were created to manage enslaved adults more than enslaved children. Children did not need to know about property or wages, and very few slave masters or overseers punished black children the same way they punished black adults. Therefore, the laws of slavery did not have a direct effect on enslaved children, but the children were aware of societal norms that prohibited them from being educated. Enslaved children were affected more by the social norms than by laws, but the norms of slavery reflected the laws. Consequently, black children had to come up with innovative plans to learn to read and write. A desire to read and write motivated black children to establish creative ways to achieve literacy. Even though the methods used by black children were quite different, the common theme throughout most of the narratives

A Biscuit for a Letter   9

discussed was a deep yearning for education. Enslaved children had to navigate within a space where their internal feelings contradicted with the external norms of society. The inner and outer war forced black children to be secretive about their education. One of the slave narratives that gives credence to the dilemma that enslaved children faced is Hannah Craft, an ex-slave from North Carolina. Her narrative explains in great detail her desire for knowledge and what her master thought about slaves being educated. In The Bondwoman’s Narrative, she stated “my master thought that education tended to enlarge and expand slaves’ ideas, which made them less subservient to their superiors. Besides, education’s blessing was destined to be conferred exclusively on the higher and nobler race.”11 Craft’s experience is quite different from slaves who will be discussed in this chapter, because she was taught to read and write by an older white woman. However, her story is enlightening because it shows that enslaved children yearned for literacy, which in itself is defiance.12 Black children knew that they were prohibited from learning to read and write, but learned anyway. Hannah Craft states, “I had from the first an instinctive desire for knowledge and the means of mental improvement.” Based on Craft’s slave experience she knew that her learning to read and write would be met with opposition, but she was willing to accept the risk.13 Craft states, “[I] would steal away from their company to ponder over the pages of some old book or newspaper that chance had thrown in my way. I would just look at the words and think that one day I would able to understand them all.”14 Although she looked at the words of books and newspaper she could not yet comprehend, it illustrates her desire for education and how it only intensified. She states, “How earnestly I desired knowledge, how our Master interdicted it, and how I was trying to teach myself.” Her narrative illustrates how black children purposely defied the conditions of enslavement. Black children’s aspiration for education was very similar to that of the larger slave community. According to Heather Williams, enslaved people always valued literacy. Her work Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom depicts how enslaved people always found creative ways to learn to read and write. Williams’s work suggests that slaves who learned to read and write could defy slavery using different methods that illiterate slaves could not use. She states, “Literacy provided the means to write a pass to freedom, to learn of abolitionist activities, or to read the Bible.” Williams also implies that enslaved people who learned to read and write attacked the racial ideology of slavery. “The presence of literate slaves threatened to give lie to the entire system.”15 Although

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her work focuses mainly on adults and education after slavery, it shows that enslaved children had similar ambitions to their parents, which was to resist their slave status and exemplify their humanity. Slave children were somewhat cognizant of the rules, because they had to live with the harsh realities of slavery daily. Although a majority of enslaved children grew up not knowing how to read and write, there were those who were able to attain literacy. James Curry, a former slave from North Carolina, acquired education from the son of his master, Moses Chambers. Curry did not have to come up with any complex tactics, because he and the master’s son were like brothers. The master’s son who taught him was only six months older, so when the white child returned from school one evening, Curry asked if he could teach him to read and write. Curry states, “I had a great desire to learn to read, I prevailed on him to teach me.”16 James got his mother to acquire a book for him, but the session did not last long because Moses Chambers, the slave master, soon found out that his son was giving a slave reading lessons and quickly forbade it.17 Although Curry’s narrative does not speak of any punishment, it does give credibility to the desire for education that black children felt. Curry and Craft’s desire to achieve literacy was very similar, and so were the sentiments of their master about enslaved people being educated. Both of the narratives correspond with Frederick Douglass’s childhood experiences. Douglass’s master, just like those of Curry and Craft, forbade his slaves to learn to read and write. Master Hugh Auld stated, “He should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world . . . there will be no keeping him.”18 Each of these narratives demonstrates how enslaved children aspired to be educated, and learning to read became the force that drove them to use education as a tool and as a source of agency. Black children used white children as teachers because very few white adults would teach them. The adults who took chances and got caught were reprimanded. For instance, when Frederick Douglass’s mistress was caught teaching him to read and write, she was scolded by her husband, Master Auld. The woman who taught Hannah Craft was removed from her property when it was discovered that she had taught a slave to read and write. By the time it was discovered that Hannah was literate she was an adult, but Douglass was still a child when his mistress was prohibited from teaching him. Douglass did not give up on learning to read and write. He developed an alternative method and used his white counterparts to learn. According to Williams, the ability for slaves to learn

A Biscuit for a Letter   11

to read and write is significant, because “Reading indicated to the world that this so-called property has a mind, and writing foretold the ability to construct an alternate narrative about bondage itself.”19 Even though the methods to defy the social norms of slavery were different, the yearning to be educated is very similar. Illustrating the different ways in which black children found agency within the harshness of slavery shows that they had a mind and used it brilliantly. Black children found diverse tactics to persuade white children to teach them to read and write. Becoming literate required them to employ creative tactics.20 These tactics ranged from personal exchange or simple competition between white and black children. Slave children traded everything from food to marbles, and they also made bets with white children that dealt with education, which was a used as a learning tool. Douglass states, “The plea that I mainly adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of using my young white playmates, with whom I met in the street, as teachers.”21 Douglass’s narrative highlights specific ways in which he was able to exert agency and defy slavery. Douglass was well aware that slaves were not permitted to learn to read and write. He knew that he was a slave, and slaves were not to be educated, but he learned anyway. Douglass realized that the white children would be very helpful to him, so he sought lessons from any white child with whom he felt he could bargain. Douglass describes how the white children were educated on the plantation where he grew up. He states, “The children and grand-children of Col. Lloyd were taught in the house, by a private tutor and the overseers’ children go off somewhere to school; and they, therefore, bring no foreign or dangerous influence from abroad.”22 Although white children may not have challenged consciously the institution of slavery, they played an important role as teachers to black children. Before white children were socialized into fully understanding the racial hierarchy of slavery, they eagerly shared their school lessons with enslaved children. However, black children were aware and took full advantage of white children’s kindness or ignorance. Douglass knew that even the poorest white child should be able to teach him basic things, so he used all of them to learn. When Douglass was sent on errands or allotted playtime, he would pull one of his young white friends aside and take a lesson in spelling.23 He discussed how he always carried a spelling book around, and whenever he got the opportunity to learn he took full advantage of it. His narrative illustrates how complex the relationships between black and white children were during

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slavery. White children could have easily told their parents about teaching Douglass to read and write, which would have all but ended Douglass’s learning. A good explanation of why the white children never told was because Douglass was able to give white children gifts in exchange for their teaching. Black and white children regularly engaged in a barter system. Douglass usually paid for his lessons with bread, which he carried in his pocket.24 The systematic ways that black children learned to read and write are extremely admirable. Richard Parker, an ex-slave from Virginia, was the last child out of fourteen and still a young boy when sold from his mother. While Parker was new to the plantation he was able to meet a young boy, and this is when he discovered his passion for education.25 After years of seeing his family disassembled, he knew of the harshness of slavery. He knew that if it was ever found out that he was being taught to read and write, the consequences would be brutal. Parker understood the danger but decided to take the opportunity to learn to read and write. He knew that if he went to white children with something they could use, the likelihood of their teaching him to read and write was good. However, slave children did not have much to barter with, so they used materials that white children found valuable. Parker’s plan had three components. First, he collected and sold old nails until he saved up enough money to buy a primer.26 His narrative is very similar to Craft’s, because both of them owned reading materials before they could actually read. This further underscores how determined enslaved children were to acquire education. Once he had enough money to buy the primer, he went on collecting nails because he knew he would need a bargaining chip to secure the services of a teacher. The material he chose was marbles. Parker knew that he could not be picky over his teacher and realized that he had to be discreet. Richard Parker, like many slave children, had responsibilities that he had to perform around the plantation. His responsibility was to water the horses. When he went to water the horses he would give a white child a marble to tell him a letter.27 He would continue this routine until he learned the alphabet. Once he learned the alphabet, he wanted the white children to teach him to read. Parker continued to be discreet about his primer, because if slaves were caught with reading materials they would be punished.28 When Parker headed out to do his daily routine the primer was hidden in his hat so no one could see it. He received his reading lessons from his master’s daughter, who was very fond of him. Sometimes white children would teach black children to read and write because they had an affectionate friendship, which seems to be the case in this narrative.29

A Biscuit for a Letter   13

Slavery seemed to be more of a peculiar institution for children, because very few children, white or black, could understand the sociological and political ideology of slavery. Slave narratives do not imply that white children taught black children to read and write as an attempt to defy the social norms of slavery. In fact, very few white children probably looked at themselves as teachers. But they, in fact, became teachers for many slave children. Parker traded marbles for lessons, while Douglass bargained with bread. Douglass states, “For a single biscuit, any of my hungry little comrades would give me a lesson more valuable to me than bread.”30 The barter system is a fair exchange of material goods, and according to white children this was an acceptable trade. Black children learned, while white children got something they wanted or needed at a particular time. The exchange for information and goods suggest that white children did not fully understand the consequences of their actions, while black children seemed to have a better understanding of social norms during slavery, but neither group understood slavery in any great detail. The likelihood of slave children not having to come up with creative ways to learn to read and write was rare, but in some cases it did happen. Some masters, whom a lot of slaves described as good masters, taught their slaves to read and write. John Brown, a former slave from Alabama, recalls that his slave experience was not as harsh as that of other slaves. He also states, “The [owners] teach the young ones to read and write, say it was good for the Negroes to know about such things.”31 Enslaved people, including children, occasionally benefited from the kindness of their masters, but the majority of the time the kind master would not teach slave children to read or write. Lindsey Faucette, a former slave in North Carolina, shares the same sentiments as John Brown. Her narrative discusses how well her master and mistress treated the slaves: “We was called to de Big House and taught de Bible and dey was Bible reading’s every day.”32 Abram Harris, a former slave in South Carolina, remembers how well he was treated by his master, but the slaves on the plantation could not learn to read or write. Abram states, “Dere weren’t none of de white folks in dem slavery times what would let dey niggers have any learnin’. You sure better not be cotch a-tryin’ to learn no readin’ or writin’.”33 The majority of the slave masters who allowed these unique situations for their slaves were, certainly, paternalistic. Herbert G. Gutman states “that these ideologies allowed owners to credit such behavior,”34like a literate slave, to their own benevolence.

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The masters’ paternalistic attitude was not always rewarded with praise from the slaves. C. H. Hall, an ex-slave from Maryland, illustrates that learning to read and write made him fight more against slavery.35 He recalls his mistress teaching slaves to read and write even though it was against the law. Hall states, “It was the rule in that country [Maryland] that a slave must not be seen with a book of any kind.”36 Hall recalls that his mistress taught him, but his master put an end to it because Hall started to inquire more about slavery, which made white folks uneasy. He became what his master and so many other masters feared, which was a rebellious slave. White slave owners sometimes allowed their children to teach black children to read and write as a form of prevention or appeasement. Aaron J. Robinson, a former slave in South Carolina, remembers his master allowing his children to teach the slave children. Robinson states, “Our master had his children to teach us our ABC’s; this he did to keep his boys from going rabbit hunting on Sundays.”37 Robinson’s master did not want his slaves learning to read, but even more he did not want his young boys going rabbit hunting. In this instance, black children became the beneficiary of their owner’s prevention method. The other ways in which black children benefited educationally was through appeasement between slave owners and white children. There were instances that slave owners allowed black children to be educated just to pacify their own children. Edward Walker, a former slave from Kentucky, remembers that he was taught to read and write by his slave master’s son. Thomas Nelson, the slave master, was not happy that his son was teaching slave children, but he thought his son would eventually grow out of it. Walker’s narrative states, “Hayden Nelson took a notion to play school master and teach the colored boys on the plantation to read and write. Hayden attempted to teach the boys everything, which his father did not approve of, but he allowed it because he believed slaves would not have the patience to learn.”38 The slave master was correct. Most of the enslaved children on the plantation grew tired of the master’s son’s school lessons, but Walker did not quit voluntarily. Thomas prohibited his son to continue with the lessons. Once a slave child began to exhibit some form of intellectual capacity that slave masters deemed dangerous, the overseer was given special instruction to watch the individual closely. Overseers were involved as much as owners in preventing slaves from learning to read and write. Henry Cheatham, a former slave from Texas, recalls the time his overseer made it impossible for slaves to learn. Cheatham states, “Dat mean overseer always tried to keep us from

A Biscuit for a Letter   15

goin’ so’s us couldn’t learn nothin’.”39 The overseer was in charge of the plantation, and his sole responsibility was to make sure the slaves did what they were supposed to do, and that they did not do what they were not supposed to do. Cheatham further states that the overseer did not want them learning how to read or write. Unlike the interaction between black and white children, slavery was not a barter system for adults. Compromises were made, but that should not be confused with a barter system. Black and white children entered a space in which both parties benefitted. Sella Martin, a former slave in North Carolina, learned to read and write using the barter system. This was not a system created by adults, but initiated by black children and agreed upon by white children. The rules of the exchange varied depending on the children and the circumstances. Martin knew, as did other slave children, that his best avenue for learning was through white children. The desire to learn to read and write would quickly become a reality. He knew that he would have to come up with certain tactics for the white children to teach him. He asked the white children with whom he played marbles to teach him to read and write, and their response to him was, “The law does not allow it.”40 Martin’s narrative gives insight that previous narratives do not. The strategy that had worked for other slave children had failed him. He would abandon the idea for a while, but picked it up again with a different approach. Though Martin’s white friends would not teach him how to read and write, he found a way to learn. This suggests that not only did the barter system have different facets, but black children’s tactics were thoroughly thought out. Martin states, “They could not control or prevent the acquisition of a quick and retentive memory, with which I was blessed, and by their bantering one another at spelling, and betting each on his proficiency over the other, I learned to spell by sound before I knew by sight a single letter of the alphabet.”41 Even though the white children were aware of the law, they did not understand it fully. The mere fact that these children played spelling games around Martin suggests their lack of understanding. The white children he trusted hid behind a law that they probably were instructed by their parents to mention. Martin’s tactics were indirect, which again shows the complex relationship between white and black children. He knew that memorizing the words white children used around him was very limited. He wanted to learn to read and write, but he needed a plan. “My occupation gave me much time for play, and marbles being general game boys in the South, and the spirit of gambling being the prevailing passion with the young

16   The Black Family and Society

as well their elders in slaveholders society, I soon became not only a proficient, but also a wealthy marble player.”42 Martin’s “bargaining chip” bought him literacy. The likelihood of Martin’s wealth referring to money is doubtful. Since he was an excellent marble player, wealth most likely referred to his collection of marbles. Whether his wealth referred to money or the amount of marbles he owned, Martin could no longer go into business with the white children he often played with, because they would try to steal from him. He came up with a plan. Martin would enter into a partnership with a white child named Eaton Bass. The stipulations of their partnership was that when Bass ran out of marbles from gambling, then Martin would be his “bank,” and in exchange Bass would teach him the alphabet. Bass’s parents taught him from a young age not to teach slaves to read, but the child’s addiction to gaming was stronger than his parents’ instructions. Martin was able to acquire one of Bass’s textbooks and a lesson. The barter system that they created worked for both parties. Bass was taught marbles by Martin, who claimed he was an excellent player, and Martin learned to read and write, which benefited him enormously. His journey to literacy was met with opposition because the white children he interacted with knew that teaching a slave to read and write was unlawful, but his tactics prevailed. The awareness of white children that there was a different set of rules for enslaved children and themselves slowly grew. Black children learned that multiple identities were important for their survival. Black children acted differently around white children than they did within the greater slave community. Gutman states, “Passageways for developing slave culture shaped the interior fabric of developing slave communities, and also served to socialize slave children.”43 Slave parents understood how important it was for their children’s survival to understand the institution of slavery. Although black children might not have understood the system in its totality, they had a better sense of slavery than white children. Slave masters and overseers did not beat the rules of slavery into their children, because they knew that the normalcy of slavery would be learned eventually. It was not particularly important for white children to understand the society in which they lived during their childhood. This lack of understanding gave some enslaved children the opportunity to take advantage of white children’s unknowingness. White and black children played a key role in the perpetuation of slavery, but black children’s literacy quest and white children’s literacy facilitation represented a weakness in the system of slavery.

A Biscuit for a Letter   17

Slave masters, as well as overseers, were aware of the power that education held. This is one of the main reasons why slaves were not taught to read or write. However, white adults knew that education could be used as a tool to inform white children about the power structure of slavery. Since white children spent the early part of their childhood not understanding the in-depth nature of slavery, schooling was used as a method to socialize them into understanding the society in which they lived. Douglass discusses that his overseers did not want their children to bring back from school anything that would disrupt the institution of slavery. Slave masters and overseers had a difficult time trying to get slaves to accept slavery; the last thing they wanted was their own children disrupting the institution of slavery. Education has played a pivotal role in reinforcing social norms and as a vehicle to challenge societal norms. John Rury’s work Education and Social Change examines how education in America has always impacted society. He states, “There is evidence that schools have had a considerable impact on society at particular moments in time.”44 Schooling and society have always shared a unique relationship in America, and this relationship was very evident in the antebellum south. Rury suggest that the nineteenth century brought about political and economic transition that changed education dramatically. The changes that took place in the nineteenth century happened mostly in the North and in cities. The South held strong to its agricultural society, which meant that education remained stagnant. According to Rury, the primary reason why the North had taken on a new educational agenda was due to the fact that it had transitioned to an industrial society. However, schools in the South continued to emphasize the racial ideologies of slavery. Rury states, “The rural common schools probably were not very effective educational institutions, at least by modern standards. Indeed, they usually just reinforced and expanded on lessons children had already learned at home and in church.”45 Although Rury’s work does not go into great detail about enslaved people’s education, it is useful because it reveals the functioning and ideologies of schools in the South. Schools that white children attended not only socialized them into thinking that black children were inferior, but justified slavery as an institution. Douglass also states that his master’s children were taught by a private instructor, Mr. Page, “who did not speak a dozen words to a slave in a whole year.”46 One can assume that Mr. Page’s job was no different than the other teachers who taught the overseers’ children. White children

18   The Black Family and Society

were to grow up and continue the dominance over the subordinate group, and the only way to accomplish this was to socialize them to think that they were superior and that God had ordained them to take care of the inferior race. The dominant-subordinate model refers to whites being the dominant group, while blacks are the subordinate group, which meant that whites were to serve as parents to the inferior race. As black children got older, more work responsibilities were forced upon them, and when white children got older they took on duties of a different kind. As James Curry and the master’s son who taught him to read and write got older, social norms dictated that their lives head in separate directions. Curry states, “From my childhood until I was sixteen years old, I was brought up a domestic servant. I played with my master’s children, and we loved one another like brothers.”47 The main thing that changed the brotherly love was that the master’s son now saw a fundamental difference between Curry and himself. Curry recalls his “white brother getting older” and states, “when the master and misses get older, they are generally sent away from home to school, and they soon learn that slaves are not companions for them.”48 This is very similar to the point that Douglass made about his master’s and overseer’s children.49 White children, particularly in the South, were not going to school to learn how to improve society in any idealistic way, but to perpetuate the societal norms. Schooling taught the master’s son, once Curry’s “brother,” how to be a master and not a companion to enslaved people. Douglass depicts the same daunting picture in his narrative. He states, “When they returned, the love of power is cultivated in their hearts by their parents, the whip is put into their hands, and they soon regard the Negro in no other light than as a slave.”50 In a matter of years, white children were socialized to think that they were better and that slavery was a normal part of society. White children were important actors, and even though their parents allowed them to be ignorant early in their childhood, as they got older they were socialized to feel superior. This occurred at school and home. The justification of slavery was all around, which made it hard to escape the peculiar institution as a white or black child. In conclusion, before black children became old enough or big enough to perform slave labor, they interacted freely with white children. This interaction gave black children the opportunity to develop a certain type of space in which they could defy slavery. Some black children chose to use this relationship to learn to read and write. Although very few black children had this opportunity, those who did portrayed how black children defied the social order of slavery.

A Biscuit for a Letter   19

Examining the relationship between white and black children illustrates two key components. First, the social norms of slavery were different within the realm of black and white children’s interaction. The structure of this relationship fluctuated over time. The narratives suggest that when adults, especially slave owners and overseers, were not around to reinforce the dominant-subordinate model, white children did not mind teaching black children, especially when they were getting something in return. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2005); James D Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Wilma King, African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights, First Edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 1995); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Harvard University Press, 2001); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2002). Williams, Self-Taught, 6. Schwartz, Born in Bondage; King, Stolen Childhood; King, African American Childhoods, 3. I refer to this interaction as a barter system. The barter system refers to a two-way exchange for an equally valued item. This chapter will discuss formal education. Formal education is defined by learning basic skills, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statues, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts, New ed. of 1853 ed. edition (Greenwood Press Reprint, 1969), 252. John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, Seventh (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 124. Bonnie D Bellamy, “The Legal Status of Black Georgians during the Colonial and Revolutionary Eras.” Journal of Negro History (Winter 1989) 6. Many slave stated adopted statues similar to Georgia’s. Check colonial records of Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana, and other southern states. John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) 96–107. Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 8. Hannah Craft was taught to read by a white woman who stayed near the plantation. The woman took a liking to Hannah and offered to teach her to read and write. The name of the woman is not given, which is common in slave narratives. Craft, 6. The Oxford Dictionary defines defiance as open or daring resistance offered to authority or any opposing force. Gates, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, 6. Ibid., 7. Andrea Heather Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 7.

20   The Black Family and Society 16. John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1977), 130. 17. Ibid., 130. 18. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 92. 19. Williams, Self Taught, 7. 20. Ibid., 12. 21. Douglass, My Bondage, 98. 22. Ibid., 44. 23. Ibid., 98. 24. Ibid., 98. 25. Blassingame, Slave Testimonies, 465. 26. Ibid., 465. 27. Ibid., 465. 28. In some cases owners allowed their slaves to read the Bible, but this was rare. 29. Parker was eventually caught by his master learning to read and write and received fifteen lashes, but remained close with the master’s daughter. 30. Douglass, 98. 31. Norman R. Yetman, Voices from Slavery, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 45. 32. Ibid, 119. See the narrative of Mary Anderson. She talks about how kind her master was, but slaves were not allowed to read or write. John Brown and Lindsey Faucette’s slave experiences were atypical. 33. Ibid., 161. 34. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 292. 35. Blassingame, Slave Testimonies, 416. 36. Ibid, 416 37. Ibid., 498. 38. Ibid., 516. 39. Yetman, Voices of Slavery, 56 40. Blassingame, Slave Testimonies, 709. 41. Ibid., 709. 42. Ibid., 710. 43. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 262. 44. John L. Rury, Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling, (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 19. 45. Ibid., 71. 46. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 44. 47. Blassingame, Slave Testimonies, 130. 48. Ibid., 130. 49. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 44. 50. Ibid., 130.

3 Examining Memorable Messages in the ­African American Family: Coping with Prejudice1 Jason Thompson Rockell Brown-Burton Fundamentally valuable messages are transmitted within the ­family (­Braithwaite & Baxter, 2006; Vangelisti, 2004) because the ­members share the closest of interpersonal relationships, and ­therefore exhibit prevalent and ­intimate levels of exchange (Altman & ­Taylor, 1973; Koenig Kellas, 2005). Some of the most significant ­messages communicated in the family are stories designed to teach and inspire members (Bylund, 2003; Langellier & Peterson, 2004). Specifically, they serve an important socializing function and cast an indelible mark in the memory of those who receive the lessons within the stories (Stone, 1988; Thompson et al., 2009). In this chapter, we focus on the lessons, the memorable messages, taught and learned by family members. In their seminal study, Knapp, Stohl, and Reardon (1981) described memorable messages as “verbal messages which may be remembered for extremely long periods of time and which people perceived as a major influence on the course of their lives” (p. 27). Others have shown that the instruction therein serves as a compass or life guide (Medved, Brogan, McClanahan, Morris, & Shepherd, 2006) and exerts an impact by ­frequently shaping the 1 Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. Direct correspondence to: Dr. Jason Thompson, Department of Speech Communication Arts & Sciences, Brooklyn College–City University of New York, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210. E-mail: [email protected] 21

22   The Black Family and Society

perceptions and influencing the actions of persons who received memorable messages (Holladay, 2002; Koenig Kellas, 2010). Despite the perhaps most crucial characteristic of these messages—their lasting effect on those who hear them—few studies have centered on the ways the content teaches valuable lessons that help family members endure difficult moments in life. We expand research on memorable messages in the African ­American family through an examination of ways such communications help members cope with racial prejudice. Documentation and study of these memorable messages, delivered in the family context, may lend insight into one of the ways those subjected to overt racial prejudice have been able to survive and thrive, despite such appalling treatment, in their long journey toward liberation and civil rights (Asante, 1995; Estes, 2005; Wilkerson, 2010). Family communication researchers interested in furthering their ­knowledge about ways the family unit serves a critical function in the lives of its members will benefit from this specific glimpse into the African American family. This treatise also answers the call of prominent ­scholars who vigorously argue for more family communication research that reflects the lives of those in underrepresented ethnic groups (Diggs & Socha, 2004; Socha & Beigle, 1999). As Socha (2001) aptly asserts, “Understanding the role of ethnicity in family communication is among the most important concerns on the horizon” (p. 5). Throughout this chapter, we give attention to the rampant racial prejudice experienced by African Americans, thereby fully demonstrating the reason this particular family context represents fertile ground to explore memorable messages about survival. We then give attention to relevant literature regarding both memorable messages and intergenerational transmission of them. Taken together, these areas lay a firm foundation for the current study. In our review of the literature and the words of participants in our study, we use the terms offered by the author or survey respondent. Out of respect for individual perspectives and choices, references to persons of color, African American, and Black are used interchangeably. Racial Prejudice Experienced by African Americans The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, 1903/2003, p. 9)

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   23

The words that Du Bois wrote at the turn of the twentieth century describe a feeling that many African Americans experience as Americans. This feeling can be traced to many years of existing in a culture in which systematic, institutionalized racism has been routinely practiced. Much historical evidence shows that African Americans have experienced widespread racial prejudice. After enduring more than two hundred years of slavery, African Americans then suffered under the repressive Jim Crow Era (Dailey, Gilmore, & Simon, 2000; Ritterhouse, 2006). During this time period, African Americans were often unable to depend on the protection and liberties guaranteed under the US Constitution. As a result of both the repressive economic and social structure of the country, African Americans, especially those who lived during America’s great migration, endured the tremendous hardships of a feudal caste system (Cox 1970; Wilkerson, 2010). This segregated society precluded African Americans from obtaining fair treatment with respect to housing (Massey & Denton, 1993; Omi & Winant, 1994), education (Sharp, 2007), and employment (Conrad, 2005). In many regards, African Americans were treated as less than human. Isabel Wilkerson (2010) explained, Their every step was controlled by the meticulous laws of Jim Crow, a nineteenthcentury minstrel figure that would become shorthand for the violently enforced codes of the southern caste system. The Jim Crow regime persisted from the 1880s to the 1960s, some eighty years, the average life span of a fairly healthy man. It afflicted the lives of at least four generations. . . . (pp. 9–10)

Jim Crow laws were symbolic of a containment strategy enacted by Whites against Blacks. That is, Whites made a deliberate, concerted effort to create different barriers that would preclude Blacks from gaining entry into the coveted port leading to upward mobility. Many of the rules of the Jim Crow Era were unwritten; they were simply understood. Wilkerson (2010) referred to this undocumented credo as the invisible hand: The hand had determined that white people were in charge and colored people were under them and had to obey them like a child in those days had to obey a parent, except there was no love between the two parties as there is between a parent and a child. Instead there was mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides. (p. 31)

Thus, the hierarchy the Whites established, exclusively based on race, by law prevented Blacks from making significant strides into the mainstream (Chafe, Gavins, & Korstad, 2001; Packard, 2002; Wilkerson, 2010).

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Few argue that African Americans experienced virulent racial prejudice in the United States, but neither have many explored the memorable messages that have helped them cope with such oppression. We discuss research on memorable messages to further ground the present study. Memorable Messages: Support and Family To generate the current well-documented literature, various scholars have examined meaningful messages in contexts including religion and spirituality in the family, mentor–mentee communication, ­organizational ­socialization, and high-school varsity-athletics coaching (Barge & ­Schlueter, 2004; Kassing & Pappas, 2007; Keeley, 2004; Stohl, 1986; Wang, 2012). The tremendous power and importance of these communications inspired the focus of our study and this chapter. For example, Smith et al. (2009) discovered the impact of memorable breast-cancer messages received by women: “Messages that motivate women toward prevention and detection behaviors are valuable because they have the power to decrease the occurrence of the disease and save lives” (p. 302). In other words, memorable breast-cancer messages encourage women to take responsible actions to combat the deadly disease and save their own lives. Smith et al. confirmed that memorable messages make a positive difference and serve a useful purpose as people face challenges such as those imposed by racial prejudice. Researchers have also reported memorable messages to be supportive. For example, Ford and Ellis (1998) investigated memorable supportive messages recalled by nurses working in a stressful hospital environment. The nurses related messages of informational, emotional, and instrumental support from their coworkers, indicating that the messages were particularly significant because of their lasting influence; that is, nurses remembered them at moments when they most needed support. Through this research, Ford and Ellis offered unmistakable evidence that memorable messages can be encouraging to people negotiating difficult circumstances. We extend their work to determine the ways memorable messages offer support to those coping with racial prejudice. The studies on memorable messages examined in a family context provide additional background for our examination on communication within African American families. For instance, scholars have ­investigated memorable messages young adults recall receiving from their parents about how work and family intersect in adult life (Medved et al., 2006). These offspring specifically remembered being socialized by their

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   25

p­ arents to balance the two competing responsibilities of career and home. ­Extending the research on family and confirming the connection between cognition and communication, Koenig Kellas (2010) explored memorable messages daughters received from their mothers concerning romantic relationships, such as “value self” (p. 467). Both the studies by Medved et al. (2006) and Koenig Kellas (2010) demonstrate the vital role family plays in socializing and teaching its members about specific circumstances of adult life. We follow suit by exploring ways that the African American family socializes and teaches its members to handle the unique circumstance of racial prejudice. In sum, we use the undeniable history of the African American experience with racial prejudice and prior research of support communicated to individuals both within and outside of the family to show that memorable messages teach lessons on coping. Moreover, scholars have documented that memorable messages are supportive and make a positive difference, as they often teach valuable lessons. We are interested in knowing about the memorable messages African Americans recall receiving from family members about handling racial prejudice. To this end, we created the following research question to guide our study: RQ1. What types of memorable messages do African Americans report receiving from family members about how to cope with racial prejudice?

To understand the memorable messages recalled by African American participants in our study, we delve deeper into relevant intergenerational communication literature. Specifically, we explore messages passed down in the African American family about how to cope with racial prejudice. Intergenerational Transmissions within the African American Family “Intergenerational communication refers to the smooth transmission and continuous preservation of the values and traditions of a society from one generation to the other” (Boateng, 1985, p. 110). Unsurprisingly, intergenerational communication is used to bequeath values and traditions within the family (see Thompson et al., 2009), and we look to previous literature about it to investigate which memorable messages on coping with racial prejudice are passed from one generation to the other within the African American family. More specifically, we are interested in memorable messages adults report transmitting to their children. We expect to find important communications because of the likelihood that African

26   The Black Family and Society

­ mericans have taken significant steps to prepare their children to overA come prejudicial practices against them and because African ­American people have both relied on and continue to believe in the power of the spoken word, or Nommo (Smitherman, 1977, p. 78), to exert an influential force in their lives (Penfield & Duru, 1988). This tradition extends to the prevailing practices of African American intergenerational communication intended to teach lessons and values that extend the family legacy. Daniel and Effinger (1996) substantiated the importance of African American intergenerational communication in their seminal article on values and lessons passed across generations. Specifically, they argued that messages of advice transmitted from primary socialization agents (e.g., parents and grandparents) reflect scripts or guides for how to subsist in life. In other words, the messages provide the next generation with enduring lessons that profoundly nurture African American children. Daniel and Effinger indicated that the messages included “[stressing] the importance [of] getting a good education, engaging in hard work, and behaving in morally sound ways” (p. 199), and they argued that each generation in the African American family must be taught how to navigate treacherous roads. Because memorable messages transmitted do not get lost, subsequent generations also benefit from them. In their examination of parental communication used to prepare children for harmful effects of racism in American society, Daniel and Daniel (1999) further validated the significance of intergenerational communication in the African American family. They argued that parents must imbue their children with strong self-esteem, self-worth, and resiliency as doing so would armor their children in the battle with racism in American society. Daniel and Daniel explained: African-American children often experience the hot stove’s [i.e., racism’s] harmful effects when they are least expected, [therefore] characteristics such as resiliency (healthy growth and development in spite of adversity), adaptability (code switching), and healthy self-esteem (feeling positively about oneself in spite of oppression) are critical early childhood outcomes for African-American children. (p. 27)

Daniel and Daniel believed parents should transmit these messages to help equip their children to cope with adversity. Furthermore, they felt that failure to pass on these messages would likely leave their children overwhelmed and overcome by racial prejudice, thus undermining their otherwise healthy social, emotional, and cognitive development. Because of the importance of intergenerational communication practiced in the African American family, we examine intergenerational

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   27

transmission of messages concerning racial prejudice. To this end, we developed the following research question: RQ2. What types of memorable messages do African Americans report sharing with their children about how to cope with racial prejudice?

Method Participants African American adults who reported experiences of racial prejudice and recall of memorable messages from a family member(s) regarding ways to cope with it were qualified to participate in the study. To be eligible, they also confirmed passing memorable messages about handling racial prejudice to their own children. A total of seventy-seven African American adults qualified and agreed to participate in the study. Their ages ranged from twenty-three to seventy-five ( M = 50.3 , SD = 14.9) years. They represented many regions of the United States: Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Procedure Subsequent to obtaining consent from the City University of New York – Brooklyn College Institutional Review Board (IRB), we recruited participants by sending a pithy description of the study to members of our social network. We also asked solicited recipients to relay the study description to anyone who might be interested in participating. Through snowball sampling, the recruited individuals continued to circulate the written study description and requested that others relay it to potential participants (as per Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Per the instructions, interested candidates contacted us so we could determine their eligibility and facilitate arrangements for participation. In full accordance with IRB protocol, no individuals were dragooned to solicit participants for the study. Instrumentation Prior researchers used in-depth, semi-structured interviews to collect data from participants regarding memorable messages (e.g., Ford & Ellis, 1998; Stohl, 1986; Wang, 2012). Some used questionnaires to gather data

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(e.g., Koenig Kellas, 2010). For the present study, we employed a selfadministered, open-ended questionnaire to collect data from participants for several reasons. First, open-ended questions enable participants to provide substantive descriptions of recalled memorable messages. Second, the questionnaire gave us easy access to participants, who lived across the United States, such that we did not need face-to-face interactions to obtain their responses to questions. Third, the questionnaire provided participants with the time and space necessary to consider the memorable messages they have received from family members and those they have passed down to the next generation. Because some messages may have been received and shared many years ago, participants benefited from time to reflect. Through the questionnaire, participants were asked to provide a fully detailed description of as many memorable messages that they recalled receiving from any family members regarding ways to cope with racial prejudice. They were also asked to write down a fully detailed description of memorable messages they have passed down to their children regarding ways to cope with racial prejudice. For the questionnaire, we used the Knapp et al. (1981) description of memorable messages: “verbal messages which may be remembered for extremely long periods of time and which people perceived as a major influence on the course of their lives” (p. 27). We also offered several examples of a memorable message: “Work as hard as you can in life”; “Keep your head held high”; and “Don’t internalize foolishness that you can’t control.” To avoid overwhelming the participants, we offered two additional directives: 1) Please do not in any way allow these examples to affect and or hinder your response on the questionnaire, and 2) we invite your response to go beyond the samples listed here. In other words, you are not bound to the listed examples.

Data Analysis We developed categories to organize and classify the descriptive openended responses provided by participants. First, we gained both familiarity and understanding of the textual data. To this end, we fully read each questionnaire at least once prior to the next phase of analysis. We read them independently to avoid influencing each other’s interpretation of the data. Second, we inductively established coding schemes from the data (per Bulmer, 1979). To accomplish this, we utilized open and axial

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   29

coding (per Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Open coding enables researchers to discover new thematic categories, add them to existing categories, and continue improving them (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). We recorded each code in the margins of the questionnaire and then transferred the information to a separate Excel spreadsheet. Following open coding, we proceeded with axial coding, which entails searching for similarities in the open-coded data (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). As connections were identified within the data, they were collapsed and combined. After individually coding the data, we met with each other to discuss similarities and differences of individual coding results. We discussed disagreements and made a final decision on the most appropriate codes and categories. A new set of thematic categories emerged after the meeting and we re-read the data to compare the original categories to those that emerged from our meeting. In the final stage, we engaged in the interpretive method of negative case analysis to ensure that none of the data contradicted any of the themes established (per Erlandson, Harris, Skipper, & Allen, 1993), thus ensuring the validity of the data. Results Research Question One: Memorable Messages Received In response to items associated with RQ1, about the types of memorable messages African Americans received from their family members about coping with racial prejudice, 77 participants described 187 messages. Five major categories emerged from the data analysis: faith and religion, self-concept, behavior, popular sayings, and self-improvement. Within each major category, we found several subcategories (see Appendix A that shows the breakdown of responses per message category). Faith and religion. Out of the 187 memorable messages from the data, the type mentioned most often by participants consisted of faith and religion content (n = 79). Family members clearly stressed the importance of focusing on a higher spiritual being as a means of coping with racial prejudice. Participants remember being urged to take solace in their r­ eligion and the noble purpose that it serves. The two main subcategories, theologically based and scripture messages, emerged from the major faith and religion category. Most participants who received religion messages cited hearing theologically based arguments, grounded in fundamental Biblical teachings, that emphasize the importance of focusing one’s attention on the timeless principles of God’s word.

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For example, some of the memorable messages recalled by participants included directives such as “Turn the other cheek,” “Just pray,” “Do not judge people,” and “Fight hate with love from God.” The respondents also recounted messages of security and comfort such as “God is in control of everyone and everything,” “Put God first and he will protect you,” and “Do your best and God will see you through all situations.” The solemn directives offered clear instructions for ways to respond in the face of discrimination practices, and the messages focused on God’s sovereignty served as reminders that God alone possesses the authority to determine one’s destiny and that those who practice prejudice do not have that kind of power. In addition to general theologically based messages, participants also recounted hearing scriptural references from the Bible. Specifically, participants remembered messages (paraphrased in quotation marks) such as “No weapon formed against you shall prosper” (Isaiah 54:17); “You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you” (Philippians 4:13); “The Lord will make your enemies your footstool” (Matthew 22:44); “Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are not to fear for the Lord is with you” (Psalm 23:4); and “Do not fret of evildoers, nor be envious of the workers of iniquity” (Psalm 37:1). Each of these passages gave participants reassuring messages to recall in times of great difficulty. In fact, some participants indicated that they would engage in intrapersonal communication (i.e., self-talk) by softly quoting scriptural references to themselves to help them cope. The messages conveniently reminded them that the Lord’s presence is always near. Specific Biblical scriptures firmly reinforced the notion that God forms a wide-ranging shield of security for his people in moments of challenge. Self-concept. The second-most frequently occurring messages involved those regarding self-concept (n = 45). Two subcategories, selfconfidence and self-value, emerged within this main category. Generally, messages pertaining to self-concept were intended to help participants feel good about their identity. Of the subtypes, messages of self-confidence, offered to support participants’ unwavering belief in their own potential to succeed in the face of racial prejudice, were mentioned most frequently: “Walk with your head up and strive for the best”; “Never forget that you can accomplish great things”; “Never doubt yourself”; and “Don’t let what others say affect you.” These messages from family members made clear that participants were capable of setting high goals and achieving them. Messages of self-confidence pushed back against racially biased verbiage intended to weaken participants’ self-perceptions.

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   31

Self-value messages, which establish a positive narrative, encouraged participants to cherish their identity: “No matter what anyone may call you, you are, and always will be a lady”; “You are not defined by the world’s classification”; “The core of who you are is what’s important”; “Never allow anyone to make you feel like less of a person because of your skin color”; “Love the skin you’re in”; and “Other people’s view of you or your race does not determine who you are, nor how you should see yourself. You are fine just the way you are.” Each of these messages could mitigate some of the harmful effects of racial prejudice (e.g., significantly lowering an individual’s sense of self-worth). Family members had offered these messages to empower loved ones to develop a healthy self-perception through reflection on positive appraisals. Behavior. The third-most frequently delivered messages involved the behaviors that may help African Americans cope with racial prejudice (n = 31). Three subcategories emerged within this main category: personal conduct, protection, and psychological avoidance. Personal conduct messages, which revolved around the way participants should handle themselves, were the most mentioned subtype. For example, participants reported that family members had told them to “Make sure you’re neatly dressed,” “Be kind and have a kind personality,” and “Be respectful” as well as “Don’t be too Afrocentric,” “Don’t hang around a lot of Negro people because whites get suspicious,” “Don’t run,” and “Never ride four to a car.” Each of these messages gave participants clear instructions about how to comport themselves in society. Messages from family members such as “Make sure you’re neatly dressed,” “Don’t be too Afrocentric,” “Be kind and have a kind personality,” and “Be respectful” reminded participants of the behaviors that garner favorable, rather than unfavorable, opinions of them from others. Conversely, messages from family members such as “Don’t hang around a lot of Negro people because whites get suspicious,” “Don’t run,” and “Never ride four to a car” advised participants to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Protection messages were the second-most mentioned subtype. They primarily involved directives for action when feeling threatened in the face of racial prejudice. Participants recounted messages from their family members such as “If you don’t have a gun, be sure to run if you’re in trouble” and “Do whatever it takes to protect yourself if you feel like your life is in danger.” Acknowledging the gravity that some situations may pose, family members had stressed the importance of safety first to preserve one’s life. They made abundantly clear that African Americans

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should not wait on help from another source, but instead rely on themselves and their own devices if they feel seriously threatened. Psychological avoidance messages, which encouraged participants to refuse to acknowledge or dwell on racial discrimination, were the thirdmost mentioned subtype. Specifically, participants recalled messages such as “Don’t pay white folks no mind,” “Don’t let your mind be occupied with prejudice against you,” and “Ignore discrimination when it happens to you.” Family members relating this advice mostly stressed the importance of blocking thoughts about others’ bad behavior that is beyond one’s own personal control. Psychological distance provides peace of mind so that experiences of racial prejudice do not distress and encumber one’s spirit. Popular sayings. The fourth-most frequently found messages included popular sayings (n = 18). The word popular, in this sense, refers to a saying coined by well-known people. The two subtypes of purveyors, entertainers and prominent figures, emerged within this main category. With respect to entertainers, participants recalled the following messages: “Say it loud, ‘I’m Black and I’m proud.’ Be proud to be Black.” “You can’t change the mind of white people and you can’t change your color. Free your mind and the rest will follow.” “I’m proud to be Black y’all and that’s a fact y’all.” The first of these messages is quoted from a song by James Brown entitled “Say It Loud.” The second and third of these messages are quoted from songs by the R&B group En Vogue entitled “Free Your Mind” and by rap group Run DMC entitled “Proud to be Black,” respectively. The rhetorical underpinning of the songs by these entertainers, taken together, inspire African Americans to feel pride in their heritage regardless of the messages communicated in society intended to destroy that pride. In coping with racial prejudice, participants recite the words from these songs, as they did Bible passages, as a form of resistance and to bolster their confidence. For the second-most mentioned subtype, participants remembered messages, originally spoken by prominent figures and repeated by participants’ family members, such as “It’s not the color of your skin but the content of your character”; “The Black skin is not a badge of shame but a glorious symbol”; and “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” The first quote, attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes that the core of a person matters most; that is, one’s true value is on the inside. Similarly, the second example about Black skin as a glorious symbol, by Marcus Garvey, encouraged participants to take pride in their appearance and relinquish any ideas of shame or embarrassment about their skin color. The last quote used to illustrate the subcategory,

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   33

by Nelson Mandela, emphasizes the importance of education in helping participants improve their situation in life. Self-improvement. The fifth-most frequently reported messages involved self- improvement (n = 12). Education and general achievement emerged as the most and second-most frequent subcategories, respectively, in the self-improvement category. In messages of education, family members advised: “Get good grades and make something of yourself”; “Let your intelligence show”; “Education will insulate you”; and “Education is the only way to fight prejudice.” They understood the value of education as an enabler for success and that education helps African Americans secure the type of advanced positions that subsequently help them effectively deal with racial prejudice. General achievement messages, similar to those about behavior, were aimed at taking action. For instance, participants remembered family members communicating messages such as “Always be the best that you can be in anything that you do” and “Never settle for less because we have to do more.” Participants’ family members were calling attention to the unlevel playing field in American society. They expressed that persons of color must perform significantly better than their White counterparts to receive any positive recognition. In essence, these messages prepared participants for the uphill climb they would likely face as African American citizens in the United States. Research Question Two: Memorable Messages Transmitted Through the RQ2, we obtained data about the types of memorable messages African Americans report sharing with their children about coping with racial prejudice. That is, we focused on the intergenerational transmission of key messages in the African American family. Similar to first research question, the second question resulted in five major categories of responses: (a) faith and religion, (b) self-concept, (c) self-improvement, (d) behavior, and (e) popular sayings (see Appendix B). Within each major category, several subcategories were created based on the findings. Faith and religion. Out of the 161 intergenerational memorable messages in the data, those consisting of faith and religion topics (n = 57), which primarily emerged in theologically based and scripture subcategories, were the most frequently cited by participants. Messages of scripture were mentioned most and included some of the exact same passages (paraphrased in quotation marks) that participants heard from their family members, such as “You can do all things through Christ who

34   The Black Family and Society

strengthens you” (Philippians 4:13); “The Lord will make your enemies your footstool” (Matthew 22:44); “Even though you walk through the valley and the shadow of death, you should fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4); and “No weapon formed against you shall prosper” (Isaiah 54:17). However, participants indicated that they also passed down additional scriptures: “God made all of us in his likeness” (Genesis 1:27); “In the last days men are going to be evil” (2 Timothy 3: 1–3); “He will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6); “God is in control of your life and so you need not worry about tomorrow because it will take care of itself” (Matthew 6:34); “Count it all joy when you face tribulations” (James 1:2); and “Put on the full armor of God and stand” (Ephesians 6:11). Theologically based messages that participants recounted giving to family members included “Do the best that you can in life and God will do the rest”; “Trust and obey God”; “No matter what you go through, God will take care of you”; “Rise above any situation in life with God as your anchor and depend on God in every situation”; and “God made a rainbow for everyone to see that he made all of the colors beautiful.” Participants indicated that they handed down both theologically based and scripture messages to prepare their children for a racist society. They offered these messages to give their children comfort and affirmation during moments of great distress. Self-concept. The second-most frequently mentioned intergenerational memorable message involved self-concept (n = 50). Three subcategories emerged (in order of frequency): self-confidence, self-value, and cognitive directives. Participants offered the following self-confidence messages to imbue their children with a robust sense of self-efficacy in much the same way their predecessors had done for them: “Walk with your head held high”; “You’re just as good or better than the next person regardless of your skin color”; and “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t accomplish your goals.” Self-value statements, such as “Black is beautiful,” “Love yourself,” “Be proud of who you are,” and “You are a marvelous creation, so be happy with yourself,” were offered to encourage a positive outlook on racial identity. These statements, more than those directives of self-­confidence, gave African Americans reason to be fully content with themselves. Whereas self-confidence and self-value messages lay the groundwork for belief in oneself and self-satisfaction, respectively, messages of cognitive directives more specifically helped establish the proper frame of mind for coping with racial prejudice. They focused specifically on the child’s thinking: “Don’t let racism hinder your thought processes about

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   35

your identity” and “Think of yourself in a positive way.” Participants imparted cognitive directive messages to shape the mind-sets of younger African Americans in a positive and profound way. Self-improvement. The third-most frequently cited intergenerational memorable messages involved self-improvement (n = 28) and were broken into education and general achievement subcategories. The education messages, which comprised the larger portion of the category, called attention to the importance of educational attainment as a step to a brighter future: “Education is key because knowledge can never be taken from you”; “Education can unchain you from the bondage of prejudice”; “Get good grades”; “The opportunity for education is real and available today so grab it”; and “Get a better education because it can take you anywhere.” Participants gave more messages about education to their children than they had received from their family members. Whereas education messages concerned a specific focus on academic accomplishments, messages on general achievement were geared toward excelling in all aspects of life. The following examples of general achievement messages were offered by participants: “Take advantage of opportunities given to you and don’t take them for granted”; “You have to be twice as good as white people to be successful”; and “Always do your best, as you have to be better than average to compete in this world.” Behavior. The fourth category of messages participants passed down to their children involved behavior (n = 14). Two subcategories emerged from the data: protection and personal conduct. Mentioned the most often in this category, protection messages passed down from participants included: “Do whatever it takes to protect yourself if someone is violent with you” and “You have the right to physically protect yourself, because I don’t want the Trayvon Martin situation happening.” Clearly African Americans encourage children to be prepared to defend themselves at all times, and the reference to Trayvon Martin, a young, unarmed African American teenager fatally shot in a 2012 altercation, specifically indicates awareness of currently encountered dangers. Participants also passed down messages of personal conduct. One of the messages had been communicated to them from their family members: “Do not hang around a lot of Negro people.” Other messages of personal conduct warned against actions that might draw suspicion: “When you’re in a store, never put your hands in your pockets and act nervous.” Participants passed down to their children unequivocal instructions about how to handle themselves in public, just as their parents did for them a generation or more before.

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Popular sayings. The fifth-most frequently mentioned category of intergenerational messages involved popular sayings (n = 11). The three subcategories—prominent figures, entertainers, and political icons— emerged. The most frequently cited popular sayings offered to family members, such as the following, came from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Marcus Garvey, respectively: “It’s not the color of a person’s skin, it’s the caliber of their character” and “If you have no confidence in self then you will be defeated in the race of life.” They bolster belief in themselves so that they could be victors rather than allow experiences with racial prejudice to discourage them. “Character, not circumstances, makes the man,” from Booker T. Washington, instructs young people not to focus on difficulties with racial prejudice, but instead to give attention to edifying themselves and their character. Entertainers were cited as the second-most frequently cited source of information in the popular sayings category, but only one message was passed down: “Be proud that you are Black. ‘Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud.’” This quote from James Brown, similar to one of the previously mentioned quotes by Marcus Garvey (“the Black skin is not a badge of shame but a glorious symbol”), was offered to give African Americans a sense of honor and pride in their racial heritage, which forms a major part of their identity. Messages by political icons was the third-most mentioned subtype in the category, but only one message was noted: “Yes we can!” as declared by President Barack Obama during his first presidential election campaign. The message highlights the finite nature of the encumbrance of racial prejudice; that is, it reaffirmed that the grip of racial prejudice cannot last forever and that African Americans should focus on their capabilities as they persevere past racial prejudice. Discussion This investigation was twofold. First, we explored the types of memorable messages that are communicated in African American families regarding ways to cope with racial prejudice. We also specifically examined the types of intergenerational messages transmitted to overcome racial prejudice. Our results support findings from previous studies on memorable messages. They pertain to the connection between cognition and communication, as the messages comprise a compass or instructional life guide that African American family members use to socialize and teach each other throughout generations (Daniel & Daniel, 1999; Daniel & Effinger, 1996; Koenig Kellas, 2010). Additionally, the findings ­illuminate

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   37

the role of spirituality and religion in coping with racial prejudice in African American communities and the need of African Americans to protect themselves in American society (Paris, 2008; Rowles & Duan, 2012; Swain, 2008). The most prevalent type of memorable messages reportedly received and the type of intergenerational memorable messages reportedly shared most by participants involved faith and religion. Nommo, or the spoken word, has been of paramount influence among African American people (Smitherman, 1977), and its tradition extends to the prudent practice of intergenerational communication, which is often replete with themes of faith and religion. This result is unsurprising because African Americans are known for being spiritual and for using their spirituality to cope with life challenges (Blue, 2009). Research suggests that relying on spirituality has been an effective coping mechanism for those dealing with the perils of prejudice and racism (Rowles & Duan, 2012). Historically, African Americans depended upon faith to help them endure the harsh realities of slavery and overcome the obstacles of the Jim Crow Era. According to Peter Paris (2008), “One cannot overestimate the historical importance of African-American religion in the public life of this nation” (p. 476). Religion allowed African Americans to create their own discursive space that served various purposes. This space was precious because it was theirs, the one place where they had control—their territory, their terrain, and the marker of this place is the unifying experience of living within it. Although contextually the condition of the people has changed from slavery through the Jim Crow Era to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, that spiritual foundation has remained constant, as made evident from the content, tone, and frequency of the messages found in our data. The messages reported by participants were replete with themes that emanate from this legacy. Consequently, faith and religious communities have been and remain “primary sources of personal strength and encouragement as well as communal sources for socioeconomic development, self-respect and racial pride” (Paris, 2008, p. 477). Faith and religion emerged as themes prevalent in our findings as well as those of others examining similar topics (Daniel & Effinger, 1996; Paris, 2008; Rowles & Duan, 2012). The messages that emerged as the second-most frequently cited concern, self-concept—how one feels about oneself. In large part, an individual’s self-concept is shaped by the messages received about him or herself from the environment and interactions with others

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(Adler & Proctor, 2011; Wood, 2000). Messages participants received were meant to help them feel better about their self-identity in the face of racial prejudice. They were ego boosters that served as positive cognitive reinforcement to bolster self-value and self-worth. The transmission of messages of self-value and self-worth socializes and teaches African Americans to be proud of who they are and to feel self-confidence despite living in a society that, in large part, teaches them that they are inferior. In our study, both the messages received and those shared with children feature themes of self-value and self-confidence, with cognitive directives noted only as a form of intergenerational message. This result validates previous findings from other memorable-message studies that indicate the critical role of the family and significant others in socializing and teaching people about coping with discrimination and racism (Daniel & Daniel, 1999; Daniel & Effinger, 1996; Rowles & Duan, 2012). Specifically, it supports other research that shows a connection between communication and cognition with the role that family, particularly significant others, play in socializing and teaching its members (Daniel & Effinger, 1996; Koenig Kellas, 2010). Other characteristics of intergenerational messages include guidance for living morally sound, the importance of hard work and a good work ethic, and educational achievement, which “nourished their affective, cognitive, and spiritual selves” (Daniel & Effinger, 1996, p. 184). Typically, participants recalled these messages and passed them down because of their perceived value; that is, they selected and delivered messages that influence and impact one’s development and ability to function and subsequently cope in an oppressive society. The findings from our investigation reveal themes similar to those described by others. For example, within the self-improvement category, most of the participants’ responses concern education and general achievement. The messages in this category clearly resonated with our participants: In terms of messages received, twelve responses fell in the self-improvement category (Appendix A), but twenty-eight messages of self-improvement were transmitted by participants to their children (Appendix B). In particular, the advice to equip oneself through education reverberated through memorable messages. In addition to the themes mentioned above, our results included messages that concern personal conduct, protection, and psychological avoidance. These themes comport with those often found in intergenerational messages intended to influence one’s behavior—in specific situations and general life circumstances—for avoiding both physical and psychological

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   39

harm. According to Daniel and Daniel (1999), racism has been and continues to be like a “hot stove,” an apt analogy because racism “represents significant potential and actual danger” (p. 27) for African Americans. Thus, messages recalled and shared, within the context of the current investigation, unsurprisingly involve directives for behavior and feature themes related to personal conduct and protection as well as guidance on responding to racist and discriminatory encounters. The feelings of anxiety that inspired the meaningful messages were warranted because conditions of American society, wrought with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, contributed indirectly and directly to harsh realities for African Americans. In many ways, African Americans lived in a policed state where routine violence, often over the most trivial matters, jeopardized their lives. In addition, the media of the day fueled the flames at a time when African Americans received no guaranteed protection by law enforcement officials (Wilkerson, 2010). In fact, into the latter part of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century, Blacks have been harmed and even killed unjustifiably by police officers (Moore, 2010). This underscores the importance of memorable intergenerational messages concerning physical protection and psychological avoidance; they remain relevant as the lives of African Americans continue to be devalued in modern America. Much of the art and cultural forms emanating from the African American community address the conditions and experiences of the people. These expressions, in the form of singing, dancing, writing, and even joking have all served as coping mechanisms. In many instances, African Americans find the content of those cultural expressions relatable and sources of inspiration and encouragement. Our findings confirm the role of culture in the messages that contained popular sayings attributed to entertainers and other prominent figures. The messages also indicate that entertainers and prominent figures, despite their success, have not been immune to discrimination or the realities of racism that plague society; these famous African Americans were in tune with the community, and vice versa. Finally, some participants reported that memorable messages were wrapped in family stories. Within the sinews of family narratives, ­participants gleaned valuable information in messages aimed at ­helping them cope with racial prejudice. Our study adds support to research ­documenting the important storytelling function of families, including those with an African American heritage (Bochner, 2002; Langellier & Peterson, 2004; Stone, 1988), and their role in forming legacies­

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(Thompson et al., 2009). Families tell stories that teach and inspire their members (Bylund, 2003), and the participants in our study remembered messages meant to influence ways of thinking and acting in the face of racial prejudice. Limitations Although we tried to anticipate and avert all shortcomings, this study is not without its limitations. While our research sheds light on the memorable messages that African Americans have received and transmitted about coping with racial prejudice, we still know little about the actual effect of these messages on African Americans’ well-being. Oppression takes a severe emotional and physical toll on those who experience it. More research can investigate how, if at all, memorable messages mitigate the stress caused by racial prejudice. In the present study, we failed to examine the reasons for ­respondents’ choices of the messages they communicated about coping with racial prejudice. Did participants pass down the messages to equip their children with knowledge about survival skills? To keep a promise to their own parents that they would do so? Out of a sense of parental obligation? A better understanding of the specific goals in transmitting messages would add another layer to the findings and provide further insight into the communication practices of African American families. While important to acknowledge them, the limitations of this study did not negate the contribution the research makes to the understanding of African American family communication. Neither do they diminish the contribution to the existing literature base regarding memorable messages, intergenerational communication, or more overarching topics in family communication as a whole. Directions for Future Research Future researchers should focus on a way to measure the influence memorable messages exert on African Americans. We have provided evidence that the messages communicated in the family were directed at coping with racial prejudice; the next step involves a scientifically designed investigation to discover whether the messages successfully help recipients cope. Information on the outcomes of the communication intended to assuage some of the stress associated with experiencing racial prejudice as well as practical effects to mitigate its harmful effects would prove most valuable.

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   41

We hope this preliminary study will add to the knowledge of family communication scholars who study memorable messages and intergenerational communication. Most important, we hope it leads to successful efforts of African Americans to cope with racial prejudice. References Adler, R. B., & Proctor II, R. F. (2011). Looking out, looking in (13 ed.). Boston: ­Wadsworth. Altman, I., & Taylor, D. (1973). Social penetration. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Asante, M. (1995). African American history: A journey of liberation. Maywood, NJ: Peoples Publishing Group. Barge, J. K., & Schlueter, D. W. (2004). Memorable messages and newcomer socialization. Western Journal of Communication, 68, 233–256. Blue, L. (2009). The African American church: A sociological history. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse. Boateng, F. (1985). African traditional education: A tool for intergenerational communication. In M. K. Asante & K. W. Asante (Eds.), African culture: The rhythms of unity. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bochner, A. (2002). Perspective in inquiry III: The moral of stories. In M. L. Knapp & J. A. Daily (Eds.), Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 73–101). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Braithwaite, D. O., & Baxter, L. (2006). Engaging theories in family communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Bulmer, M. (1979). Concepts in the analysis of qualitative data. Sociological Review, 27, 651–677. Bylund, C. (2003). Ethnic diversity and family stories. Journal of Family Communication, 3, 215–236. Chafe, W., Gavins, R., & Korstad, R. (2001). Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans tell about life in the segregated South. New York, NY: The New Press. Conrad, C. (2005). African Americans in the U.S. economy. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield. Cox, O. (1970). Caste, class, & race: A study in social dynamics. New York, NY: Penfield. Dailey, J., Gilmore, G., & Simon, B. (2000). Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern politics from civil war to civil rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Daniel, J. L., & Daniel, J. E. (1999). African American childrearing: The context of a hot stove. In T. J. Socha & R. C. Diggs (Eds.), Communication, race and family: Exploring communication in Black, White, and biracial families (pp. 25–44). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Daniel, J. L., & Effinger, M. (1996). Bosom biscuits: A study of African American intergenerational communication. Journal of Black Studies, 27, 183–195. Diggs, R. C., & Socha, T. (2004). Communication, families, and exploring the boundaries of cultural diversity. In A. L. Vangelisti (Ed.), Handbook of family communication (pp. 249–266). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Du Bois, W.E.B. (2003). The souls of Black folk. New York: Bartleby. (Original work published 1903). Ellis, J. B., & Smith, S. W. (2004). Memorable messages as guides to self-assessment of behavior: A replication and extension diary study. Communication Monographs, 71, 97–119.

42   The Black Family and Society Erlandson, D., Harris, E., Skipper, B., & Allen, S. (1993). Doing naturalistic inquiry: A guide to methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Estes, S. (2005). I am a man! Race, manhood, and the civil rights movement. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Ford, L. A., & Ellis, B. H. (1998). A preliminary analysis of memorable support and nonsupport messages received by nurses in acute care settings. Health Communication, 10, 37–63. Holladay, S. (2002). “Have fun while you can,” “You’re only as old as you feel,” “Don’t ever get old”: An examination of memorable messages about aging. International Communication Association. Unpublished manuscript. Kassing, J., & Pappas, M. (2007). “Champions are built in the off season”: An exploration of high school coaches’ memorable messages. Human Communication, 10, 537–546. Keeley, M. (2004). Final conversations: Survivors’ memorable messages concerning religious faith and spirituality. Health Communication, 16, 87–104. Knapp, M. L., Stohl, C., & Reardon, K. (1981). Memorable messages. Journal of ­Communication, 31, 27–41. Koenig Kellas, J. (2005). Family ties: Communicating identity through jointly told stories. Communication Monographs, 72, 365–389. Koenig Kellas, J. (2010). Transmitting relational world views: The relationship between mother–daughter memorable messages and adult daughters’ relational schemata. Communication Quarterly, 58, 458–479. Langellier, K., & Peterson, E. (2004). Storytelling in daily life: Performing narrative. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2002). Qualitative communication research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Massey, D., & Denton, N. (1993). American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Medved, C. E., Brogan, S. M., McClanahan, A. M., Morris, J. F., & Shepherd, G. J. (2006). Family and work socializing communication: Messages, gender, and ideological implications. Journal of Family Communication, 6, 161–180. Moore, L. (2010). Black rage in New Orleans: Police brutality and African American activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Omi, M., & Winant, H. (1994). Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York, NY: Routledge. Packard, J. (2002). American nightmare: The history of Jim Crow. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Paris, P. J. (2008). African American religion and public life: An assessment. Cross ­Currents, 58, 475–494. Penfield, J., & Duru, M. (1988). Proverbs: Metaphors that teach. Anthropological ­Quarterly, 61, 119–128. Ritterhouse, J. (2006). Growing up Jim Crow: How Black and White southern children learned race. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Rowles, J., & Duan, C. (2012). Perceived racism and encouragement among African American adults. Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, 40, 11–23. Sharp, A. (2007). Separate but equal: The desegregation of America’s schools. Detroit, MI: Thomson-Gale. Smith, S., Nazione, S., Laplante, C., Kotowski, M., Atkin, C., Skubisz, C., & Stohl, C. (2009). Topics and sources of memorable breast cancer messages and their impact on prevention and detection behaviors. Journal of Health Communication, 14, 293–307.

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   43 Smitherman, G. (1977). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Socha, T. J. (2001). Home, family, and communication: The horizon through a wide lens. Journal of Family Communication, 1, 1–7. Socha, T. J., & Beigle, J. (1999). Toward improving life at the crossroads: Family communication education and multicultural competence. In T. J. Socha & R. C. Diggs (Eds.), Communication, race, and family: Exploring communication in Black, White, and biracial families (pp. 209–227). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Stohl, C. (1986). The role of memorable messages in the process of organizational socialization. Communication Quarterly, 34, 231–249. Stone, E. (1988). Black sheep and kissing cousins: How our stories shape us. New York, NY: Times Books. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research: Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Swain, R. D. (2008). Standing on the promises that cannot fail: Evaluating the Black church’s ability to promote community activism among African-Americans in the present day context. Journal of African American Studies, 12, 401–413. Thompson, B., Kellas, J., Soliz, J., Thompson, J., Epp, A., & Schrodt, P. (2009). Family legacies: Constructing individual and family identity through intergenerational storytelling. Narrative Inquiry, 19, 106–134. Vangelisti, A. L. (2004). Handbook of family communication. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Wang, T. (2012). Understanding the memorable messages first-generation college students receive from on-campus mentors. Communication Education, 1, 1–23. Wilkerson, I. (2010). The warmth of other suns: The epic story of America’s great migration. New York, NY: Random House. Wood, J. (2000). Relational communication: Continuity and change in personal relationships. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

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Appendix A Examples of Memorable Messages African Americans Report Receiving from Family Members Memorable Message Man and Subcategory

Frequency

Example

Faith & Religion

n = 79

Theologically Based

n = 49

1. Turn the other cheek. 2. Do not judge people. 3. Put God first and He will protect you.

Scripture

n = 30

4. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you (Philippians 4:13). 5. The Lord will make your enemies your footstool (Matthew 22:44). 6. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are not to fear for the Lord is with you (Psalm 23:4).

Self-concept

n = 45

Self-confidence

n = 25

1. Never forget that you can accomplish great things. 2. Love the skin you’re in.

Self-value

n = 20

3. The core of who you are is what’s important

Behavior

n = 31

Personal Conduct

n = 17

1. Make sure you’re neatly dressed. 2. Don’t hang around a lot of Negro people.

Protection

n=8

3. If you don’t have a gun be sure to run if you’re in trouble.

Psychological Avoidance

n=6

4. Don’t pay white folks no mind.

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   45 Popular Sayings

n = 18

Entertainers

n = 11

1. Say it loud, “I’m Black and I’m proud.” Be proud to be Black. 2. I’m proud to be Black y’all and that’s a fact y’all.

Prominent Figures

n=7

3. It’s not the color of your skin but the content of your character. 4. The Black skin is not a badge of shame but a glorious symbol.

Self-Improvement

n = 12

Education

n=7

1. Education is the only way to fight prejudice. 2. Get good grades and make something of yourself.

General Achievement

n=5

3. Always be the best that you can be in anything that you do.

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Appendix B Examples of Intergenerational Memorable Messages Memorable Message Man and Subcategory

Frequency

Faith & Religion

n = 57

Scripture

n = 39

1. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you (Philippians 4:13) 2. The Lord will make your enemies your footstool (Matthew 22:44) 3. He will never leave you nor forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:6).

Theologically Based

n = 18

4. Trust and obey God. 5. No matter what you go through, God will take care of you. 6. Do the best you can in life and God will do the rest.

Self-Concept

n = 50

Self-Confidence

n = 21

1. Walk with your head held high.

Self-Value

n = 20

2. You are a marvelous creation so be happy with yourself.

Cognitive Directives

n=9

3. D  on’t let racism hinder your thought processes.

Self-Improvement

n = 28

Education

n = 21

1. Education is the key because knowledge can never be taken from you.

General Achievement

n=7

2. Take advantage of opportunities given to you, and don’t take them for granted.

Types

Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family   47 Behavior

n = 14

Protection

n = 11

1. You have to physically protect yourself because I don’t want the Trayvon Martin situation happening.

Personal Conduct

n=3

2. When you’re in a store never put your hands in your pockets and act nervous. 3. Don’t hang around a lot of Negro people.

Popular Sayings

n = 11

Prominent Figures

n=5

1. It’s not the color of your skin but the caliber of your character. 2. Character, not circumstances, makes the man.

Entertainers

n=4

 ay it loud, “I’m Black 3. S and I’m proud.” Be proud to be Black.

Political Icons

n=2

4. Yes we can.

4 Black Intellectuals on Trial: Debating Race, Community, and Responsibility Marcia Walker-McWilliams In 1995, the debate over the responsibility and role of black intellectuals in black communities captured print media and public fascination. A group of “new black intellectuals” or “black public intellectuals” had emerged as prominent scholars on aspects of the black experience in America. Cornel West, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, and Michael Eric Dyson were at the forefront of this group of new black public intellectuals from elite academic institutions who had been appearing on television, radio, in national magazines and newspapers, and giving lectures throughout the country. For some, it was remarkable that these black scholars, who routinely and explicitly addressed the relevance of race in America, had managed to successfully bridge academia to mainstream media. For others, the new black intellectuals had reaped the benefits of integration and the Civil Rights Movement and were now equipped to tell everyone, both whites and blacks alike, what was and was not known about the ways in which race did and did not operate in America. Still, other critics and scholars were critical not only of the term “black public intellectual” but of those who appropriated the term and identified themselves as such. Representation and authenticity became central factors in the debate over the role and responsibility of black intellectuals. Because they were so prominent in mainstream media, were the new black public intellectuals taken as the authorities on all issues concerning race? Were they 49

50   The Black Family and Society

taken as not only the voice of the black community, but the voice of black intellectuals as well? Were these intellectuals to be celebrated for discussing issues of race in a public sphere, given America’s reluctance to effectively confront racial inequality? Or did their preponderance in mainstream media signal a lack of authenticity and growing distance between themselves and black communities at large? Four major articles written in 1995 were instrumental in sparking renewed debate about the roles, responsibilities, representation, and authenticity of the new black public intellectuals. In January of 1995, Michael Berube’s “Public Academy” appeared in The New Yorker. Two months later, Robert S. Boynton’s piece “The New Intellectuals” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and was featured on the cover. Both articles were on the whole more celebratory of the new black intellectuals. In April of 1995, Adolph Reed’s highly critical piece of the new black public intellectuals, “What are the drums saying, Booker T? The Current Crisis of the Black Intellectual” appeared in The Village Voice. All three articles largely focused on issues of representation and authenticity. Although these articles represent fundamental components of the literature on black intellectuals (and as such will be discussed in more detail further on), it was the fourth major article, written by Massachusetts minister Eugene Rivers, that served as the launching point for this project. “Beyond the Nationalism of Fools: Towards An Agenda for Black Intellectuals” appeared in the Boston Review in the summer of 1995. The article opened with a series of devastating and staggering statistics concerning the impact of violence, incarceration, and teenage pregnancies on black communities, followed by Rivers’s proclamation that: “Some 40 years after the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, younger Black Americans are now growing up unqualified even for slavery. The result is a state of civil war, with children in violent revolt against the failed secular and religious leadership of the Black community.”1 The statistics show that the black community is in a state of crisis, and Rivers argues that without effective leadership, the conditions and life chances of young black Americans will not improve. He then asks, “What is the responsibility of Black intellectuals in the face of this nightmare?”2 Explicit in this question is an articulation of a role and set of responsibilities for black intellectuals in the post–civil rights era that involves both leadership and the need to provide remedies for the maladies affecting black communities. Unlike Berube, Boynton, and Reed, Rivers focuses less on issues of representation and authenticity. What seems to be most

Black Intellectuals on Trial   51

important is that the new black public intellectuals, and arguably black intellectuals in general, have made significant socioeconomic strides, while many other black Americans remain behind. Rivers argues, The debate over the responsibility has degenerated into star-worship and name-calling, the stuff of television talk shows. The issues are too serious for that. It is time to get back on track. The Black community is in a state of emergency; Black intellectuals have acquired unprecedented power and prestige. So let’s quit the topic of salaries and lecture fees, leave the fine points about Gramsci on hegemony to the journals, and have a serious discussion of how intellectuals can better mobilize their resources to meet the emergency.3

A number of key points are raised. First, Rivers argues that the current arguments among black scholars, what historian Sean Wilentz calls “an old-fashioned donnybrook, fought out in the high-brow weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies,”4 have little import in the real debate over what black intellectuals must do to help black people. The sense of urgency that Rivers evokes is presented in contrast to less important issues such as salaries, lecture fees, and esoteric scholarship that have no direct role in easing the plight of black people. River’s intellectuals are elite black academics, and he calls for research and scholarship aimed at investigating and improving the lives of blacks in America, reminiscent of projects undertaken at the Atlanta Conference at the turn of the twentieth century by scholars working with fewer resources in a more racially hostile and segregated environment.5 Rivers utilizes a Du Bosian “Talented Tenth” framework in placing elite black academics as anointed and appointed leaders of black America. Moreover, black intellectuals in the post–civil rights era are depicted as not having taken advantage of the numerous resources available from the ivory tower: How have these institutions and scholars failed—despite their incomparably superior information, financial and institutional support, and comparative wealth, freedom, and safety—to produce a coherent research agenda addressing the contemporary devastation of the Black community? Why has this generation’s peculiar collective genius been to produce so little from so much?6

Several scholars, including Robin Kelley, responded to Rivers’s critique of black intellectuals. Kelley argued that there are a number of black activist intellectuals who consciously engage in dialogue with black Americans at the grassroots level about what is and is not needed to improve the lives of black Americans.7 Such intellectuals exist not only within but outside of the academy. Kelley writes, “Most of these activist-intellectuals don’t

52   The Black Family and Society

seek the limelight and are unwilling to make bold pronouncements about what the Research Agenda ought to be.”8 Not only does Kelley highlight that there are various “types” or kinds of intellectuals—activist intellectuals, public intellectuals, progressive intellectuals—he raises important questions about the notion that there should be or is only one research agenda for an expanding, multifarious black America. Kelley also argues that black public intellectuals and activist intellectuals alike have profoundly shaped younger generations of black activists. He concludes his essay with a powerful assertion: In the end, I think practically everyone recognizes that black communities, and the American working class more generally, are facing a devastating crisis. But we also must recognize that our inability to address these problems is not evidence of a lack of commitment, solid research, and good ideas. The struggles that lie before us are hard, and as Rivers himself acknowledges, the greatest research and policy initiatives alone cannot fix the situation. Just because progressive black intellectuals do not have the power to implement policy does not mean they have failed the black ommunity.9

In analyzing the arguments of Rivers and Kelley, we see that the debate over the roles and responsibilities of black intellectuals in relation to the struggles of black America remains a point of contention. In many respects, black intellectuals have traditionally been defined vis-à-vis the status of other black Americans and viewed as both ambassadors and insiders of higher education institutions. Because black Americans have faced a long history of political and economic marginalization and racial discrimination, black intellectuals who have achieved status and teach within institutions of higher education are seen as having within their grasp the resources needed to combat and resolve these injustices. In the debate resurfacing over the place and responsibilities of black intellectuals in black America near the turn of the twentieth century, very little attention was given to the plight of black intellectuals within the academy and the day-to-day struggles that they face. Nor was there adequate attention given to the ways in which black intellectuals out of the spotlight, out of elite academic institutions, and out of higher education as a whole impact their communities. The historiography of black intellectuals reveals much about how the debate over their responsibilities has in some ways transformed yet remained remarkably consistent throughout the black freedom struggle over the course of the twentieth century.

Black Intellectuals on Trial   53

The Black intellectual tradition from the late nineteenth century to the civil rights era While this paper focuses on the debate over the responsibilities and expectations of black intellectuals in the post–civil rights era and the 1990s specifically, tracing the antecedents of the debate from the turn of the twentieth century is a necessary endeavor. The idea that black intellectuals bear a responsibility to study, address, and attempt to remedy the issues that plague black communities is an outgrowth of the black elite’s sense of service and responsibility to the masses that developed during Jim Crow. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars such as Alexander Crummell and W.E.B. Du Bois argued that black intellectuals, professionals, and the educated had a responsibility to help uplift their fellow brethren, namely because the plight of blacks overall was one of blatant and extreme racial and economic poverty, state-sanctioned violence against black men and women, and legal discrimination in the post-emancipation era. These scholars, largely men, saw themselves as the select group of blacks able and educated enough to carry the race to new heights of “civilization”—to lead them to racial and economic progress.10 Yale historian Jonathan Scott Holloway argues that Alexander Crummell’s 1897 address to the American Negro Academy marked “the birth of the twentieth-century black intellectual tradition.”11 In his address, Crummell “demanded that black intellectuals recognize and accept their responsibilities as the cultured and civilized leaders of the race. Black Americans needed to be saved . . . and [he] believed that intellectuals had been called to duty.”12 Similarly, in “The Talented Tenth” (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois called for the top ten percent of black Americans in professional occupations to assume the role as leaders of the race: If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. . . . The talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.13

Representation as “the best of the race” and active leadership were the defining roles of black intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet Anna Julia Cooper, a contemporary of both Crummell and Du Bois, prescribed a different method or strategy for the uplift of blacks.

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In Voice from the South, she argued that the triumphs and successes of one man did not mean that the race as a whole was progressing: “Our present record of eminent men, when placed beside the actual status of the race in America to-day, proves that no man can represent the race.”14 Unlike Du Bois and Crummell, Cooper was critical of the idea that but a few blacks would represent or lead the race to a better existence. Furthermore Cooper argued that black women, heretofore not mentioned, had an integral role in the struggle against oppression. She argued, “The fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman.”15 Further elaborating on this argument, Cooper writes, “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say, ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”16 Cooper, a black female intellectual writing before Du Bois, did and would stress the need to gauge the progress of the race by that of poor blacks and black women, whom she saw as playing integral roles in the fight against racial violence and discrimination. Intellectuals would have a role in the struggle, but the role of everyday blacks and that of women (who were equally deserving of higher education) were just as important and integral to the freedom struggle and pursuit of equality.17 Decades later, in the throes of the Civil Rights movement, prominent historian John Hope Franklin claimed that the problem of the black scholar was in fact the problem of the scholar in general, arguing that “In America the scholar’s role in the community and in the nation has always been limited.”18 At the same time, Franklin believed that all scholars are in some way or another important to American society and as such must grapple with the problems that face the society: “whether he wanted to or not, the American scholar has been drawn irresistibly into the main stream of American life, and has contributed his knowledge and his ingenuity to the solution of the major problems that the country has faced.”19 But black scholars had additional burdens to face, chief among them having to prove their intellectualism—that blacks were capable of producing scholarship, whether rooted in the study of race or wholly unrelated. It was difficult to have scholarly work that addressed race and racism taken seriously by the academy; it was perhaps even more difficult to have their work seen as having broader policy implications that would help remedy society’s treatment of blacks. While Franklin seems to focus on the first of these two conundrums, the second clearly shows the disparities between black and white scholars in that whatever knowledge white scholars were able

Black Intellectuals on Trial   55

to put forth as probable solutions to societal problems, black scholars were rarely, given that same chance and consideration. For Franklin, the constant need to prove that one could be both black and a serious intellectual scholar was a factor for W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Carter G. Woodson and others who chose the route of “Negro studies” instead of traditional American scholarship. Franklin recognized that earlier generations of African American scholars had far fewer options: Perhaps they would have been accepted in the main stream of American scholarship; perhaps not. Their dilemma lay before them, and their choice is evident. . . . We can say, however, that it is tragic indeed, and a commentary on the condition of American society, that these Negro scholars felt compelled to make the choice they did make. Had conditions been different, had they been free Americans functioning in a free intellectual and social climate, they might well have made another choice.20

Franklin’s observation articulates a different perspective on the role of black intellectuals. While previously the role of black scholars centered on issues of representation and leadership, the debate clearly shifted proceeding up to and during the Civil Rights Movement. Implicit in Franklin’s work is the question of integration and to what extent a black scholar can choose to focus on academic endeavors outside the realm of black studies, as well as to what extent he (or she) can be seen as a scholar first, perhaps a black scholar second. Franklin’s perspective on the role of responsibilities of black intellectuals is positioned comparatively to that of white intellectuals. Franklin also argues that black scholars have a role in correcting pseudoscience scholarship and revealing the ways in which American society discriminates against blacks. However, he differentiates scholarship from advocacy: “There is also a place for advocacy, so long as the Negro scholar understands the difference. Recognizing the importance of the use of objective data in the passionate advocacy of the rectification of injustice, the Negro can assume this additional role for his own sake and for the sake of the community.”21 In contrast to Crummell and Du Bois, who demanded that black scholars and intellectuals assume their roles as leaders of the race, Franklin sees the role of advocate as voluntary and separate from the necessary function of producing rigorous, intellectually sound scholarship. At the same time, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called attention to the need for black intellectuals to address issues faced by everyday blacks at a time when integration

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and assimilation were seen as the means by which racial inequalities and discrimination could miraculously be put to an end. In an article published in the Negro Digest (1962), “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” Frazier argues that black intellectuals had failed to investigate the legacy of slavery on the status of blacks in the 1960s and the possible problems and negative effects of integration and assimilation. For Frazier, black scholars, at least in the social sciences, had failed to do the intellectual work of critiquing the vestiges of racial oppression. Although in a different context, Frazier echoes the sentiments of Crummell and Du Bois, contending that “the new Negro middle class is confronted with the problems of assimilation and their intellectuals have not provided them with an understanding of the problems.”22 Thus it is the duty and the role of black intellectuals to be at the forefront of scholarship on issues affecting black Americans and to relay that scholarship to black Americans. Essentially, black intellectuals should be able to both theorize and practically relate the conditions of black existence to the larger black public. Similar to Franklin, Frazier argues that black intellectuals lacked intellectual freedom. Whereas Franklin saw this lack of freedom as a hindrance to black intellectuals because they may have felt obligated to do “Negro studies,” Frazier sees the lack of freedom as a hindrance because black scholars are so dependent on white communities for economic support and intellectual guidance that they are unable to speak about the significance of the barriers that black Americans face as a result of the legacy of slavery.23 Furthermore, Frazier contends that the desire for assimilation and conformity among black intellectuals has displaced black intellectuals from their traditional responsibility “to provide a positive identification through history, literature, art, music, and the drama.”24 Again, the role of the “corrective” scholar is a central component in the debate over the role of black intellectuals. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the roles and responsibilities of black intellectuals have been variously defined as race leaders, representatives of black America, scholarly pioneers, corrective scholars, and articulators of the social problems that befall black communities. In the middle of the twentieth century, black intellectuals were seen as operating within an intellectual community in which they were often forced to choose between “Negro studies” or “traditional American” scholarship. As we will see, the debate over the responsibilities of black intellectuals in the post–civil rights era encompasses many of the same issues, but with additional key elements: dramatic increases in the numbers of black academics, the variety of their scholarship, and the rise of the black public intellectual.

Black Intellectuals on Trial   57

The post–civil rights era and the emergence of the new black ­intellectuals, or black public intellectuals The Civil Rights Movement brought about a number of political and legal rights for black Americans. Public facilities and institutions were mandated to desegregate, chief among them schools and institutions of higher education. Although predominantly black colleges and universities had been in existence since Reconstruction, a smaller percentage of black students matriculated into predominantly white institutions. The expansion of federal financial aid, civil rights legislation, and the emergence of affirmative action policies provided increased opportunities for blacks to attend a wider array of colleges and universities. These same factors precipitated increased opportunities to attend graduate school. Additionally, as the nation struggled to come to terms with the breadth and depth of racial inequality in the post–civil rights era, black scholars come to be seen as “insiders” and authorities on issues of race. Scholar William Banks writes of black intellectuals in the post–civil rights era: The late 1960s were heady times for black intellectuals. The civil rights movement brought them visibility. Scholars and writers who worked the rich soil of race and culture gained an audience. Prestigious universities began to recruit African-American scholars. . . . Publishers and editors of books and magazines sought works that would explain social unrest to surprised and frustrated white audiences. Black social and political activists boldly pressed their claims for the soul and allegiance of black intellectuals. Never before had African American prospects for employment in intellectual work been so favorable.25

As Banks argues, the Civil Rights Movement created opportunities for black scholars to publicly expound upon the nature of race in American society and to work in the elite factions of the ivory tower. Yet key to the expansion of employment opportunities for black scholars in the 1970s were black student protests for the creation of black studies programs and departments on college campuses across the nation. In addition to demanding black studies departments and student centers for black students on campus, many black students demanded the hiring of black faculty to teach black studies courses, that more black faculty be hired across disciplines, and that their black studies programs have practical outreach and engagement ties to local black communities.26 With these demands, the debate over the roles and responsibilities of black intellectualism once again became salient. Writing in the midst of the student protests, scholar Andrew Billingsley wrote: “They [institutions of higher education] have failed, as the other major institutions of our

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society have failed, to incorporate black people and the black perspective into their conception of their function, their structure, or their operation.”27 He went on to argue, “If the black revolution is to succeed at all, and if black studies are to succeed it will be because black intellectuals play an increasingly dominant role in their formulation, administration, and operation.”28 It became clear that black intellectuals would have a role in educating black and non-black students about the contributions of blacks to American society as well as their marginalized status within it. Billingsley saw black intellectuals as necessary to transforming the academy, to educating future generations of students, and to ultimately transforming higher education from the inside out. A number of civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin initially opposed the creation of black studies because they believed such programs would politicize higher education to the detriment of black students. For them, African American studies was tainted by its association with black nationalism and the Black Power movement, both of which played a hand in energizing black student protests. In Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life, author William Banks argues that during the black student protest movements and Black Power era, “Militant leaders demanded that intellectuals fuse with the masses and lead the way in unmasking white standards and the purposes served by the dominant norms. They declared that intellectual distance supported the status quo and that nothing less than active engagement was acceptable.”29 Intellectuals were not needed to hold a position of superiority or leadership per se. Rather, they needed to form the bridge between institutions of higher education and communities that required that they stay connected to black communities through their research, teaching, and/or advocacy for social change. In the post–civil rights era, the number of black intellectuals increased as a result of greater opportunities in higher education and wider employment opportunities. And although the number of black doctorates and black professors remained small in comparison to white scholars, black intellectuals did indeed make some gains. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a number of these intellectuals rose to national prominence and were labeled as the “new black intellectuals” or “black public intellectuals.” Their rise to prominence and the reaction of other scholars and critics to them marks the latest turn in the debate over the roles and responsibilities of black intellectuals. While most of the literature agrees on just who qualifies as a black public intellectual—Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks,

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and Michael Eric Dyson comprising the core of the group—defining them and locating the origins of the term is more problematic. African Americanist James Conyers puts forth his own definition of public intellectuals and describes their role in American society: Their writing simultaneously defines themselves and the wider public of whom, and for whom, they speak. Public intellectuals usually write and speak. They must do so, in order to advance a wider understanding, to increase discussion, to shape criticism, and try to persuade others. . . . But both intellectuals and the public for whom they speak agree that the point of view thus set out accurately reflects the community from which and for whom the intellectual speaks.30

Conyers’s definition of a public intellectual highlights the degree of mutuality that need exist between an intellectual and whatever public he or she chooses to speak to or from. Conyers’s definition of a public intellectual is less rooted in distinct, highly visible scholars and leaves room for any intellectual whose written work or oral presentations resonates with a wider public base. At the same time, the problematic nature of an intellectual who takes it upon him or herself to speak on behalf of an entire group of people is raised; especially when that group of people is marginalized. In 1995, Michael Berube’s “Public Academy” was the first of the major articles addressing the rise of the black public intellectual. He began the article by citing Cornel West’s argument that “one of the unintended effects of the civil rights movement was that elite, formerly all-white universities wound up institutionalizing the African American intelligentsia, thereby insuring that its work would never again roam free in—or keep its ‘organic’ links to—the world outside the academy.”31 While West is clearly speaking for black scholars who earned their doctorates or worked in white institutions, Berube does not use West’s argument to problematize the very notion of a black public intellectual who speaks for a community that he/she no longer maintains organic ties to. Instead, Berube focuses on the role of black intellectuals as cultural critics and cultural interpreters who “have an unprecedented opportunity to speak from, to, and for a public, since their professional bona fides depend not on their repudiation of vernacular African American culture but on their engagement with it.”32 According to Berube, the role of black public intellectuals involves engagement with African American culture and the participation in a broader public sphere in order to address the crises in African American communities and to interpret the concerns of blacks to a white, elite and largely aloof audience.

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Robert Boynton’s definition of black public intellectuals mirrors that of Berube. Boynton’s stance is that the new black intellectuals are “streetsmart, often combative, and equipped with a strong moral sense, they, too, have a talent for shaking things up,”33 and he celebrates the “starquality” of black public intellectuals. Boynton argues that black public intellectuals “benefited from American’s current concern about race, serving as experts on everything from the L.A. riots and affirmative action to the nominations of Clarence Thomas and Lani Guinier, and anything having to do with Louis Farrakhan.”34 Black intellectuals were “in style” and riding the wave of race’s popularity on the American stage. Boynton also argues that black public intellectuals such as Gates, West, and Toni Morrison can be conceived of as intellectual activists capitalizing upon a more open university setting: “Outstanding students who ten years before would most likely have become political activists instead pursued academic careers. As a result, many developed an intellectual style with a decidedly activist edge; in the university but not completely of it, theirs is scholarship with a social purpose.”35 Both Berube and Boynton praise black public intellectuals for their ability to straddle both worlds of academia and the public, and to do so successfully as black scholars. Black public intellectuals did and do continue to play an important role in criticizing (to an extent) the ways in which race shapes our society. Berube and Boynton see the black public intellectual’s role as articulating to a broader public, namely a white public, the ways in which race, racial identity, and culture shape the lives of everyday black people and the larger society. Both authors remain critical of mainstream media who seek to make black public intellectuals the authorities on all things black, but they are less critical of black public intellectuals who market themselves and their ideas as the voice of black intellectuals and black America. These two authors put forth the notion that black intellectuals have a responsibility to blacks—to represent them and their struggles to white America. This approach is not altogether different than previous perspectives concerning the roles and responsibilities of black intellectuals. Taking a much more critical approach, political scientist Adolph Reed argues that contemporary “black public intellectuals diverge significantly from the rich history of black commentary” and that there is “little sense of debate or controversy among themselves as a cohort.”36 Reed then goes on to cite how West, Gates, Dyson, and Kelley praise one another more than they engage in critical debate over each other’s ideas. He argues that black public intellectuals engage in posing and “claim to

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speak from the edges of convention, to infuse mainstream discourse with a particular “counterhegemonic” perspective at least implicitly linked to one’s connectedness to identifiably black sensibilities or interests.”37 Reed essentially argues that black intellectuals appeal to white audiences based on their “authenticity” as articulators of a black cultural experience that lies in contrast to a more mainstream narrative about life in American society. Black public intellectuals straddle both the academic world and the role of public engager, which Reed sees as a way to “skirt the practical requirements of either role—to avoid both rigorous, careful intellectual work and protracted, committed political action.”38 Reed also seems to imply that the public of the new black public intellectuals was not black audiences, but white audiences. The question of who constitutes the public was not lost in the debate. In 1996, political scientist Michael Hanchard argued: There is also little actual discussion of what constitutes the black public intellectual’s public. Is it the black community broadly defined, or a particular segment of it? Does it consist of white liberal and leftist academics, who often rely upon these public ­figures for doses of essentialized “black” insight without bothering to read and discuss the works of a broader array of black scholars and activists? Is it, ironically, the new Right, which points to flaws—both perceived and real—in the writings of critics such as Cornel West in order to critique black social advances of the post–civil rights era more generally?39

Ten years later, in The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, scholar Eric Lott similarly remarks, “The very real questions black public intellectual work confronts are: Which public? Whose public? It may be vulgar to suggest that ‘public’ mostly functions in this discourse as a euphemism for white people, but thus far there hasn’t been enough sustained reflection on how alternative or counterpublic spheres intersect and interact with an extensive, broad-based, and hegemonic ‘public’ one.”40 While these writers criticize the idea of black public intellectuals as the chief articulators and representatives of issues affecting black people, none of them critique the fact that the black public intellectual is more likely than not a black male. Only bell hooks and Toni Morrison are occasionally mentioned as black public intellectuals, but even their work is not critiqued or scrutinized to the same extent as West’s or Gates’s. Surprisingly, very little is mentioned about what roles black academic scholars play in their campus communities as instructors, advisors, and administrators to their student population and whether or not they actively engage with students of color or the issues they face on campus. Beyond higher education, there is very little analysis of the role that activist

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intellectuals and nonacademic black intellectuals play in shaping and articulating ideas about race in society. Whether we attempt to celebrate or interrogate the emergence of black public intellectuals, we cannot lose sight of the wider black intellectual tradition and the historical roles black intellectuals have had in relation to their communities. Historian Jonathan Scott Holloway argues that black intellectuals have always been written about in a “crisis canon” where black intellectuals and thinkers are “referred to as the victims of ‘crises’ and ‘dilemmas’; they have been ‘failures’ and ‘problems’; but all the while they have been obliged by their ‘responsibilities.’”41 Simultaneously, “writing about black intellectuals almost always revolves around a crisis of the moment or the crisis of living in a world where many believe the words “black” and “intellectual” are mutually exclusive.”42 Essentially, black intellectuals have routinely and historically been written about within a context that places at the forefront their responsibilities towards black communities in crisis and within the context of their own crisis as scholars and intellectuals who are treated as representatives on all things black, but nothing else. Perhaps one way to avoid looking at black intellectuals as “failures” or confined by a set of rigid responsibilities is to look at black intellectuals as scholars operating within various settings with differing intellectual, professional, and personal goals, and ultimately multiple methods for meeting those goals. If we hold all black intellectuals to one single role in relation to black America, regardless of their strengths, weaknesses, and goals, then they are bound to “fail.” If we are to debate what role black intellectuals should have in relation to black communities, we first have to identify those scholars whose work has relevance and speaks to black communities. Then we must learn from them in what ways they hope to reach these communities. The attribution of success or failure to those scholars should measure the impact and import of their work vis-à-vis the contributions they seek to make and the communities they seek to engage. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Eugene Rivers, “Beyond the Nationalism of Fools: Towards an Agenda for Black Intellectuals,” Boston Review Forum, online ed. http://bostonreview.net/BR20.3/ rivers.html, Summer 1995. Ibid. Ibid. Sean Wilentz, “Race, Celebrity, and the Intellectuals: Notes on a Donnybrook,” Dissent v. 42, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 293.

Black Intellectuals on Trial   63 5.

Eugene Rivers, “Beyond the Nationalism of Fools: Towards an Agenda for Black Intellectuals,” Boston Review Forum, online ed. http://bostonreview.net/BR20.3/ rivers.html, Summer 1995. 6. Ibid. 7. Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review Forum, online ed. http://bostonreview.bet/BR20.4/ Kelley.html, October/November 1995. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Jonathan Scott Holloway, “The Black intellectual and the ‘crisis canon’ in the twentieth century,” Black Scholar v. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 2. 11. Ibid. 12. Alexander Crummell, “Civilization, the Primal Need of the Race,” American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers, No. 3 (Washington, DC: The American Negro Academy, 1898) 3, in Jonathan Scott Holloway, “The Black intellectual and the ‘crisis canon’ in the twentieth century,” Black Scholar v. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 2. 13. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” September 1903, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=174. 14. Anna Julia Cooper, Voice from the South (Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing House, 1892): 29. 15. Cooper, 28. 16. Cooper, 250. 17. Cooper, 75. 18. John Hope Franklin, “The Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar,” in Soon, one morning, new writing by American Negroes, 1940–1962, Herbert Hill, ed. (New York: Knopf, 1963): 62. 19. Franklin, 63. 20. Franklin, 70. 21. Franklin, 74. 22. E. Franklin Frazier, “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual,” Negro Digest (February 1962), 29. 23. Frazier, 30–31. 24. Frazier, 35. 25. William M. Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1996), 145. 26. James Allen Moss, “In Defense of Black Studies-Some Additional Notes,” AfroAmerican Studies v. 1 (1971), 218–219; James Turner and C. Steven McGann, “Black Studies as an Integral Tradition in African-American Intellectual History,” The Journal of Negro Education v. 49, no. 1 (Winter 1980), 58. 27. Andrew Billingsley, “The Black Presence in American Higher Education,” in What Black Educators Are Saying, ed. Nathan Wright (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970), 129. 28. Billingsley, 135. 29. William M. Banks, Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1996), 156. 30. James Conyers, ed, Black American Intellectualism and Culture: A Study of African American Social and Political Thought (Stanford, CT: Jai Press, Inc, 1999), 204. 31. Michael Berube, “Public Academy,” New Yorker v. 70, no. 4 (January 9, 1995), 73. 32. Berube, 78. 33. Robert S. Boynton, “The New Intellectuals,” The Atlantic Monthly (March 1995), 56. 34. Ibid.

64   The Black Family and Society 35. Boynton, 64. 36. Adolph Reed, “What are the drums saying Booker T? The Current Crisis of the Black Intellectual,” The Village Voice (April 11, 1995), 33. 37. Ibid. 38. Reed, 35. 39. Michael Hanchard, “Cultural Politics and Black Public Intellectuals,” Social Text, No. 48 (Autumn 1996): 96 40. Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic Books, 2006): 96. 41. Jonathan Scott Holloway, “The Black Intellectual and the ‘crisis canon’ in the twentieth century,” Black Scholar v. 31, no.1 (Spring 2001), 2. 42. Ibid.

References Banks, William M. Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. Banks, William M. and Jewell, Joseph. “Intellectuals and the Persisting Significance of Race,” The Journal of Negro Education v. 64, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 75–86. Berube, Michael. “Public Academy.” New Yorker v. 70, no. 4 (January 9, 1995): 73–80. Billingsley, Andrew. “The Black Presence in American Higher Education.” In What Black Educators Are Saying, ed. Nathan Wright, 126–149. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970. Bowser, Benjamin. Against the Odds: scholars who challenged racism in the 20th century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Boynton, Robert S. “The New Intellectuals.” The Atlantic Monthly (March 1995): 54–70. Childs, John Brown. “Afro-American Intellectuals and the People’s Culture.” Theory and Society v. 13, no. 1 (Jan 1984): 69–90. Conyers, James L, ed. Black American Intellectualism and Culture: A Study of African American Social and Political Thought. Stanford, CT: Jai Press Inc, 1999. Cooper, Anna Julia. Voice from the South. Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Printing House, 1892. Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Talented Tenth,” September 1903, http://teachingamericanhistory. org/library/index.asp?documentprint=174. Frazier, E. Franklin. “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual.” Negro Digest (February 1962): 26–36. Gates, Henry Louis and West, Cornel. The Future of the Race. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1996. Guinier, Lani. Lift Every Voice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Guy-Shefthall, Beverly. “Black Women’s Studies: The Interface of Women’s Studies and Black Studies.” Phylon v. 49, no. ½ (Spring-Summer, 1992): 33–41. Hanchard, Michael. “Cultural Politics and Black Public Intellectuals,” Social Text, No. 48 (Autumn 1996): 95–108. Hill, Herbert, ed. Soon, one morning, new writing by American Negroes, 1940–1962. New York: Knopf, 1963. Hine, Darlene Clark. “The Black Studies Movement: Afrocentric-Traditionalist-Feminist Paradigms for the Next Stage.” The Black Scholar v. 22 (Summer 1992): 11–18. Holloway, Jonathan Scott. Confronting the Veil. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Holloway, Jonathan Scott. “The Black Intellectual and the ‘crisis canon’ in the twentieth century.” Black Scholar v. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 2–13. hooks, bell and West, Cornel. Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. Boston: South End Press, 1991.

Black Intellectuals on Trial   65 James, Joy. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals. New York: Routledge, 1997. Jordan, June. Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Kelley, Robin. Boston Review Forum, online ed. http://bostonreview.bet/BR20.4/Kelley. html, October/November 1995. Lott, Eric. The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual. New York: Basic Books, 2006. MacPhail, Scott. “June Jordan and the New Black Intellectuals,” African American Review, v. 33, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 57–71. Marable, Manning, ed. Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Moss, James Allen. “In Defense of Black Studies-Some Additional Notes,” Afro-American Studies v. 1 (1971), 218–219. Platt, Anthony M. E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Reed, Adolph. “What Are the Drums Saying, Booker? The Current Crisis of the Black Intellectual.” Village Voice (April 11, 1995): 31–37. Rivers, Eugene F. “Beyond the Nationalism of Fools: Toward an Agenda for Black Intellectuals.” Boston Review Forum, online ed. http://bostonreview.net/BR20.3/rivers. html, Summer 1995. Sekayi, Dia. African American Intellectual-Activists: Legacies in the Struggle. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997. Turner, James and McGann, C. Steven. “Black Studies as an Integral Tradition in African American Intellectual History.” The Journal of Negro Education, v. 49, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 52–59. Ward, Stephen. “Scholarship in the context of struggle: Activist intellectuals, the Institute of the Black World, and the contours of Black power radicalism.” Black Scholar v. 31, no. ¾ (Fall 2001): 42–53. West, Cornel. “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 2 (Winter 1993–1994): 59–67. Wilentz, Sean. “Race, Celebrity, and the Intellectuals: Notes on Donnybrook.” Dissent v. 42, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 293–299. Woodyard, Jeffrey Lynn. “Evolution of a Discipline: Intellectual Antecedents of African American Studies.” Journal of Black Studies v. 22, no. 2 (Dec 1991): 239–51.

5 African Perspectives on Race in the African Diaspora: As Understood by Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah Rita Kiki Edozie

Introduction The adage that Africans (aside from South Africans) do not experience race is commonly stated. Race, it is assumed, is the preserve of African descendants who have lived in the Euro-America African Diaspora where race is experienced as a result of the multiracial, sociopolitical historical, and socio-cultural contexts that exist in these domains. Africans in the Continent do not experience race. Paradoxically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel, Americanah, may appear to affirm this false notion—at least by the time readers arrive at the novel’s concluding chapters. Nonetheless, that recent (postcolonial) African immigrants in the West—also known as new African Diasporas (Okpehwo and Nzegwu, 2009)—experience race in their host communities in Europe and America is an underemphasized yet important truism that warrants further exploration. Telling that story—a coming of age of new African Diasporas’ experiences with race in the US and Great Britain—is the core theme and value of Adichie’s exciting novel Americanah. Revealing the importance of that story and engaging its significance as a means to understand the diversity of the African Diaspora experience narrated by first generation Africans is the objective of the current essay. 67

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The novel is provocatively named after the nation-state that Adichie and the current reviewer find ourselves making sense of while developing our own identities of Blackness and Africanity as African immigrants living in the African Diaspora. Americanah’s main character, Ifemelu, once pondered in the novel, “Who says that a novel only has to be about one thing (page 191)?” Likewise, Adichie’s 477-page novel is about many things. It’s about immigrant life in the US and Britain. It’s about love, friendships, and relationships. It’s about gender experiences and family. It’s about social, cultural, and economic migration, transnationalism, and globalization. Be that as it may, Americanah does have a core, singular theme that stands out as a dominant thesis. The many aforementioned “things” addressed throughout the book are told through the prism of race and identity, a theme captured by a paradigm of “racialization.” To see Adichie’s novel as engaging a key thesis about racialization acknowledges the way that the author has employed race as a useful analytical tool for describing the processes by which racial meanings are attached to particular issues treated as social problems among African Diasporas. Additionally, however, and in relation to the novel’s key attention to race in this regard, given the growing diversity of the African Diaspora population in the US, trans-generationally, comparatively, and globally, Adichie’s novel also informs an important case study and posits a poignant illustration of the argument that Yoku Shaw-Taylor and Steven Tuch make in The Other African Americans. In their study of the African and ­Caribbean experience in the US, the authors speak to what they refer to as the invisibility of these groups, despite their growing presence ­(Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2007). As with the objective of Taylor and Tuch’s nonfiction, social science volume, Adichie’s text—albeit fictional literary scholarship—will serve to broaden its readers’ understanding of Africanborn African Americans and their perspectives on and experiences with race by examining the interethnic and intra-racial dynamics of historic and new African Diasporas. Racialization, Immigration, and Transnationalism in Amerikanah’s Global African Diaspora Murji and Solomos (2004) use the concept “racialization” to analyze the processes by which ideas about race were constructed, came to be regarded as meaningful, and are acted upon in practice. Racialization is closely associated with notions of identity, which in turn is a poignant social marker of convergence and difference in itself. When the two intersect—­particularly

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in black communities worldwide—race and identity are particularly recognized as sites of oppression and resistance to the communities that experience them, and are thus seen as a continuous process of social positioning and identity construction conscious through social, political, economic and psychological practices. Using love, African immigrant life, and globalization, Adichie interweaves these myriad themes through the thread of racialization discourses and structures of global inequality to reveal the interconnections, variances, and array of complex relationships among African identities and circumstances expressed by African descendants in the West and in a global arena dominated by the West. Throughout Americanah, Adichie eloquently unravels this important theme about race and the African immigrant identity, mainly through a series of stylistic vehicles, including characters, scenes, and verse. The most prominent of her devices is the scenic expressions and illustrations representing the identity of the novel’s main character, Ifemelu, an ­African immigrant. There is also Ifemelu’s blog discourses in “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (formerly known as Negroes)” which are used to engage explicit political statements about the politicaleconomy and identity politics of race. As well, the novel significantly uses hair as a metaphor for race presenting many poignant scenes in a West African braiding salon in the US. Adichie also articulates her theme through Ifemelu’s many relationships—with Obinze, Curt, and Blaine respectively (one a fellow Nigerian, the next white American, and the last an African American). In this regard, Adichie employs her political views about the state of race and ethnic relations for new African Diasporas to the US through both Ifemelu’s interrelations and interactions with African Americans, as well as her engagement with—and especially critique of—white liberals. Finally, through the character of Obinze, Adichie explores global, structural racism. The novel’s genius is in its literary eloquence, humor, interesting storyline and plot, and intellect in using racialism to unravel an exciting aesthetic and discourse relayed through the novel’s vignettes, anecdotes, many pages, scenes, and chapters. Be that as it may, if Adichie’s ­Americanah were merely a book about the unraveling of a “coming to racial understanding” of an African immigrant to the US, it would not rise to the remarkable piece of literature and social science that the novel is—which sums up my own judgment of the book’s most critical value. That is to say, while this theme dominates much of the novel, Adichie’s approach to race and identity in this regard is mainly about matters of thinking, mental categorization, attitude, and discourse. This I believe

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is the foremost objective of the book. For example, much of the story is told at Mariana’s African Hair Braiding Salon, where we observe that the debate about “black hair” is used to remind us of physical attributes of race and how phenotypes of Africans and African descendants have been socially constructed to represent both a positive and/or negative statement about black beauty and aesthetics. An equally important underlying subtheme of Americanah is the story that Adichie tells mostly through the character of Obinze and his experiences in Nigeria and the UK—and in his travels and traverses between the two. In this regard, Adichie’s novel also gives us a sense of the way that structural racism in the global arena works. The historical-cultural and contemporary economic processes that connect former colonial Western powers such as the UK with formerly colonized ones like Nigeria present a backdrop for Adichie’s novel. As such, through Americanah, we see how racialism is still very much manifest in the lives of Africans who live on the continent as an expression of post—or neo, as some still insist— colonialism. After all, it is Ali Mazrui who distinguishes old or historic African Diasporas from new, postcolonial African Diasporas by showing how the former are the Diasporas of enslavement and the latter are the Diasporas of imperialism (Mazrui in Okphewo and Boyce-Davis, 2001). Structural analyses of racialism reveal ways that the Euro-Africa encounter and its ushering in of the Euro-American transatlantic slave trade and the “European Scramble of Africa” have created a global terrain whereby the African identity had been dehumanized racially to legitimize the continent’s exploitation by the West. Through the structural racism that underlies the Americanah “dream” for Africans, readers will see how global society allocates privilege and status, including the best opportunities—jobs, the best schools, and the most inclusive access to prestigious society—to Western countries and to whites while excluding Africans and African descendants. Thus, in a much more nuanced way than she achieves through the aforementioned race, discourse, and identity themes, Adichie’s novel also reveals the structural racism that embeds the lives of Africans in the Continent and their transnational migrants and descendants in the West. In doing so, for example, Adichie links Obinze’s migration to the UK to global political-economic issues manifest in developing world African cities like Lagos and postcolonial African countries such as Nigeria. As a result, Adichie at least touches upon the reality that racialism—through the experience of colonialism—ontologically embeds the contemporary circumstances of Africans in the continent. Race matters to continental Africans as well.

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In many ways this theme embodies the meaning that is represented by the book’s title. What is and who are “Americanah”? Drawing from Adichie’s characters and their discourses, Americanah is the Nigerian “wanna-be American” who slurs r’s and forgets to speak Yoruba after just a week’s vacation in the US. She/he is the Nigerian who has never been to the US but who like Ifemelu’s boyfriend, “Obinze,” is admired for his fluency and knowledge of foreign things . . . especially American things, American films, magazines . . . and even American presidents. She is “Marianna, the African hair-braiding salon owner” and Senegalese immigrant whose “faultless version of her American self presents an exaggerated, broken English American accent” to her customers. ­“Americanah” is primarily Ifemelu—a fictional replica for sure of Adichie—who after about eight years of residing in the US examines her “new American self” as one who now says “great” and “I’m so excited” much of the time. Americanah is one who owns a condo, writes a “race” blog, and who dates “inter-racially” with rich handsome white guys called Curt, and both “intra-racially” as well as “inter-ethnically” with an African American professor called Blaine. In this regard, with Americanah, Adichie provides us with an intellectual platform to examine new perspectives emergent among African Diasporas and its attendant study. Adichie presents an African Diaspora that reveals the experiences of transnational and postcolonial Africans in a globe who traverse social and cultural linkages with African descendants and descendants of former colonizers through complex networks of social relationships and processes. Americanah represents the Africans’ politicaleconomic, cultural, and social orientation—physically or virtually— toward the West. A literary work first and foremost, Adichie supports her (and my own) contention that racialism underlies the multi-dimensional lived experiences of the contemporary African in the continent and in the diaspora in a gripping page turner that chronicles, backwards through flashbacks, the lives of her chief protagonists, Ifemelu and Obinze. Ifemelu and the Non-American Black The main character of Americanah, Ifemelu, is no doubt a close resemblance of Adichie, who tells us this much in her previous works. In her TED talk, “The Danger of the Single Story,” Adichie recalls the curious attitudes of American roommates toward her “African” identity. In Things Around My Neck, Adichie introduces us to her own personal focus on the “black hair” issue. In a recent public lecture at the University of Flint,

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Michigan, Adichie acknowledged that she formulated some aspects of Ifemelu’s feminist demeanor and characterization from her own ­experiences. In Americanah, to lead and relay the novel’s most provocative discourses and thematic objectives, Adichie constructs the character Ifemelu, the smart, pretty, articulate, and assertive African immigrant who becomes a writer. Significantly, Adichie names Ifemelu’s identity throughout the book as a “non-American Black,” rather than the normative identity that is used to refer to African immigrants—“African”; Ifemelu refers to her fellow African immigrants in the same way. Adichie’s choice of employing ­“blackness” as the identity to interrogate new African immigrants’ experiences in the US is deliberate. She uses the framework of blackness to underscore racialism in the African immigrant experience while also negotiating relations between historic African Diasporas and new ­African Diasporas. Her choice suggests that race is indeed about skin color; and that Africans are black too. Perhaps Adichie’s bold, and even blunt, introduction of race in this way on the first and second pages of the novel has caused African Americans to have an ambivalent initial response to the novel. On the first page, Ifemelu observes in Princeton “Black locals so light skinned with lank hair . . . . inappropriate for African hair-braiding.” On page 2, Ifemelu introduces her blog, titled rather awkwardly as ­“Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (or those formerly known as Negroes).” If in these first few pages Adichie suggests that the novel will underscore a glaring divide between her own identity (ambiguous at this point) and a distinct “Othering” of African Americans as “American Blacks” and “Negroes”; in subsequent chapters Ifemelu’s attitude substantially changes. After all, in the opening chapters we do sense that Ifemelu is an “African immigrant” not a “Non-American Black.” For example, on page 140 in attending for the first time a meeting of a college African Student Association, Ifemelu “sensed renewal in America for the first time—among Kenyans, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Congolese, Senegalese . . . with whom she did not have to explain herself.” Yet, as the novel’s plot unravels, Ifemelu adds the phrase “by the Non-American Black” to her blog title. We also see Ifemelu’s identity transformations—and perhaps identity transition back and forth as her locations change. ­Subsequent blogs would thus be named “Understanding America for the Non-­American Black” and “Why Dark-Skinned Black Women—Both ­A merican and Non-American—Love Barack Obama.” Moreover, on page 222,

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Ifemelu writes, “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black Baby!” Ifemelu—Adichie—makes her boldest statement about the African immigrant identity in relation to race and identity in this last blog when she elaborates, “When you make the choice to come to America, you become black” (page 222). In the blog Ifemelu proceeds to advise new African Diasporas from Africa and the Caribbean of the reality that American society sees them as black and not Jamaican, Caribbean, or necessarily African. She continues that despite the fact that new Diasporas may not have experienced race in the same way that historic African Diasporas had, new African Diasporas will all eventually “Have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes” (page 222). Blogging about Race The depiction of Ifemelu’s character as a writer of a blog whose blog topic is race provides one reason why Adichie’s novel should be seen to be an overtly political discourse beyond merely an equally fascinating work of literary aesthetics. The blog’s many postings reveal Adichie’s role as a writer who is also a public intellectual who has something to say about race in the US and the world from an African perspective. After only a few years in the US as an African immigrant, through her blog, Ifemelu even entitles herself to assume the “experience and identity” of an African American who lectures white Americans on race. As an example page 326 of Ifemelu’s blog speaks to whites (she calls them “American Non-Black’s”), saying, “If an American Black person is telling you about an experience about being black . . . try listening . . . hear what is being said.” Ifemelu asserts elsewhere in the novel that doing so will broach the possibilities of friendship, connection, and understanding. In “What Academics Mean by White Privilege Or Yes It Sucks to Be Poor and White but Try Being Poor and Non-White,” Ifemelu argues that poor whites may not have “class privilege,” but they certainly have “race privilege.” In the blog subtitled “American Tribalism,” Adichie proclaims through Ifemelu that tribalism is alive and well in the US, which is expressed in four iterations: class, ideology, region, and race. She argues that there is a ladder of racial hierarchy, with white on top and black on the bottom. Elsewhere, in “A Few Explanations of What Things Really Mean,” Ifemelu’s blog continues: “Of all their tribalisms, Americans are most uncomfortable with Race.”

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In “Traveling While Black,” Adichie (Ifemelu) speaks of being “recognizably black” where—though there are all kinds of blacks, including people of color, in Puerto Rico and Brazil—she speaks, through a friend, about how the whole world treats you differently when you “look Black”. . . sub-Saharan African. No political trend is left undiscussed in Ifemelu’s blogs, as she blogs overtly about President Obama’s historic victory as the first black president in “Obama Can Win Only if He Remains the Magic Negro.” In this posting, she describes what she sees as an acceptable black profile for whites in America. She writes, “Obama as the Black man who is eternally wise and kind who never reacts under great suffering nor gets angry or becomes threatening . . . and always forgives all kinds of ‘racist shit’” (page 322). Americanah’s blogs reflect Adichie’s own resolve to reveal African immigrants’ growing identification with the racial experience in the US. In a blog tactlessly entitled “Why Are the Darkest, Drabbest Parts of American Cities Full of American Blacks?”, she has Ifemelu respond to her African American Yale professor boyfriend. Blaine appeals to her to substantiate her blog discourses with more rigorous academic research; Ifemelu retorts, “I don’t want to explain; I want to observe.” As such, on the one hand, the blogs serve to present the African voice, observations, and perspectives on race that have normally been crowded out by the African American voice. In this regard, Ifemelu speaks to white and African Americans. On the other hand, through the blog, Adichie uses the blogs to educate fellow African immigrants about the importance and significance of race to their lives in America as new African Diasporas. This is especially the message for an older generation of African immigrants who are parents to a more youthful cohort of American-born Africans who experience race more commonly with historic African Americans. We see this complexity through the character of Dike, and in the blog named “Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,” Ifemelu’s estranged childhood sweetheart, Obinze, who has returned to Nigeria from Britain after being deported, says that the blog astonished him. The blog posts seemed “so American” and “alien” to him. This was “Americanah.” In her blogs, Ifemelu observes that Americans find excuses to subvert discussions about race by fobbing it off as complex, really about “culture,” about “class” and being “urban” and poor and—not wanting to provoke “racially charged” situations—avoid dialogue about race altogether. The blog posts of “Raceteenth,” prominent throughout the novel, serve to have such a dialogue.

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Engaging and Negotiating Race through Historic Diasporas: Blaine and African Americans vs. American Africans Adichie’s novel is one that appropriately does not shy away from speaking bluntly about the intra-racial and interethnic convergences, divergences, tensions, reconciliations, intersections, and interrelations among Africans and African Americans in the US. Who is Black, African American, or African is a recurrent prism through which Adichie engages this topic. Blaine, Ifemelu’s “American Black” boyfriend, is “African American,” while Dike, Ifemelu’s teenage nephew who came to the US from ­Nigeria as an infant, is “American African.” The difference between the two demonstrates for the reader the way that Adichie distinguishes historic and new African Diasporas in terms of their experiences with race in the US. On page 141, Adichie introduces the character of Kofi, whose parents came from Ghana when Kofi was two years old. Despite the fact that Kofi has lived in the US for much of his life, Wambui, described as a Kenyan university student in the US, says of Kofi, “There’s no American nonsense in that house. He eats Ghanaian food and goes back to Ghana every year. We call people like Kofi American African, not African American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.” Adichie uses Ifemelu, her main character, to reflect on the range of black identities in this respect, when she considers the identity of her nephew, who is also—by Wambui’s definitional standards—an American African. “Will he indeed choose such an identity, or will the identity be chosen for him?” (page 142). Adichie reserves her most introspective analysis of the African/AfricanAmerican relationship for the love-story plot about Ifemelu and Blaine described by Adichie as a complicated love that Ifemelu has for Blaine because while admiring and learning from him about race and the African American identity, she also resented him. Blaine represented African Americans’ “racial” righteousness, she thought. He expected her to feel (about race) what she did not know how to feel. She felt a step removed from the things he believed in and the things he knew she was eager to play catch up with. Yet Ifemelu reveals that she was also fascinated by Blaine’s sense of righteousness. Though many times irritated by Blaine’s ultra-progressiveness and what she thought were his demands for an unrealistic “racial purity,” she could see that at the same time Blaine’s love would actually be a solution for racial misunderstanding in America. In one scene, Blaine’s pretentious sister, Shan, would say of Ifemelu, “Because she’s African; she’s writing from the outside. She doesn’t really

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feel all the stuff she’s writing about. . . [I]f she were African American, she’d just be labeled angry and shunned.” Blaine would come to Ifemelu’s defense at what she perceived to be Shan’s attack on her identity. He said, “A lot of this is relatively recent. Black and pan-African identities were actually strong in the early nineteenth century.” Adichie uses this scene to reveal the African perspective on race in this context and show how Africans sometimes feel excluded by African Americans around the discussion about race. In silently responding to Shan, Ifemelu conceded that race was not embroidered in the fabric of the African-born’s history—nor had it been etched in her soul. But later on she mused in her blog, “Is Obama Anything But Black?” despite his first generation Kenyan ­ancestry. “Race is not biology, race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. It’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have.” As if thinking forward to President Obama’s address in July 2013 regarding the Trayvon Martin verdict, Ifemelu would add, “If a random Black guy commits a crime today, Barack Obama could be stopped and questioned for fitting the profile . . . for having the profile of ‘Black Man’” (page 339). Here, I believe that Adichie seems to be suggesting that Africans experience race in America because they also fit the recognizable phenotype and marginalization of “blackness” with all its social construction in negativity by white state and society. In the end, despite a three-year, live-in love affair with Blaine, Ifemelu does not sustain the relationship with him. In one of her frequent flashbacks, we see on page seven how the relationship with Blaine is seen as a prism for her entire immigrant life in America. In rationalizing the breakup due to her desire to leave him to return home to Nigeria despite her career successes in the US, Adichie tells us that Ifemelu reflects upon the reality of layer after layer of discontent that had settled in her and formed a mass that now propelled her to return home. Ifemelu recalls that the relationship with Blaine “Was like being content in a house, but always looking out of the window” (page 7). Engaging and Negotiating Race through White Americans: Curt, Kimberly, Laura, and Kelsey If at all, the initial liberal print newspaper responses to Adichie’s ­Americanah were far from glowing—if not subtly hostile at times—some blame must be attributed to the acclaimed Nigerian writer’s stinging critique of white liberals in the novel. New York Times book reviewer Janet Maslin describes Americanah’s plot as “Feeling like an excuse for the venting of opinions

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that carry far more conviction than the storytelling does.” Maslin tauntingly continues, “But if she has any real passion for the people in ‘Americanah,’ she’s done far too good a job of keeping it to herself”1 While Maslin’s review did have many insightful and positive things to say about Adichie’s novel, the review did not objectively pick up on Adichie’s critical exposition of the way that Africans view Euro ­Americans’ paternalistic portrayal, representation, and engagement with modern Africa and Africans. To relay this justifiable critique—not opinion, as Maslin calls it—Adichie uses characters such as Curt, Kimberly, Laura, and Kelsey. In her own literary analysis, little different from Dambisa Moyo’s honest social science analysis in Dead Aid (2009), Adichie is both humorous while stunningly authentic in her dismay at Western paternalism toward Africa and Africans in the many scenes where she caricatures the liberal Africanist who portends to have a mission to help (Africans say “save”) Africans emerge out of their presumably dismal circumstance. First there is Curt, whom Adichie characterizes as a wealthy, ­handsome, blonde—though attractively “pale”—young white male with disguised privilege. He is seen as the “colorblind” liberal type who ­paradoxically, Ifemelu suspects, loves her because of her “exotic ­African” looks. Ifemelu wonders whether she is Curt’s opportunity to explore the “Other.” ­Kimberly, Curt’s sister and Ifemelu’s wealthy, blonde boss whose children Taylor and Morgan she babysits, refers to all black women as ­“beautiful”. Kimberly loves Ifemelu’s “rich African, multi-cultural” identity—­ presumably relayed by her name alone and acknowledged pretentiously within five minutes of meeting Ifemelu. To further illustrate the White liberal Africanist identity, Adichie describes Kimberly and her husband, Don, who run a charity to help poor children in Malawi. Adichie endearingly describes Kimberly as a repeated “apologist” with a sense of selfindulgence: “As if apologies could sooth over all the scalloped surfaces of the world,” Ifemelu wonders. Yet, despite Adichie’s subtle caricature of Kimberly, Ifemelu likes her because she is “Obi Ocha”—a clean heart, a Mother Theresa of sorts. Adichie saves her most stinging critique of the White liberal for Laura, Kimberly’s sister, and Kelsey, the white customer at Mariana’s African Hair-braiding Salon, who are characters that she presents pejoratively. We are told that Ifemelu disliked Laura from the first day she met her. She saw Laura as dangerously opinionated and ignorant. She didn’t understand why Laura looked up so much information about Nigeria, asking her about 419 scams (Nigerian corruption transactions in the US and UK), telling her how much Nigerians sent back home to their poor destitute relatives,

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and reminding her of how lucky she ought to feel for being able to leave Nigeria for the United States. Ifemelu mused, “It was aggressive, unaffectionate interest, strange indeed to pay so much attention to something (Nigeria) you didn’t like” (page 165–166). Laura and Ifemelu would spar when Laura indicated that Ifemelu was a “privileged” African who ought to be grateful for immigrating and living the “American Dream.” Ifemelu silently thought, “As a babysitter?” In the numerous paternalistic stories that she would tell Ifemelu about Africans, Laura once mentioned a female Ugandan doctor that she had gone to school with who she stated hadn’t gotten along with African Americans because she (the Ugandan doctor) didn’t have “their issues”! By way of explanation and defense of the African American, Ifemelu retorted, “Maybe when the African American’s father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan’s father was running for parliament.” At that reply, now with intense dislike for Laura’s paternalism, Ifemelu adds, “Your analysis of these things is simplistic. . . . You need to understand more history” (page 170–171). Laura was offended by Ifemelu’s response and scoffed haughtily, clearly feeling insulted by Ifemelu: “Let me go and find some history books to read, then” (page 171). With the character of Kelsey, Adichie gives the reader a physical profile of the White liberal Africanist when she describes Kelsey as coming into Mariana’s African Braiding Salon to get “Bo Derek” braids done. Ignoring Mariana’s explicit, affirmative “Yes” to Kelsey’s question about whether women vote in Senegal, Kelsey says presumptuously to Mariana, “You couldn’t ever have this business in your country. . . . [I]sn’t it wonderful that you get to come to the US . . and now your kids have a better life” (page 191). Through Ifemelu, Adichie tells us that she recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like non-Americans from the developing world to do so. Such liberals expected you to be silent and grateful for being in the US, and always reminded you of how much better America was than wherever you had come from. Kelsey and Ifemelu’s different interpretations of the book presumably about Africa—A Bend in the Sun—represented again a telling instance of Adichie’s critique of her perception of White liberals’ engagement with and attitudes toward Africa and Africans. Responding to Kelsey, who viewed the book as the epitomic read for understanding contemporary, modern Africa, Ifemelu is critical of the book: “It’s not about Africa at all. . . . [I]t’s about an Indian man’s yearning for Europe . . . and contempt for Africa” (page 192). With each accusing each other of a subjective

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reading of the book, both women—Kelsey, white liberal and Ifemelu, non-American black—would part ways disliking each other intensely. In an age of celebrity aid with the superstar personalities of celebrities such as Bono, Angelina Jolie, and Madonna, having become prominent and taken seriously as global spokespersons for “African development and poverty reduction,” Adichie’s critique of what some have referred to as the “new liberal imperialism” is fair game. African immigrants, especially in colleges and universities in the US, are pervaded by this postmodern style of representing and stigmatizing their African identities as monolithically “poor, brute, and needy” of Western benevolence and humanitarian intervention. The attitude, which is reflected in the everyday interactions of many whites’ first engagement with African immigrants, spuriously dominates media and advertising campaigns like Gwyneth Paltrow’s “I am African: Keep A Child Alive” campaign combatting AIDS in Africa. While recognizing campaigns and attitudes such as these as “the clean heart” of white liberalism; Adichie’s Americanah seems to also warn Americans who engage in the “fix Africa industry” of the “danger of a single story” when engaging in “Africa” discourses (See Adichie’s TED video). Structural Racism, Transnationalism, Postcolonialism, and Globalization: Obinze’s Storyline Maslin’s New York Times review of Adichie’s novel also claims that its love story orientation by the end in Part IV is disappointing. Of course, this is Maslin’s opinion. Great literature has been written around love stories. Besides, love and relationships are bedrock themes of Adichie’s previous blockbusters such as Half of a Yellow Sun. Thus, there is little surprise that Americanah features this now well-known style of Adichie’s writing to present important political discourses through the everyday experiences that are told through relationships of love. Be that as it may, while Adichie’s featuring of the character Obinze— Ifemelu’s childhood sweetheart with whom she rekindles an estranged relationship by the end of the novel—seemed to fulfill the telling of a perhaps “Nollywood-style” love story for Americanah; I read the plot that unraveled between the two characters as doing so much more for the reader. Indeed, Adichie uses the character of Obinze to reveal a story about contemporary, “postmodern” Nigerian life immersed in Lagos City, a symbol of dynamic, agent-centric culture, as well as to reveal a case study of the intersections among local, national, and global capitalist

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inequality and asymmetrical transnationalism all at once. Here is where we find the story of structural racism and Africa’s place in it. After Americanah’s first chapter that introduces the familiar (for the US and Western reader)—set in Princeton, New Jersey—very quickly by her second chapter, Adichie plunges the reader into the unfamiliar (for the US and Western reader) by immersing us into modern-day Lagos City, where she begins to play out the complex character of Obinze, a wealthy young Nigerian entrepreneur when we first meet him. Obinze receives Ifemelu’s email on his Blackberry, in his chauffeur-driven Range Rover, stuck in “Lagos Traffic” on “Third Mainland Bridge” en-route to his Dolphin Estate in Lekki, Victoria Island, Lagos’s upper-middle-class suburb. Obinze’s character is presented as the prototype of the new young Nigerian elite who dominate the terrain of African cities like Lagos, Abuja, Nairobi, Accra, Dakar, and Johannesburg. Obinze made business deals in fifty “millions”—of naira—these days. He recalls his first trip to the US at the airport in Atlanta, when he was asked how much money he had. When Obinze replied that he didn’t have much, the US immigration officer disbelievingly replied, “I see Nigerians like you declaring thousands and thousands of dollars all the time.” Nonetheless, brilliantly, Adichie uses Obinze to tell us more than just a story about Lagos City’s wealthy and extravagant society and culture. We see also the way that class and inequality play out in the city, as well as a complicated, non-monolithic—and thus pluralistic—agency and representation of Nigeria’s young elite. This is a different picture from the simplistic “corrupt, Nigerian elite” stereotype that is oftentimes used in describing contemporary Nigeria and Nigerians. For example, Obinze gives “change” to Lagos’ street beggars to the admonishment of his working-class chauffeur (referred to simply as “driver” by Nigerians), who thinks beggars are lazy. As well, unlike his wife, Kosi—immersed in the evangelical church syndrome and yet who lauds authority and psychological abuse at their “house-girl” (maid and paid baby-sitter in Nigeria), Marie, for bringing condoms to the house—Obinze supports and sympathizes with Marie. In Marie’s defense, Obinze argues that Marie is a mere child herself, who has been “raped” by previous male employers. It is Obinze who takes the feminist and class position that Marie has a right to protect herself by bringing condoms to her current job in the event that the same thing happens in Kosi and Obinze’s household. Through Obinze, this way, we are shown Adichie’s critical gaze of the contemporary social and cultural scene in Lagos. We see class inequality, the vagaries of “vulgar capitalism,” and complex social mores that play

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out among Nigeria’s emergent new elite. We see how Obinze’s wife, Kosi, was worried about a house-girl that it would never even occur to Obinze to seduce. With Obinze we see a progressive consciousness on the issue, “But Lagos could do this to a woman married to a young and wealthy man. . . . [H]e knew how easy it was to slip into paranoia about house-girls, about secretaries, about ‘Lagos Girls,’ those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole” (page 34). Significantly as well, we see that Obinze was not always wealthy, which is true for most Nigerians who are assigned variable rich and/or middle class rankings today. Through Americanah, Adichie relays the fluid class formation that occurs in modern Nigeria, an oil-producing emergent economy and developing world country. What’s more, and more importantly to underscore the novel’s core thesis, as we see through Obinze’s own trajectories from childhood to manhood, that wealth creation, class, and inequality for modern Africans is transnational, Diasporic, and global. As teenagers, both Obinze and Ifemelu see “abroad”—the West in the US or the UK—as the direction to steer toward to succeed in life. Though denied a visa to do postgraduate studies in the US, through his mother, a university professor, Obinze is able to travel—albeit illegally—to the UK. Like Ifemelu, who is sexually exploited by a white tennis coach in the US because she needed a job, African immigrant life for Obinze in the UK is equally as hazardous. When Obinze receives Ifemelu’s email after so many years of silence, he is cleaning toilets in the UK for three pounds an hour. We are told that Obinze stared at the “mound of shit” that he had to clean and reflected on responding to Ifemelu’s email, thinking to himself, “What was there to tell her, that he cleaned toilets, and only just today encountered a curled turd?” (page 240). More so through Obinze’s character than Ifemelu’s, Adichie shows us the hazardous, unequal, racialized life of the African immigrant in London. An example is when Obinze is forced to assume someone else’s citizenship identity, whose name is Vincent; thereafter, Obinze thus becomes “Vinny Boy,” the paternalistic endearment given to him by his British boss. Another example is told through Obinze’s struggle to legalize his stay in the UK. To get British citizenship, Obinze is forced to illegally marry a biracial Angolan woman who has EU citizenship through ­Portugal. However, Obinze is constantly duped by the Angolan brokers of the fake marriage. The most humiliating blow to Obinze in the UK is his detention for not having the legal papers to stay and work in the UK, and his subsequent and consequential deportation. Underscoring again global inequality skewed by race, Adichie narrates for us how Obinze and many

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African deportees embody this experience, “There he was, in handcuffs, being led through the hall of Manchester airport, and in the coolness and din of that airport, men and women and children, travelers and cleaners and security guards, watched him, wondering what evil he had done. He kept his gaze on a tall white woman hurrying ahead, hair flying behind her, knapsack hunched on her back. She would not understand his story— why he was now walking through the airport with metal clamped around his wrists, because people like her did not approach travel with anxiety about visas” (page 282). As such, if by the end of Adichie’s Americanah, we see Obinze driving a German-engineered BMW in Lagos and his rekindling the long lost love of Ifemelu, who in Lagos no longer blogs about “Race”—“I feel like I got off the plane in Lagos and stopped being black”, she wrote—we see however not just a reconciliation of a long-lost love affair. Rather, we see a young African returnee from the African Diaspora to the continent refusing marginalization and destitution despite his exclusion from the Western global hubs of capital and opportunity where he imagined he would succeed. Instead, we see Obinze embodying his mother’s strong moral values, talent, and skill in raising him single-handedly to make a successful life for himself in his country, Nigeria. Likewise, for the global structural racism theme that Americanah reveals for its readers through Obinze’s storyline, it is indeed Ifemelu, not Obinze, who has the last word. Ifemelu’s own return from the US back to Nigeria tells a similar trajectory of Africans defying global exclusion and racial representation in the West. That is to say, in underscoring and illustrating the contours of Obinze’s complicated traverse of poverty and wealth in the context of transnationalism, globalization, and structural racialism, Ifemelu’s blog about the Nigerpolitan Club reveals the paradoxes of such a state of global post-coloniality for Africa. Ifemelu writes in her new Nigerian blog, where she now discourses about “life,” she says: Lagos has never been, will never be, and has never aspired to be like New York, or anywhere else for that matter. Lagos has always been indisputably itself, but you would not know this at the meeting of the Nigerpolitan Club, a group of young returnees who gather every week to moan about the many ways that Lagos is not like New York as though Lagos had ever been close to being like New York. Full disclosure: I’m one of them. Most of us have come back to make money in Nigeria, to start businesses, to seek government contracts and contacts. Others have come with dreams in their pockets and a hunger to change the country; but we spend all our time complaining about Nigeria. . . . If your cook cannot make the perfect panini . . . is it because Nigeria is not a nation of sandwich eating people . . . and Nigeria is not a nation of people with food allergies, not a nation of picky eaters for whom food is about distinctions

African Perspectives on Race in the African Diaspora   83 and separations. It is a nation of people who eat beef and chicken and cow skin and intestines and dried fish in a single bowl of soup . . . and it’s called assorted . . . and so get over yourselves and realize that the way of life here is just that, assorted (page 421).

Here Adichie is rejecting Nigerians’ embodying of the “Afropolitan worldview” which has become a prominent way to identify by many African young people working and living in cities around the globe. Representing African diaspora middle classes who straddle transnationally between the West and the continent, Afropolitans do not claim to belong to a single geography, but feel at home in many cities around the world. While on the one hand, Afropolitans have been celebrated for their agency in contributing to and innovating globalization by interjecting the imprint of “Africanity” all over the world. On the other hand, Afropolitanism has been criticized for its Western appropriation and orientation, its commodification and commercialization of the African identity, its elitism among wealthy Africans, and its bypassing of historic, core African values, contexts, and worldviews. In critiquing the constant complaining about Lagos’ lacking compared to New York City by the Nigerian diaspora elite in Lagos, Adichie shies away from the Afropolitan orientation, which she could so easily have embraced, and instead encourages a refreshing sense of postcolonial Nigerian national context and grounding for her novel’s characters. Conclusion Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah may be her best book yet, if only because it speaks to a global reach, addresses universal themes, and with the topic of race, distinctively and honestly engages in a discourse about the state of contemporary public affairs through an eloquently versed literary lens. To minimize the brilliance and thus importance of Adichie’s message in Americanah will be to only reinforce for Africans the notion put forth once by Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina in “How To Write About Africa” (Granta, Discussion 48, Winter, 2005) that Africa and Africans can only be written about and thus understood in stereotypical, pathological, simplistic, reductive, and romanticized ways. Defying this notion, Adichie’s novel gives voice to Africans living in today’s global era, who engage and make sense of race and their African identity, while straddling globalization and transnationality. As well, while Americanah is a story of the global African diaspora in its reference to migration to, from, and within the African continent to elucidate the lived experiences of both “global Africans” but also the

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world in Africa where the interweaving of worlds reveals an African “way of belonging to the world”—whether one resides on the continent or not (Mbembe, 2006). For a change, nevertheless, this African diaspora story is told from the ideological perspective and positioning of Adichie’s main characters’ African continental perspectival and contextual localities; in the case of Americanah these locales are the cities of Lagos-Abuja-Enugu in Nigeria. Even more significantly in speaking to the novel’s value is Adichie’s bold engagement as an African with the dialogue of race and racialization in terms of how Africans see it in shaping and framing the contemporary international and cultural political economy in which they live. For centuries since the late 1800s, through the ideology and various practices of Pan-Africanism, Africans in the Continent and African descendants in the Diaspora have engaged with the subject of race and the African identity, particularly through the dialogues of the political thought and practices of luminous scholars such as Edward Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, James Aggrey, Leopold Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, and Julius Nyerere, to name a few of the giants in this dialogue.2 Yet, even among these classical writers, differences emerged over their conceptualizations of race and Africa. While African Diasporas in the West had been earlier than Africans on the Continent urbanized, as a result sharing much of a common culture and language with their white counterparts, Continental Africans at the time were mainly rural based, with very different cultures and languages (Forster et al., 2000). Pan-African discourses about race demonstrated convergent themes due to shared experiences because both Africans in the Continent and their descendants in the Diaspora were all victims of oppression by Western enslavement, imperialism, and colonialism (Forster et al., 2000). To see old African Diasporas as descendants of enslavement and new African Diasporas in the West as descendants of imperialism is to underscore the reality that the global racialization process happened to Africans and African descendants as single peoples. Its legacy, therefore, as Adichie points out in the current novel, is still universally experienced by the posterity of the victims of that Euro-Africa encounter. Be that as it may, through the characters Blaine and his sister, Shan, in the scene where Shan treats Ifemelu like an African outsider regarding her (Ifemelu’s) dialogue about race, and thereby underlies the dividing line between continental-born Africans in the Diaspora and historic African Diasporas, Adichie’s novel compels us to think about and assess what the

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status of this intra-racial dialogue is today. As it occurred in the heyday of Pan-Africanism, does the infusion of Africans’ distinct ontology of culture and transnationalism into the African Diaspora—manifest in language, style of life, tradition, values, artistic aesthetics, and voluntary migrations in a global era—alter their engagement with and experiencing of race? One response to this question could be discerned from the views of Kenyan diaspora Oscar-winning actress, Lupita Nyong’o, who after reading the novel, will now take a dual acting/producing role in the film adaptation of Americanah. Nyong’o resonated with the novel this way, “Page after page I was struck by (protagonists) Ifemelu and Obinze’s stories, whose experiences as African immigrants are so specific and also so imminently relatable . . . It is a thrilling challenge to tell a truly international story so full of love, humor and heart”3. Adichie’s novel Americanah presents the distinctive ways that ­Africans in the African Diasporas experience race revealing the array of such encounters in the host countries that Africans live in. Nonetheless, revealing also the nuance and complexity of this experience, Adichie’s novel demonstrates that new African Diasporas may experience race differently at one time, and similarly at another, compared to historic Diasporas. Using the assertive, articulate, dynamic, feminist voice and standpoint of Adichie’s main character, Ifemelu, Adichie’s core lesson in Americanah is that when they do experience race and come to terms with its meaning, it is important that their hosts listen to their views. Notes 1.

Maslin, Janet (2013) “Braiding Hair and Issues About Race in ‘Americanah’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie” New York Times, May 19, 2013. 2. Peter Forster, Michael Hitchcock and Francis Lyimo (2000), Race and Ethnicity in East Africa, St Martin’s Press. 3. Palace, Steve, 2014 “Lupita Nyong’o To Star In And Produce ‘Americanah’ in The Hollywood News, June 14. http://www.thehollywoodnews.com/2014/06/06/lupitanyongo-to-star-in-and-produce-americanah/

6 Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family: Ideological and Methodological Contestations Theresa Rajack-Talley Latrica Best

Introduction Researchers in the United States are increasingly using the feminization of poverty perspective to explain the disproportionate representation of women and African American female–headed households who live in poverty. However, there are ongoing debates regarding what constitutes a feminization of poverty, and whether there is adequate evidence of its existence in underrepresented populations. In this article, we examine the cultural bases of the concept and the extent to which the interrelated effects of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class are employed in the ideological understanding and methodological framework used to study Black single female–headed households. Specifically, we implore statistical reports, and interrogate the literatures on poverty, family, and gender to illustrate concerns with the widespread use of the feminization of poverty perspective that infer that more Black families are poor, simply because of the increase in single female–headed households. The origination of the term feminization of poverty can be traced to a study conducted by Dr. Diane Pearce, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin and the former director of the Women and Poverty 87

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Project of Wider Opportunities for Women. The study examined gender trends and poverty rates in the United States between the 1950s and the mid-1970s and found that there was a dramatic change in the composition of the US population that were poor (Pearce 1978). ­During that period, women over the age of sixteen were increasingly found below the poverty line, and larger percentages of the American poor were female–headed households. Pearce used the term feminization of poverty to refer to her findings and linked women’s poverty to the lack of government ­support for an increasing population of divorced and single women. These findings were later substantiated by other ­researchers who examined poverty for the same time period using census data ­(McLanahan and Kelly 1999; McLanahan, Sorenson, and Watson 1989). The researchers noted, however, that this pattern was based on a relative and not an absolute decline in women’s economic status—and, in fact, poverty rates for women and men were on the decline. Nevertheless, by the mid1980s, it was believed that almost half of all the poor in the US were living in families headed by women in various stages of their life cycle. In addition, intergenerational poverty was observed in households headed by women with early childbearing experiences and low levels of education. The feminization of poverty hypothesis raised by Pearce and others drew attention to women’s poverty and ignited two major discourses on possible causes of women’s poverty. One school of thought focused on the social and economic disadvantage that women experience in the workplace (McLanahan and Kelly 1999) and supported the proverbial “glass ceiling” claim that women make less money than men, even within the same job category. Since women were generally earning less than men, then it was more likely that single women with families would be poorer than single men with families. Within this perspective, conditions of poverty arise because of the economic disadvantages faced by women and are heightened for single female–headed households. The other perspective insinuated that women’s poverty was a result of changes in family structures away from the nuclear two-parent model to single female–headed households (Ezeala-Harrison 2010). These arguments were based on the observations that female–headed households were forming increasingly larger percentages of the American poor even though more women were entering the workforce. In fact, as more women attempted to become economically independent by entering the job market, the more they were being drawn to “pauperization and dependence on welfare” (McLanahan and Kelly 1999).

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The past and current data do show that single female–headed households are more likely to experience poverty. Both structural and cultural causations are implied in the debates but are not clearly defined in the feminization of poverty perspective. The major critique that emerges is that the feminization of poverty fails to recognize that women have different histories, live in different circumstances, and have different cultural experiences and social relations. Moreover, these differences affect how and why women experience poverty. As a result, the feminization of poverty approach is accused of blurring racial, ethnic, social class, immigration status, and other demographic differences of poor women, and single female–headed households (Ezeala-Harrison 2010; Elmelecha and Lu 2004; Lin and Harris 2008). Thus, the universal adoption of the feminization of poverty perspective for all groups of women, and in particular Black and minority women, raises several concerns and some confusion. The Racial Feminization of Poverty Concern about the importance of race in the feminization of poverty perspective is linked to the founding of the concept. Some researchers believe that the focus on women’s poverty arose, in part, because of the plight of White women in the US (Brenner 1987; Rodgers 1987, 1990), and thus contains inherent racial and class biases. It was felt that linking poverty to family demographics was a way to make poverty experienced by White women more visible. The argument is made that prior to the 1960s, most White families in the US were headed by husbands or other males, and that the increase in divorce rates among Whites was the lead cause for the increase of poor White single female–headed households. On the other hand, in the same period more Black married couples with families fell below the poverty line, compared to White married couples with families. According to Brenner (1987), “while many White women are only a husband away from poverty, many minority women with a husband are already poor” (446). The question then arises, are households poor because they are single female–headed, or are they poor because racism and sexism disproportionately impacts single female–headed Black and minority households? Currently, a disproportionate number of African-Americans live below the poverty line within the Black-White groupings. Poverty rates for minority women are higher than that of Whites overall, as well as that of minority men (US Census Data 2010). In other words, the majority of the poor in the US are Black and women, many of whom are single

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female–headed households with children The Black female–headed household is not a new social phenomenon in the African American community. For example, in the late 1950s a little less than 30 percent of poor Blacks lived in female-headed households; this increased to a little more than 50 percent in the 1960s and by the late 1970s approximately 67 percent of all the Black poor were living in households headed by single women (Peterson 1987). In 1984 approximately one half of all African-American household heads were women, with a steady increase in the percentage of poor Black female–headed families (Brenner 1987; Rodgers 1987, 1990). This trend continued as the US Census data for 2010 showed that 12.3 percent of the US population or 40 million people were African Americans, and one out of every three Black households (29 percent) were headed by single women, the highest percentage of female-headed households in the US Only 30 percent of all Blacks were married and nearly half of the women were never married. While women in all racial and ethnic groups experience higher rates of poverty than Whites, the poverty rates are particularly high for Blacks where more than one in four, or 25.6 percent, is poor.1 African American women continue to head households and experience high rates of poverty. Moreover, this trend has expanded and now includes working women of color particularly Latinas, Asian Americans, and immigrant women living in the US Poverty

Chart 1: Families with Female Heads of Households, Percentage below the Poverty Levels 1973–2011. Source: US Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic   Supplements (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2010/tables.html).

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rates for Blacks and Hispanics remain above the national average, with the highest rates for families headed by single women (see chart below). There are many reasons why poverty rates among Black female–headed households, as well as Hispanic female–headed households, remain consistently higher than White female–headed households. The most dominant factor however, is the difference in total income earned per household. The level of poverty or wealth in a household is reliant on the number of income earners, total income, and the number of dependents living in the home. On the other hand, total income and number of individuals employed in any household is affected by gender, race/ethnic, and immigrations status differences that impacts wages and labor market employment2 (Elmelecha and Lu 2004; Fidel 2010). When examined together the total income earned, regardless of family structures, is substantially disproportionate in favor of Whites compared to Black and minority families. Overall, White women who are full-time wage and salary workers earn a median weekly income of about 82 percent that of their male counterparts. In comparison, the median earnings for both Black and Hispanic women are 91 percent of those of their male cohorts. The earnings for White and Black men in 2011 were about the same as in 1979, after adjusting for inflation. This means that within race, Black women compare favorably in social capital and employment rates with black men. However, across the major race and ethnic categories in the United States, earnings growth has been sharpest for White women, outpacing that of Black and Hispanic women. For example, between 1979 and 2011, earnings for White women rose by 32 percent, compared with an increase of 22 percent for Black women and 14 percent for Hispanic women.3 It is therefore not surprising that for Black women who are heads of their households and are in the labor market, their annual incomes on average are lower than that of working White women who also head households.4 Moreover, they persistently experience higher rates of poverty compared to White female–headed and Black male–headed households. Palmer (1983) defined this occurrence as the racial feminization of poverty, and Ezeala-Harrison (2010) described it as the Black feminization of poverty. The Black feminization of poverty theory supports the ideas of the original feminization of poverty beliefs, and links poverty in Black households to single motherhood and “unstable traditional family units.” White women do have greater likelihoods of marriage, lower levels of single motherhood, and are less likely to be poor than any of the minority-status women (Elmelecha and Lu 2004). Consequently, the Black feminization of poverty places emphasis on marital status, and the impact of high divorce

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and separation rates associated with White women’s economic situations are juxtaposed to Black women. There are no comparisons of employment opportunities, incomes earned, or economic support variations between the two groups. Implicit in this argument is the assumption that women of all races and classes share a common experience in the labor market, and/or following divorce or widowhood. The economic impact of race, ethnicity, and class, though strikingly different across groups of women and their familial experiences, are not addressed. As a result, the Black feminization of poverty standpoint does not explain why poverty rates are lower for White single female–headed households than for Black single female–headed households, with the same or fewer numbers of children. Moreover, it does not respond to why Black women cannot earn an adequate wage to support themselves and their families, with or without a mate. Prior studies have found that White single female–headed households do have higher levels of economic independence than many Black women. This is because, in addition to receiving public assistance, they get financial support from White males who earn more than Black males. Compared to White men, Black men have higher unemployment, are underpaid, and are more likely to not have access to steady income because of racial and class disadvantages (Staples 1974, 1999). Consequently, Black men are dissuaded from forming families and face higher rates of poverty than White men. However, both the Black feminization of poverty and the feminization of poverty perspectives ignore the poverty of men, particularly the plight of poor Black and minority men. This is also important in understanding the poverty in Black female–headed households with children by Black men. By and large, the total income for Black and Hispanic single female–headed households with children is almost half of that of their White equivalent. Today, most of the Black poor in the US still live in families headed by single women, and the rate of poverty for these families has not changed significantly over the years. It is important to note, however, that 70 ­percent of all Black families are not headed by single females. Similarly, not all Black single female–headed households are poor; close to 50 percent do not fall below the poverty line and are not part of an oppressed class (see 2010 US Census Data on Poverty) Moreover, more Black women falling into poverty does not equate to more Black and minority men getting out of poverty and/or the Black masculinization of wealth. Racial and ethnic groups are not homogenous but are divided by social classes stratified on the basis of income, education, and occupation.

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Structural Barriers and Struggles The differences in social class within the Black grouping rouses an additional hypothesis as to why individuals fall into poverty. It is suggested that poverty is not a result of race and ethnic differences but is because of low incomes and the inability to accumulate wealth. From this stance, the Black feminization of poverty is seen as a direct result of the structural effects of intra-class differences (Gimenez 1999; Staples 1974, 1999). Racism and sexism are believed to be correlates rather than determinates of poverty and serve to intensify the economic impact on the poor and working class groupings. It is therefore women’s social class location that makes them more or less likely to experience poverty. According to the American dream, all individuals can use their own initiatives and move up in the social class hierarchy and change their life course (Sidel 2000). Failure is assumed to be due to some weakness of character and value deviance, such as getting married before giving birth. Accordingly, it is personal faults that prevent certain groups, including some Black women, from climbing the social class ladder and consequently keep their households wallowing in poverty. It is easy for people to buy into this logic because education is widely believed to be a powerful mechanism to better economic opportunities for women and poor families, and is available to all groups. However, when this theoretical argument was tested with young African American females, incidences of poverty did not change with educational attainment (Casserly 1998). Negative stereotypes undermine the agency of Black working women, who negotiate gender and racial discrimination every day in the workplace, because they must feed, clothe, educate, and provide shelter for their families. The feminization of poverty glides over the struggle that Black and working women must endure to acquire and maintain wealth, an indicator of financial well-being over time. For example, Black women were disproportionately affected by the most recent economic recession. They were more likely to experience foreclosures and fall victims to predatory lending practices than their White counterparts (Nembhard and Marsh 2012; Rivera et al. 2008). These practices, coupled with other adverse circumstances, result in an inability to amass wealth and assets that could be dispersed in the household and across subsequent generations. In fact, statistics show that Black women have little to no wealth prior to age fifty, with best estimates of single Black women having a median net wealth of $100, whereas never-married Black women had no median net wealth. Approximately half of all single Black women have zero or

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negative wealth (Chang and Lui 2010; Nembhard and Marsh 2012). In other words, there are a substantial number of households where there is significantly more debt than assets. However, discussions surrounding the feminization of poverty in single female–headed households do not always consider the ramifications of the inability for Black women to potentially build wealth. Moreover, a closer examination of where in the life course cumulative disadvantage for this group starts, and how this gap persists over time, is important in determining persistent poverty in Black single female–headed households (DiPrete and Eirich 2006; O’Rand 1996). The utilization of negative racial and gender stereotypes to rationalize and blame impoverished women and their families for their deplorable living conditions and other social ills is not uncommon. According to Sidel (2000), stereotyping and stigmatization of the poor, including the Black poor, are often used by the state to repeal policies that support aid to families and dependent children. Moreover, Collins (1990) advocates that by linking persistent poverty in the Black family to value transmission in families, including single-female parenting, diverts attention from the political and economic inequality that affects Black women and their children. Furthermore, it blames African Americans for their own victimization. Lin and Harris (2008) suggest that because of “the color of the debates,” poverty among Blacks and minorities should be reframed to emphasize the cumulative effects of systematic discrimination across generations. They suggest that there be a closer alignment of racial and ethnic disparities, social class, and gender with poverty. Cultural Biases Regardless of the theory or explanation offered in the feminization of poverty perspectives, there are embedded assumptions and suppositions about marital status and family types as causations of poverty. Such cultural biases are pathological in nature. This includes the assumption that poverty in single female–headed households is the result of “unfortunate” domestic circumstances that are symptomatic of family breakdown, and which places children in worse living conditions compared to “complete” families. The implicit danger of this idea is that gender inequality and poverty are both reduced to cultural practices (Moore 1994, 1996). This idea is observed in the literature that focuses on the structure and practices of Black families, particularly in low-income and poor households, and that almost always demonizes single female–headed households, portraying them as welfare dependents with promiscuous behavior (Brenner 1987;

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Rodgers 1987, 1990). Further, the statistics on the number of children born out of wedlock and women on public assistance are used to support the popular stereotypes. While these arguments may sound convincing, they are inconclusive, misleading, and value laden in their premise. Rajack-Talley and Talley (2005) conducted a socio-historical analysis of the literature on the African American and Afro-Caribbean family to determine the extent to which value orientations are implicit in the research and influence conclusions about the Black family. They found that there are value-laden assumptions in family studies and that these have varying and indeterminate summations about the relationship between functionality and family structures. More specifically, their research found two important Eurocentric assumptions in the Black family literature that links Black family structures and practices to poverty in a similar fashion as the feminization of poverty perspective. First, the assumption is made that the White middle-class nuclear family is the norm. From this perspective, it is assumed first that the non-nuclear structure of the Black family is caused by an inability to conform to White middle-class family norms and results in the predominance of single Black female–headed households, and is strongly associated with the cause of poverty (Frazier 1966; Moynihan 1965). Within this perspective, cultural differences are taken as indices of dysfunction; the greater the “deviance” of the Black family from the White family structural norm, the greater the level of dysfunction of the family and the more likely to cause poverty (Frazier 1966; Moynihan 1965; Rainwater 1966). The second ideological assumption common to both the Black family literature and the feminization of poverty perspective is that single female–headed households are deficient and poor because they lack a male breadwinner. The myth of the male breadwinner in Black families has long since been challenged, and the idea of a male breadwinner in many is almost mythical (Franklin 1997; Jewell 2003). In fact, Black women, women of color, and immigrant women in the US have always worked and continue to do so to support families in two-parent households, as well as single female–headed households. In other words, women play central roles in their household economies and in the economic development of their countries. They work because sometimes they are the sole supporter of their families, or because the money earned from a male partner in a two-parent household is inadequate to support the family (Rajack-Talley and Talley 2005). Today, it is increasingly more difficult for working women to make enough to buy adequate food and pay rent, utility, and medical bills. Despite the brave attempts

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of women, especially in single-parent households, to provide for their families, they are continuously seen as deviant and the cause of poverty in the Black community because they do not conform to some “ideal family “structure. In general, the feminization of poverty perspective does not adequately address the interrelated and cumulative effect of various forms of discrimination and incidences of poverty in Black single female–headed households. In most instances, the conceptualization of the phenomenon is influenced by existing ideologies, cultural biases, and stereotypes of poor women and families, and Blacks in general. Assumptions are made about causation that are often fettered by the boundaries of Eurocentrism and are steeped in moral judgments and value orientations. Consequently, the broad acceptance of the feminization of poverty approach defies a holistic understanding of poverty and poses methodological problems in researching poverty in different types of households, particularly Black female–headed households. Methodological Challenges In spite of the ideological critiques of the feminization of poverty perspective, it is still widely accepted and adopted as a methodological framework to research women and poverty across the globe. Several issues arise in the universal application of the concept. Specific to Black female–headed households in the US, we have identified four main research inconsistencies and/or challenges. First, the conclusions drawn from feminization of poverty studies are out of sync with the data and experiences of Black and minority women. Specific to the US, the methodological problems associated with the feminization of poverty studies stem from the dominant use of information collected from census data and poverty studies, both of which have empirical weaknesses. The survey data collected in population census do not always provide the type of gender-disaggregated information at a micro level that allows for crossnational or time series comparisons. In addition, survey analysis does not always look within groups and take into consideration the significant effect that race/­ethnicity and class can have on women’s poverty. On the other hand, poverty studies rely heavily on material measures of human deprivation such as income-expenditure indicators. Researchers believe that this approach negates the importance of social indicators including gendered power relations, livelihood strategies, and socioeconomic inequalities to incidences of poverty (Kabeer 1994;

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Chant 2003, 2006). The Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Poverty in Rural America posits in its 19993 report that many of the explanations and policies on poverty failed and recommended that gender, race, and ethnicity be explicitly integrated into explanations of, and solutions to, poverty. Second, since cultural biases influence the focus of studies, they also determine the indices used. Katz (1989), in examining the ideas and assumptions that have historically shaped public policy on poverty in the US, found that how we think and talk about poverty emerges from a mix of ideology and politics alongside structural components. Similarly, how we measure poverty is based on assumptions about causations influenced by cultural biases. For instance, in the early 1960s in the midst of economic growth and wealth, poverty amongst a larger number of Americans was explained using an adaptation of Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” notion derived from his ethnographic studies of poor Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Though the focus at that time was on rural America, attention quickly shifted to the Black community and Moynihan’s report. One of the features identified by Moynihan as the fundamental problem in the Black community was family structure. The perception of the problem influenced the way poverty in the Black community was studied. Thus, Moynihan adopted several indices to demonstrate the demise of poor Blacks such as divorce rates, the number of illegitimate births, and the number of single female–headed households. The third problem that arises in the application of the feminization of poverty argument is that the focus is on a group among the poor and not poverty inside a group (Medeiros and Costa, 2006: pp. 4).5 Since the focus of a study affects what is measured, then researching the gender of the poor versus poverty in female-headed households can result in two distinct analyses. For example, the approach that examines whether there is an over-representation of female-headed households in poverty (a group among the poor) will find that there is no clear pattern that links poverty and household headship (Buvinic and Gupta 1994; Medeiros and Costa 2006). In the other approach, the measure of female-headed poverty will not change even if the number of poor female–headed households decreased because of a decline in the number of female-headed households in the population at large. Regardless of the criteria used to look at poverty, female-headed households would be the poorest (Sen 1999), but there are empirical and definitional issues in the focus of the analyses and subsequent conclusions.

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Fourth, most of the time the summations reached using the feminization of poverty perspective are based on macro-level analyses of gendered poverty. Critiques have warned that the use of macro-level indicators do not adequately reveal gender-specific forms of deprivation that occur in the home (Chant 1997; Elmelech and Lu 2004; Kabeer 1996; Marcoux 1998). Consequently, feminization of poverty research rarely captures gender hierarchies and gender inequity in the distribution of resources and power in nuclear families. It is critiqued for its homogenizing tendencies that ignore intra-household inequality and poverty within patriarchal family structures (Chant 1997; Jewell 2003; Muthwa 1993; Rajack 1996); nor does it allow for the examination of poverty in single male–headed households. A focus on intra-household analysis challenges the assumptions of the feminization of poverty perspective that bases its analyses on the Western model of an altruistic nuclear family with a male breadwinner, as the only economically and socially functional unit. Moreover, intra-household inequalities are inextricably linked with extra-household social factors that shape or hinder opportunities for women and young girls at the societal level. As a result, while there is little doubt that female- headed households face a unique set of constraints, these represent only a fraction of what affects women as a whole. The trajectories leading to women’s poverty in both types of households are important in understanding women’s poverty and poverty in households, but they are not fully incorporated as units of analysis in the feminization of poverty research approaches. Many of the issues arising stem from the fact that the feminization of poverty research approach adopts quantitative measures and is directed at macro-level analyses. This approach is convenient because it showcases single female–headed households that are visible, easily identifiable in the statistics, and deemed appropriate for political agendas focused on poverty alleviation for women as a targeted group. Such measures, however, do not address the larger issues of structural and systemic gender equity and its relation to poverty (Jackson 1996; Kabeer 1997; Molyneux 2001; Pankhurst 2002; Razavi 1999; World Bank 1994, 2002), nor do they deal with systematic racism in the US (Brenner 1987; Casserly1998; Rodgers 1987, 1990; Staples 1985) This is not to say that in the US and elsewhere there is not a proliferation of female-headed households de jure or de facto6 and that high numbers of African-American single female–headed households dominate poverty statistics. However, both statistical reports and poverty studies, in general, cannot conclusively say whether there is an over-representation of female-headed households among poor households.

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Conclusions The discourse on the feminization of poverty has served to highlight the view that women and single female–headed households are more vulnerable to transitory and chronic poverty. However, households do not necessarily experience poverty because they are headed by women. Further, while female-headed households are more likely to experience poverty, it is not always the case. In order to get a handle on the gender dimensions of poverty, it is necessary to understand how discrimination looks in the context of scarcity and the interrelatedness of various forms of prejudices. Black women and women of color in the US are generally poorer than some men and other women because their race/ethnicity, social class, and immigration status limit their range of endowments and exchange entitlements, as well as their ability to translate labor into proper wages, translate income into choice, and build personal and family wealth. As such, the main critiques of the feminization of poverty are its presumption of uniformity of causation of poverty among all women, its overemphasis on female-headed households, and the hidden cultural biases that are not made clear in its arguments. Capturing the lived experiences of women is important in understanding the gendered impact of poverty on women, on single female–headed households and in poor households of all types. Accordingly, gender, race/ethnicity, social class, and family structures are not separate and competing explanations for poverty, but rather it is their interrelatedness that produces conditions of poverty for Blacks and minority women and their families. In general, the feminization of poverty framework is not well developed conceptually or methodologically. There is a lack of compelling data to link causes of poverty to households headed by single females, nor can its claim that female-headed households are the poorest of the poor be substantiated. This is not to say that gender discrimination and the disadvantaged status of women in North America is incontestable. A more plausible explanation is that single female–headed households are poor because the women who head these households experience simultaneous gender, class, race/ ethnicity, immigration status, and other forms of discrimination. Vulnerability within this context is more closely associated with social forces of discrimination, rather than on family traits and cultural values. As a result, the call is made by many critiques to move beyond the blind adoption of universal paradigms that insert cultural explanations with Eurocentric bias norms and instead try and capture separately the extent, the plethora of determinants, and the nature of poverty for specific groups of women.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

This does not include Native American female–headed households, which experienced the highest level of poverty – Census Data 2010. Labor market factors include type of employment, hours of work, level of education, and job turnover. US Department of Labor, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 2012, Report 1038. White women are more likely to be native born, have high levels of education, and benefit more from labor force participation. In the 1980s and 1990s poverty studies in the US were interested on the gender of the poor (see Bradshaw, 2002 and Pressman, 2002). De jure where women maintain their households alone, while de facto refers to households with men who are unable or unwilling to work.

References Bradshaw, Sarah. 2002. Gendered Poverties and Power Relation: Looking Inside Communities and Households (Managua: ICD/Embajada de Holanda/Puntos de Encuentro). Brenner, Johanna. 1987. “Feminist Political Discourse: Radical versus Liberal Approaches to the Feminization of Poverty and Comparable Worth,” in Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 447–465. Buvinic, Mayra and Geeta Rao Gupta. 1994. Targeting Poor Woman-Headed Households, in Developing Countries: Views on a Policy Dilemma. Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women. Casserly, Catherine. 1998. African- American Women and Poverty: Can Education Alone Change The Status Quo? NY: Garland Publishing, Inc. Chang, Mariko Lin and Meizhu Lui. 2010. “Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future” In Insight Center for Community Economic Development. Chant, Sylvia. 1995. “Single-Parent Families: Choice or Constraint? The Formation of FemaleHeaded Households in Mexican Shanty Towns,” in Development and Change, 16, 635–56. Chant, Sylvia. 1997. “Women-Headed Households: Poorest of the Poor? Perspectives from Mexico, Costa Rica and the Philippines.” IDS Bulletin, 28:3, pp. 26–48. Chant, Sylvia. 2003. “Female Household Headship and the Feminization of Poverty,” in Gender Institute Working Paper Series, 9, London School of Economics. Chant, Sylvia. 2006. “Re-thinking the “feminization of poverty” in Relation to Aggregate Gender Indices” In Journal of Human Development. 7(2). pp. 201–220. DiPrete, Thomas A., and Gregory M. Eirich. 2006. “Cumulative Advantage as a Mechanism for Inequality: A Review of Theoretical and Empirical Developments,” in Annual Review of Sociology, 271–297. Elmelecha Yuval and Hsien-Hen Lu. 2004. “Race, Ethnicity and the Gender Gap.” In Social Science Research, vol. 33, Issue 1, pp. 158–182. Ezeala-Harrison, Fidel. 2010. “Black Feminization of Poverty: Evidence from the U.S. Cross-Regional Data.” In The Journal of Developing Areas, 44.1, pp. 149–166. Franklin, Donna L. 1997. Ensuring Inequality: The Structural Transformation of the African American Family. New York: Oxford University Press. Frazier, Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1966. (First Printed in 1939). Gimenez, Martha. 1999. “The Feminization of Poverty: Myth or Reality?” Critical Sociology, 25: 336. Jackson, Cecile. 1996. “Rescuing Gender from the Poverty Trap,” in World Development, 24: 3, pp. 489–504.

Feminization of Poverty and the Black Family   101 Jewell, K. Sue. 2003. Survival of the African American Family: The Institutional Impact of U.S. Social Policy. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Kabeer, Naila. 1994. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. London: Verso. Kabeer, Naila. 1997. “Editorial, Tactics and Trade Offs: Revisiting the Links Between Gender and Poverty.” IDS Bulletin, 28:3, 1–25. Katz, Michael. 1989. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. NY: Pantheon Books. Lin Chih Ann and David R. Harris (eds). 2008. The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist. NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Marcoux, Alain. 1998. “The Feminization of Poverty: Claims, Facts, and Data Needs.” In Population and Development Review, 24(1): 131–139. Mederios Marcelo and Joana Costa. 2006. “Poverty among Women in Latin America: Feminization or Over-Representation?” Working Paper No. 20. Report Published by the International Poverty Center of the United Nations Development Programme. McLanahan, Sara and Erin Kelly. 1999. “Feminization of Poverty: Past and Future.” MacArthur Research Network. Working Paper. McLanahan Sara, Annemette Sorenson and Dorothy Watson. 1989. “Sex Differences in Poverty 150–1980.” Signs: Journal of Women In Culture and Society, 15(11): 102–22. Molyneux, Maxine. 2001. Women’s Movements in International Perspective: Latin America and Beyond. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Moore, Henrietta. 1994. Is there a crisis in the family? Geneva: World Summit for Social Development, Occasional Paper No. 3. Moore, Henrietta. 1996. “Mothering and Social Responsibilities in a Cross-cultural Perspective,” in Silva, E. (Ed.) Good Enough Mothering? Feminist Perspectives on Lone Motherhood. London: Routledge. Moynihan, Danielle. P. 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research. Muthwa, Sibongile. 1993. “Household Survival, Urban Poverty and Female Household Headship in Soweto: Some Key Issues for Further Policy Research.” Paper presented in seminar series ‘The Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries: Women, Colonialism and Commonwealth.’ Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, November 19. Nembhard, Jessica Gordon and Kris Marsh. 2012. “Wealth Affirming Policies for Women of Color” In The Review of Black Political Economy, 39(3): 353–360. O’Rand, Angela, M. O. 1996. “The Precious and the Precocious: Understanding Cumulative Disadvantage and Cumulative Advantage over the Life Course,” in The Gerontologist 36.2: 230–238. Palmer, Phyllis. 1983. “The Racial Feminization of Poverty: Women of Color as Portents of the Future for all Women,” in Women Studies Quarterly, vol. 11, No. 3. Pankhust, Helen. 2002. “Passing the Buck? Money Literacy and Alternatives to Savings and Credit Schemes,” in Gender and Development, 10:3, 10–21. Pearce, Diana. 1978. “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work and Welfare,” in Urban and Social Change Review vol. 11 (February): 28–36. Pearce, Diana. 1983. “The Feminization of Ghetto Poverty,” in Society (21 ), (November/ December): 70–74. Peterson, Janice. 1987. “The Feminization of Poverty,” in Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 21, No. 1. Pressman, Steven. 2002. “Feminist Explanation of Poverty.” Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 37. No. 2, pp. 353–361.

102   The Black Family and Society Rajack, Theresa. A. 1996. “Neither Peasant Nor Proletariat: The Paradox of Development for Caribbean Women and Men in Peasant Households. Unpublished Dissertation, KY: University of Kentucky. Rajack-Talley Theresa and Clarence Talley. 2005. “Eurocentrism and the Afro-Caribbean Family,” in The GRIOT, vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring). Rainwater, Lee. 1966. “The Crucible of Identity: The Lower Class Negro Family,” in Daedalus 95, 268–264. Razvi, Shahra. 1999. “Gendered Poverty and Well-being: Introduction,” in Development and Change, 30:3, pp. 409–33. Rodgers, Harrell R. 1987. “Black Americans and the Feminization of poverty: The Intervening Effects of Unemployment,” in Journal of Black Studies, vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 402–417. Rodgers, Harrell R. 1990. Poor Women, Poor Families: The Economic Plight of America’s Female-Headed Households. NY: M.E. Sharp Inc. Rivera, A, Cotto-Escalera, B, Desai, A, Huezo, J, and D. Muhammad. 2008. “Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008.” Boston: United for a Fair Economy. Retrieved July 21, 2013 from http://www.faireconomy.org/files/StateOfDream_01_16_08_Web.pdf. Rural Poverty Series. 1993. Persistent poverty in Rural America: Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Rural Poverty. Boulder: Westview Press. Sen, Gita. 1999. “Engendering Poverty Alleviation: Challenges and Opportunities,” in Development and Change. 30:3, 685–92. Sidel, Ruth. 2000. “The enemy within: The Demonization of Poor Women,” in Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 27(1), 73–84. Staples, Robert. 1974. “The Black Family Revisited: A Review and a Preview,” in Journal of Social and Behavioral Sciences 20 (Spring), pp. 65–78. Staples, Robert. 1999. The Black Family: Essays and Studies. Boston: Wasdsworth Publishing Company. World Bank. 1994. Enhancing Women’s Participation in Economic Development. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank. 2002. Integrating Gender into the World Bank’s Work. Washington, DC: World Bank.

7 “It’s Gonna Be Some Drama!”: A Content Analysis of HBCUs on BET’s College Hill Siobhan Smith

1. Introduction One of the most important institutions in African American history is the Historically Black College or University, also known as the HBCU (Williams and Ashley, xvi; 1). These institutions were originally opened in reaction to newly freed African Americans’ desire for literacy and other freedoms (Williams and Ashley xxiv, 3; 52). Many HBCUs are now known for their achievements in sending their students to business and professional schools. In addition, they provide students with higher-educational opportunities, though these same students might have been rejected by other institutions. These schools also give African American students the chance to learn more about their cultural roots (e.g., Mbajekwe, 8; Williams and Ashley, 141). One way that the mainstream public comes to learn about HBCUs is through the media. For example, movies such as Drumline and television shows such as A Different World provided their viewers with ­entertaining— and often informative—perspectives of HBCUs. Unfortunately, as some HBCU defenders have argued, the public is often not privy to positive achievements of HBCUs but might be more likely to hear about negative situations involving them (e.g., Gasman, 3; Mbajekwe, 21). Despite these 103

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tensions, Reality TV World Staff (para. 3, 5) stated that one reality television show, College Hill, aired by Black Entertainment Television (BET), appeared to have the goal of presenting the unique aspects of HBCU life—for instance, how HBCUs differ from ­Traditionally White Institutions (TWIs), how HBCU students negotiate diversity issues, and authentic social and academic situations at HBCUs. However, some viewers (e.g., Native Son, para. 2) and scholars (Parrott-Sheffer, 207) argued that College Hill fell short, relying and focusing on familiar and negative stereotypes to present the majority African American casts as (re)presentations of HBCUs, to the detriment of the reputation of these institutions. For example, some HBCU administrators and scholars complained that the program overlooked the academic strengths of the HBCU to emphasize situations that appeared less authentic than those found in fictionalized programming (e.g., Parrott-Sheffer, 211). The media, television in particular, plays an important role as the cultural storyteller: many people who do not possess firsthand knowledge of a particular racial group such as African Americans may heavily rely on TV to provide them with information about this group of people (e.g., Entman and Rojecki 4; Greenberg, Mastro and Brand, 333; Matabane and Merritt, 330). In the specific context of College Hill, viewers and HBCU constituents argued that not only were the institutions being portrayed negatively, but African American cast members as well (e.g., Dix, Gibbs, and Bannister, para. 12, 15–16; Leger, para. 12; Native Son, para. 11). Research supports that possibility that some audience members regard the program as a reliable source concerning African Americans and HBCUs. Though textual analyses of programs featuring HBCUs have focused on the presentation of these institutions (Gray, 93; Parrott-Sheffer, 207) as well as the portrayals of African Americans in these programs (ParrottSheffer, 207), there has yet to be an analysis that produces quantifiable data that allows for in-depth exploration of African American stereotypes presented by a particular program. Therefore, this study utilizes content analysis to examine the portrayals of HBCUs as informed by the literature regarding HBCU mission statements. 2. Prototypes and Exemplars: Theoretical Background It is possible that because some people have little or no experience with African Americans or HBCUs, they have not developed prototypes or exemplars regarding either. This possibility might influence how some audiences might respond to media portrayals featuring HBCUs. To explain, a prototype consists of average features of a particular concept/object that

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are used to categorize new objects (Ross & Matkin, 205); on the other hand, an exemplar is a specific example with which one has actually had experience (Fiske & Taylor, 94). To provide examples of prototypes and exemplars, one might encounter an African American woman who is aggressive and hot tempered and recognize the abstract prototype of the angry African American woman. By contrast, because of her possible lack of resemblance to other African American women one might encounter, Condoleezza Rice, the sixty-sixth United States secretary of state, illustrates an instance of an exemplar. There is evidence to suggest that people categorize—utilizing prototypes and exemplars—simultaneously, implying that people need both in order to organize the information they constantly encounter. Understanding these concepts is important to the current study because in many cases it is possible that because people have little or no experience with African Americans or HBCUs, they have not developed prototypes or exemplars regarding either. The possible lack of prototype or exemplar development of many people regarding HBCUs and African Americans speaks to the importance of their mediated portrayals. 3. Literature Review 3a. HBCUs: A Brief History A total of 105 HBCUs exist in twenty of the fifty states, primarily in the South, in addition to Washington, DC, and the Virgin Islands (e.g., Dilworth, 127). Many of the arguments for the continued existence of the HBCU are summarized in Augusta-Dupar’s (1) content analysis of the mission and vision statements of ten HBCUs. This study, which provided the coding categories for the current research project, explored how committed HBCUs were to academically and socially bettering their students, with the assumption that the mission and vision statements of these universities provide clear goals and emphases of the institutions. Drawing from this content analysis, social characteristics were “[striving] to educate the whole individual, [offering] programs designed to meet the unique needs of Black students, and [commitment] to providing academic excellence and leadership qualities” (Augusta-Dupar, 52). Augusta-Dupar also found evidence for academic characteristics (72), which involve creating a classroom environment that nourishes and fosters its students as they pursue higher education. The mission statements also revealed that commitment to providing academic excellence was the most referenced social characteristic.

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3b. HBCU Portrayals and College Hill One way in which HBCUs have been brought to mainstream attention was through entertaining media. Television programs such as A Different World and College Hill, in addition to movies such as School Daze and Drumline, have acquired fans and critical acclaim. These media can be informative as well, as some audiences have used these portrayals to enlighten their own understandings of HBCU life. Unfortunately, some scholars argue the academic achievements of HBCUs are often ignored by higher-education sources, as it is often scandals involving failures in leadership and mishandling of financial aid that lure the attention of the higher-education media and more general media outlets (e.g., Gasman, 3; Mbajekwe, 21; Parrott-Sheffer, 216; Stewart, 31). Recent studies of televised programs that feature HBCUs suggest that the programs do either a wonderful job of portraying African Americans, as in the case of A Different World (Gray, 93), or a terribly poor one, as in the case of College Hill (Parrott-Sheffer, 207). Originally aired in ­January 2004, College Hill was produced by Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and executive produced by Edmonds’s ex-wife, Tracey Edmonds. The majority of the cast members are African American. The first season of College Hill was taped at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with the second, third, and fourth seasons at Langston University, Virginia State University (VSU), and University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), respectively. The sixth season returned to its original focus on college students, though it was filmed generally in Atlanta, and not at a particular HBCU. Filmed in South Beach, Florida, the seventh season featured only two cast members (out of eight) who attended HBCUs. In addition, the series is a ratings draw: The first two episodes of the sixth season drew a record 1.2 million viewers, (Reuters, para. 1). Currently, BET has not announced that it will air another season of the show. Responses to College Hill appear to generate from four major sources: cast members of the show, students of the HBCUs featured in the series, college administrators and alumni of the HBCUs featured in the series, and viewers of the show. Cast members tend to take positive views. For instance, Idesha Browne (of the University of the Virgin Islands, also known as UVI, Season 4) insisted that some of the sexually charged episodes that aired early on in the show’s run were actually shown in order to get ratings. “The show isn’t about UVI,” she argues. “It’s about eight students who live in a house and attend UVI” (Leger, “‘This is TV’” section, para. 4). Browne’s comment suggests the focus of the show

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was never about the HBCU, but the cast members. However, not all cast members relate positive responses. For instance, Jon Walker (of Langston University, Season 2) explained that being on the show caused him to temporarily lose his focus on school (Irving, para. 25). Speaking directly to the issue of cast members acting as (re)presentations of HBCUs, other students at Southern felt some of the female cast members were not good role models because they encouraged viewers to have stereotypical viewers about women at Southern (Dix et al., para. 12). Comparable reactions came from students at UVI, who were concerned that people would associate the university with the outlandish behavior presented on the show. While some college staff members seem to have accepted the show’s less-than-flattering portrayals of its students as just the nature of the beast (“if everyone on the show was ‘goody-goody,’ no one would watch it”; Dix et al., para. 13), the majority of administrators and alumni worried about how College Hill was representing the featured HBCUs. For instance, alumni (and parents) at UVI reacted similarly, questioning why school administrators—and BET—would allow negative and stereotypical images of African Americans to air. Ultimately, these constituents reacted in such a negative manner to the show that Ragster was advised to apologize to the university and the Virgin Islands (Leger, para. 4). Just as College Hill gave UVI a boost in popularity, it also increased the amount of attention that prospective students gave to Langston University (Irving, para. 28). In spite of the possible positive influence the show might have had on the featured HBCUs’ enrollments, Ragster stated plans to meet with the presidents of other College Hill settings and Viacom executives to discuss African American images in the media (Leger, para. 11). The outcome of this meeting, or if it was ever held, is unknown to the researcher. Like cast members and HBCU constituents, viewers have also expressed their responses to the show. These opinions display a range of thoughts and emotions. For an example of a negative response, consider blogger Native Son’s post titled “BET: College Hill Has gone too Damn Far!!!” While there has been some popular press coverage of the show, there was quite a notable blogging community devoted to College Hill, and later seasons of the show encouraged viewers to visit the show’s blogs, hosted by BET. Blogs such as these are important because they represent an example of interactivity between media and viewers/users. As Blood writes, “By writing a few lines each day, weblog editors begin to redefine media as a public, participatory endeavor” (10). In addition, because bloggers often respond to various cultural artifacts, bloggers’ reactions to

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media texts can be as valuable as other cultural critics’ opinions. Native Son refers to BET as “Bootleg Entertainment Television” (para. 2), stating that as a graduate of an HBCU, he cannot understand why the presidents of the HBCUs featured in the series allowed the schools to appear. In his opinion, the program did little but reproduce negative stereotypes of African Americans, which damaged the universities’ reputations. Native Son’s argument for a more balanced portrayal of HBCU life refers to general tension surrounding BET’s programming. Others responded to Native Son’s post by stating the show focused only on students who displayed sexual promiscuity and were involved in dramatic situations, versus those students who focused on their educations. Despite the anger toward portrayals of African Americans on the series, a lone respondent to Native Son’s thread, named A college student, insists that College Hill is indeed airing a true representation of HBCU life: “As a student of college in this day and age, College Hill is exactly like it is no changes. . . . The Real World isn’t no better so it isn’t a race thing cause I’m black and I watch [The] [R]eal [W]orld and see the same stuff” (comment 19). Strikingly, this response also includes an argument that the show focuses on social life because the show’s target audience includes students, not parents. Though this respondent is alone in his/her insistence that the show does not display any portrayals that The Real World does not, this response bolsters Robert Johnson’s argument that BET should be held no more socially responsible for its programming than similar networks, such as MTV. In summary, whether the responses are from cast members of the show, HBCU students, or other constituents such as administrators and viewers of the show, College Hill inspires a range of responses. In spite of the popular responses to the program, little scholarly research has focused specifically on College Hill, though one textual analysis has been conducted (Parrott-Sheffer, 207). He points out that starting with The Cosby Show and ending with College Hill, only three television shows have portrayed HBCUs (The Cosby Show, A Different World, and College Hill), suggesting that the broader academic and social goals of HBCUs are hard to reconcile with the stereotype of ignorant African Americans. Parrott-Sheffer charges College Hill with boring, predictable, and stereotypical portrayals of African American cast members: “The characterization of the cast provides a cursory glimpse of the values the media associate with HBCUs and those who attend them. What emerges seems to be a simplistic, one-dimensional, and sensational rendering of

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Black colleges” (211). Parrott-Sheffer maintains that instead of focusing on the cultural importance of the HBCU, the program spends more time presenting the cast in racy and sensational situations and in a stereotypical manner. This statement reflects a seeming break between the image and mission goals of the HBCU (Augusta-Dupar, 47) and the portrayals of the institution and its students. In addition, Parrott-Sheffer (211) argues that the situations that occur on College Hill are more fictionalized than many scripted programs—evoking the lyrics of the program’s closing theme, which declares the show will involve drama. Further, it is possible that HBCUs are only minimally present in the series; for example, HBCUs might only be presented as a backdrop for a few episodes. By contrast, entire episodes might be devoted to the HBCUs. Consequently, though College Hill is set at a particular HBCU, it is of interest to the current study just how often the show’s narrative actually references the institutions. Therefore: RQ1: How often are HBCUs explicitly referenced on College Hill?

As discussed above, Augusta-Dupar’s content analysis of ten mission statements of HBCUs summarized the various justifications for the continued support of HBCUs. In sum, elements regarding social acceptance and support are categorized as social goals (e.g., striving to educate the whole individual; 82) and elements regarding an environment conducive to students’ learning are grouped into the academic goals category (e.g., promoting student self-worth; 72). After determining the number of times HBCUs are referenced by College Hill, this study inquires if these references can indeed be categorized as aspects that are important to the image and goals of HBCUs, as articulated by their mission statements. More specifically, it is logical to discover the frequency of the academic and social goals respectively. Hence: RQ2a: What are the most prevalent academic goals on College Hill? RQ2b: What are the most prevalent social goals on College Hill?

These questions generate interest regarding which type of goal, academic or social (Augusta-Dupar, 72, 82), appears the most often in the show. One of the tensions surrounding the portrayals of HBCUs is the dialectic between academic and social concerns. Several have referred to this struggle (e.g., Leger, para. 12; Native Son, para. 7; Parrott-Sheffer, 220; Ragster, para. 2); one of the show’s executive producers, Tracey Edmonds, stated her happiness about gaining the opportunity to better

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capture the academic side of life on the show, providing more evidence of this tension (Black Entertainment Television, para. 8). In response to this dialectic, RQ3: Are academic goals more prevalent than social goals on College Hill?

In addition to stating that College Hill presents HBCUs and their students in an unbecoming manner, there are academic and popular sources (e.g., Parrott-Sheffer, 207; Taylor, para. 1) who suggest that these negative images, those that would likely contradict the values HBCUs endorse, appear more frequently than those that would illustrate HBCU morals and goals: H1: There will be more anti-goals (references that oppose the mission statement and goals of HBCUs) than those that endorse academic goals and social goals portrayed on College Hill.

After considering these research questions and the literature surrounding televised portrayals of HBCUs, an issue still remained regarding their portrayal. Many HBCU constituents, such as alumni and students, felt College Hill was portraying the featured universities in a negative fashion; more specifically, while much of their concern did originate from the standpoint that the production favored the social life of the cast members rather than their academic endeavors, many felt that the HBCUs were being portrayed negatively in general. Therefore, it is of interest how a viewer might feel the HBCU was portrayed upon completion of an episode. This concern led to the final hypothesis: H2: College Hill will contain more negative references to HBCUs than positive ones.

4. Method 4a. Sample In order to generalize to this specific reality TV show, the sampling unit of the project was each episode of the series. This study focused only on the seasons that are available on DVD as well as centered on a particular HBCU: Season 3, Virginia State University, and Season 4, University of the Virgin Islands. Because the first four seasons focused on particular HBCUs, but only two of these are available, it was appropriate to analyze

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the entire population that is available: thirty episodes. Each episode is approximately twenty minutes long. 4b. Coder Training and Reliability The coders for the project were two undergraduate students, a Pakistani American female and a Caucasian male. These coders were trained for a little over forty-one hours in the use of the coding protocols. During training, the coders discussed decisions as well as revised rules in the codebook with the researcher. The researcher’s coding choices took precedence only in the occurrence of an impasse. During coding, variables that achieved reliability early in the coding process were assessed for drift; variables remained reliable. Reliability for each variable was achieved (of at least α = 0.667; Krippendorff, 241). 4c. Coding: Units of Analysis The shows were coded on three levels: episode, scene, and HBCU reference. The first level was natural: each show was an individual unit. The second level of analysis was the scene. According to Iedema, a scene is a “reconstruct[ed] unit still experienced as being concrete: a place, a moment in time, an action, compact and specific” (188). Scenes are made up of many shots, which are defined as “uncut camera actions” (Iedema, 188). This means the camera angle may change, but the camera movement itself is not moved to a new setting. A scene often ends with a fade to black. In addition, an extreme long shot or long shot of the scenery often begins a scene, to establish the setting. Music changes in the audio track are also cues for scene changes. All of the scenes for each of the episodes were coded. Coders were instructed to provide the identification number of the season, as well as the identification numbers of the episode and the scene. They also provided a brief description of the scene. Unitization was demonstrated by coders being able to reach an acceptable level of intercoder reliability. For Virginia State University, Season 3, the percent agreement of scene selection between the two coders was 91.3 percent. For University of the Virgin Islands, Season 4, the percent agreement of scene selection between the two coders was 93.4 percent. The coding procedures listed below were adjusted as needed during coder training and finalized before the coders began the sample of episodes not used for training. References to HBCUs on College Hill were noted on both the scene and the episode level to explore the portrayals of HBCUs.

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4c1. Scene-level references. The literature regarding the historical significance of HBCUs, particularly Augusta-Dupar’s content analysis of mission statements of ten HBCUs, provided the thematic characteristics of the institutions. Two academic goals (emphasizes the development of Black consciousness and identity and emphasizes the development of Black history, racial pride, and ethnic traditions) were combined to meet the content analytic requirements of mutual exclusivity and exhaustiveness. This was because the descriptions from Augusta-Dupar’s analysis of HBCU mission statements did not clearly explain how these two academic goals, with their shared focus on racial heritage and pride of African Americans, were two separate goals. Each descriptor was previously categorized as an academic or social characteristic (AugustaDupar, 72, 82), and was then categorized as a goal or an anti-goal. A goal is a positive achievement that an institution desires to accomplish because it results in positive outcomes for the HBCU, students, administrators, and/or society at large. By contrast, anti-goals (a term developed uniquely for this project) are negative outcomes that would have detrimental results for the HBCU, students, administrators, and/or society at large. To continue, within the level of the scene, the unit of analysis was the reference to the HBCU. For each scene, the coders first indicated if an explicit reference was made to the HBCU or not (e.g., the scene occurs on campus, focuses on a campus event, includes a faculty member). If so, then they also indicated how the HBCU specifically is being portrayed with regard to each particular reference. Coders were instructed to indicate each reference, and then indicate either the goal or the antigoal that is being enacted for each particular reference in a scene (also indicating if it belonged with an academic categorization or a social categorization as based on Augusta-Dupar’s study, 72, 82). If there were no references made to the university at all, then the coders indicated “X.” The three variables measured achieved acceptable agreement after two independent coding sessions, intermixed with one training meeting. See Table 7.1 for average intercoder reliabilities of HBCU scene-level references. 4c2. Episode-level references. Lastly, the coders indicated, if the HBCU was explicitly referenced in the episode, whether they categorized the entire episode’s overall portrayal of the HBCU as positive (1), neutral (2), or negative (3). If there were no references made to the university at all, then the coders indicated “X.” The two variables measured achieved

“It’s Gonna Be Some Drama!”   113 Table 7.1. Intercoder Reliabilities and 95 Percent Confidence Intervals of HBCU References (Scene Level) α

95% CI

Reference to HBCU

0.95

[0.88, 1.00]

HBCU Reference Number

0.95

[0.88, 1.00]

HBCU Scene Reference Descriptor

0.93

[0.87, 0.97]

perfect agreement (α = 1.000) after two independent coding sessions, intermixed with one training meeting. These variables had to achieve perfect agreement because of the small number of episodes used for training purposes (for Season 3, N = 7, for Season 4, N = 7). 5. Results 5a. Research Question 1: Frequency of HBCU References (Scene Level) Out of the 327 scenes, only 43 (13.1 percent) had a reference to the HBCU. In addition, it was found there were significantly more scenes without references to the HBCUs than those with references to HBCUs, χ2(1, N = 284) = 177.62, p < .001. This finding suggests that the HBCU is not very important to the narrative of the show. This also seems to contradict BET’s goals from the outset to provide viewers with an “absolutely real” (Reality TV World Staff, para. 5) view of the HBCU. Examples of the HBCUs being explicitly referenced during Season 3 include the cast members’ visit to the Mass Communication Department to record a radio public service announcement for the Wrap It Up Campaign, scenes of the homecoming game, and Audrina’s auditions for both BET’s Black College Tour poetry slam and the modeling club. Season 4’s references to the HBCU include Krystal’s on-campus meetings with Dr. Moss after her fight with Vanessa, as well as the on-campus Tramp, which is a celebration of the Islands’ culture. However, the majority of the scenes take place in the house or out in the city where the show was filmed. As stated above, College Hill critics have argued the show needs to provide a fuller portrayal of HBCUs (e.g., Leger, para. 12; Parrott-Sheffer, 220). In support of this critique, Seasons 3 and 4 of the show treat the HBCU as more of a backdrop than an important narrative device. In this respect, the majority of the show quite resembles other docusoaps. As Lowe (para. 1) states, College Hill is similar to other reality programs that

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involve coeds living together in a house that allows for every ­public—and private—moment to be recorded. As mentioned above, much of the show’s narrative takes place in the house proper, or out in the cities where the HBCUs are located. In fact, without the HBCU staging, College Hill’s friendships, fun, and fights resemble those of other programs in the docusoap genre (e.g., College Life, Sorority Life) and movies in which college life plays a major part in the narrative (e.g., Higher Learning). Returning to its more traditional format, Seasons 6 and 7 of College Hill were centered in Atlanta and South Beach, respectively. Though these seasons still featured college-aged students, the focus on the HBCU was no longer apparent. The researcher was unable to find any information as to why this change occurred. Possible factors include desires for BET to maintain a fresh and unique program that would lure and satisfy audiences that could be sold to advertisers, pressures from HBCU constituents to present a positive image of the institutions and their students, and/or a lack of agreements from HBCUs to participate in future seasons. Another possible factor could be that College Hill’s producers and/or BET realized that the HBCU as an institution was ultimately being ignored by the series and felt nothing would be lost by revising the format of the show. To revisit a quote from Idesha Browne, a cast member of Season 4, set at the University of the Virgin Islands, “The show isn’t about UVI. It’s about eight students who live in a house and attend UVI” (Leger, “‘This is TV’” section, para. 4). Browne states, quite firmly, that College Hill is not about the HBCU, but about the students who attend it. 5b. Research Questions 2a and 2b: HBCU References and Goals Research Question 2a asked which of the academic goals was the most prevalent on the show. It was found that of the forty-three explicit references to the HBCU on the scene level, thirty (69.8 percent) were academic goals. (See Table 7.2 for descriptive statistics of the HBCU references on the scene level.) A one-way χ2 analysis revealed there was a significant difference among the three academic goals categories that were referenced by College Hill, χ2(2, N = 30) = 10.40, p < .006. Further, pairwise comparisons via the Marascuilo contrast procedure (Glass and Hopkins, 391) showed that those references of the HBCU promoting student self-worth occurred statistically more frequently than the other references in this category (i.e., promotes positive regard for humankind and emphasizes the development of Black history, racial pride, ethnic traditions/Black consciousness and identity).

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This category was defined as dedication to building students’ characters, as well as encouraging their integrity, respect, and responsibility (Augusta-Dupar, 60). An example of the HBCU promoting student selfworth included Season 4 when Krystal and Vanessa visited Dr. Moss after their explosive fight in the house. During these individual therapy sessions, Dr. Moss encouraged both women to analyze the situation from an objective viewpoint. She also wanted both of them to treat themselves and others with respect, and to accept full responsibility for their actions. Research Question 2b inquired what the most prevalent social goals on College Hill were. It was found that striving to educate the whole individual was the only goal (28.6 percent of academic goals, n = 12) that occurred in this particular category (See Table 7.2). It is defined as providing the student with a holistic environment that helps to develop written and oral communication skills and critical thinking (Augusta-Dupar, 74). Examples of this category being presented on the show included both seasons’ cast members’ efforts to host on-campus events. In both seasons, cast members were required to work closely with campus administration, other students, and of course, each other. In addition, they used media such as fliers and the Internet to plug their event. These instances required cast members to utilize and strengthen their communication and critical thinking skills, another goal of the HBCU. 5c. Research Question 3: HBCUs and the Portrayal of Academic or Social Goals A one-way χ2 analysis revealed there were significantly more academic goals (71.43 percent, n = 30) portrayed on the show than social goals (28.57 percent, n = 12), χ2(1, N = 42) = 7.71, p < .005. Therefore, while the show mostly depicted the cast members interacting independently of the HBCU backdrop, it appears that when the HBCU was referenced on the scene level, most of these references did portray academic concerns. This finding was surprising because based on past literature (e.g., Dix et al., para.1; Leger, para. 1; Parrott-Sheffer, 207), the researcher was expecting to find mostly social aspects presented by the show. Perhaps an explanation for what is occurring is not a lack of references to academic goals, but that the social lives of the cast members do not always involve the goals (academic or social) of the HBCU. It could be the case that viewers remember portions of the narrative that involve social concerns from the perspective of the cast members. Such a viewpoint often includes the more exciting aspects of the show, such as off-campus, rather than

116   The Black Family and Society Table 7.2. Descriptive Statistics of HBCU References (Scene-Level) Academic characteristics Goal

Anti-Goal

n

%

n

%

Promotes positive regard for humankind

12

28.6

Promotes little regard for humankind

0

0.0

Committed to promoting social justice

0

0.0

Disregard for social justice

0

0.0

Promotes student selfworth

16

38.0

Promotes student selfdevaluing

1

100.0

Emphasizes the 2 development of Black history, racial pride, and ethnic traditions/ Black consciousness and identity

4.76

0 Ignores the development of Black history, racial pride, and ethnic traditions/ ignores the development of Black consciousness and identity

0.0

Committed to maintaining a diversity view

0.0

Unconcerned with maintaining a diversity view

0

0.0

0

Social characteristics Goal n

%

Striving to educate the whole individual

12

28.6

Offers programs designed to meet the unique needs of Black students

0

0.0

Anti-Goal n

%

Striving to educate only portions of the individual

0

0.0

Offers little or no programs designed to meet the unique needs of Black students

0

0.0

“It’s Gonna Be Some Drama!”   117 Committed to providing academic excellence and leadership qualities

0

0.0

Disregard for providing academic excellence and leadership qualities

0

0.0

Total

42

100.0

Total

1

100.0

Note: The total of number of HBCU references is N = 43. The total number of goals is n = 42. The total number of anti-goals is n = 1.

on-campus, parties. In fact, one episode of Season 3 is dedicated to the struggle of midterms: the first half depicted the cast members struggling to study, and the second portion showed the cast members enjoying a house party they hosted. By contrast, social goals of HBCUs are often reflected by on-campus parties. However, the portrayals of academic goals seemingly cannot compete either: the cast members of Season 3’s devastation at learning about the personal story of a woman who was battling HIV does not appear to be more salient than a memorable hot-tub event. Because of audience members’ possible forgetting of these rather mild portrayals of academic goals, maybe what the show’s viewers and critics are calling for are more substantive instances of academic goal portrayals, such as an entire episode dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention or education (which was not depicted by either season). However, this begs the question if viewers would find such an episode appealing; such a question is better answered with focus-group discussions. 5d. Hypothesis 1: Goals versus Anti-goals Many sources suggest that anti-goals (i.e., negative portrayals of HBCUs) outnumber the presentation of goals on College Hill. However, the results suggest instances of goals occurred statistically significantly more often than instances of anti-goals. As a result, this hypothesis was rejected. This finding contradicts much of the uproar surrounding the show and what many feel are its negative portrayals of the HBCU and those that attend them. A one-way χ2 revealed that of the 43 references to the HBCU on the level of the scene, 42 were categorized as goals (97.67 percent, n = 42), and only one was considered an anti-goal, (2.33 percent, n = 1), χ2(1, N = 43) = 39.09, p < .001 (See Table 7.2). When HBCUs are explicitly referenced, the show actually reflects the goals of the institutions. For an example of a College Hill detractor, consider Donald Wade, Alumni Federation president at Southern University, who stated that he

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had no desire to see another episode of the show, and that people “who did not understand the ‘Southern tradition and values’ should not have played a part in such an endeavor” (Dix et al., para. 14). Blogger Native Son also vented his frustration regarding negative portrayals of HBCUs and its students. His opinion represents those of many HBCU constituents who felt that BET had failed the Black community by airing a show that portrayed the HBCU in a negative light. In response to the critiques of College Hill presented above, just as portrayals of academic or social goals might not be perceived as salient and substantial as social happenings to viewers, perhaps portrayals of goals by the show are not as easily recalled as portrayals as anti-goals. As previously stated, content analysis is not the proper method for discovering the nuances of other viewers’ reactions to College Hill. 5e. Hypothesis 2: Evaluation of HBCU (Episode Level) As discussed above, much of the sentiments expressed by HBCU constituents originated from the standpoint that the production favored the social life of the cast members rather than their academic endeavors, and many felt that the HBCUs were being portrayed negatively in general. Therefore, though the previous research questions and hypothesis have been concerned with scene-level references (and portrayals of academic and social [anti-] goals), the second hypothesis suggested that College Hill episodes would contain more negative references to HBCUs than positive ones. This analysis considered how the HBCU was evaluated after a viewer watched an entire episode. It was found that out of thirty episodes, eighteen (60 percent) had references to HBCUs. In addition, all eighteen references were considered positive. Therefore, this hypothesis was rejected. Once again, the findings go against what was suggested by the literature. For example, Parrott-Sheffer refers to the program as a “nonstop party of sex and alcohol” (219). This comment refers to the program’s negative portrayals of the HBCU and its students and illustrates a desire to see the HBCU portrayed in a positive manner. Other critiques of the show imply a desire to see a reality show similar to A Different World (e.g., Leger, para. 12; Native Son para. 11). In spite of College Hill’s critiques, it was found that when the show referenced the HBCU on the level of the episode, the references were positive. For instance, in ­Season 3, the viewers were treated to VSU’s homecoming festivities, and in episode 14 of Season 4, the cast members (sans Vanessa) enjoyed a

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UVI-sponsored trip to the beach of Virgin Gorda. In both of these examples, the universities were evaluated positively. This begs the question of why viewers apparently did not judge as such. This could be a result of one or more of the following factors: first, though a little over half of the thirty (60 percent; n = 18) episodes did contain a positive reference to the HBCU, the other twelve (40 percent) did not. This suggests that the material within these episodes is more memorable than those with an HBCU reference. University of the Virgin Islands President Laverne Ragster states this could be the case in her apology: We at UVI hope this momentary blaze of attention [as a result of College Hill] will allow us to illuminate what really goes on here and at so many fine, smaller schools: the learning, the progress, the betterment of all whom we educate and serve. . . . This is what remains and grows, long after saucy television reruns fade from memory. (para. 11)

It could be that the “saucy” (Ragster, para. 11) episodes, those that include the “sex and alcohol” (219) to which Parrott-Sheffer refers, simply have a longer half-life in the memory of viewers. Second, it is also plausible that the coders of this research project were unable to judge the series with the mindset of the viewers who provided many of the critiques of the show. Viewers such as those interviewed by Dix et al. (para. 12) and Leger (para. 14) were often quite familiar with HBCUs as a result of attending one or being an administrator at one; Blogger Native Son, who discussed College Hill with visitors to his webpage, was also an HBCU attendee. As a result of this familiarity, it is plausible that the episodes did not have the same substantive value for these viewers. 6. Conclusions 6a. Summary and Implications for Theory The goal of the study was to examine the portrayals of HBCUs in reality TV program College Hill. It was found when the HBCU was referenced on the level of the episode on College Hill, these references were positive. However, those who critiqued the show, as referenced in this article, argued that the show negatively portrayed HBCUs. There could be several reasons for the dissonance between the negative responses surrounding the show (which influenced the author’s hypotheses) and the findings actually produced by the study. First, it could be that in general, many of the show’s African American viewers are already sensitive to negative portrayals of African Americans in television. As mentioned in Research

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Question 1, College Hill shares similarities with other docusoaps (e.g., Lowe, para. 1). In fact, Reality TV World Staff calls the show “an apparent all-black old-school takeoff of sorts on MTV’s The Real World” (para. 2). While in some respects College Hill is copying the success of shows such as MTV’s College Life, Fraternity Life, and Sorority Life, it was created to meet a need for African American viewers. By airing the show on BET, the network was able to deliver this target audience to advertisers—but also to let African American audiences see a portrayal of one of their most historic institutions, the HBCU. As stated above, the mediated portrayals of HBCUs are severely lacking. In addition, African American viewers do like—and need—to see themselves on television, because in spite of the growth of African Americans in the media, they are still under-represented or ignored (Clark, 18; Poindexter and Stroman, 104). College Hill illustrates that though programming featuring African Americans may no longer be as blatantly stereotypical as Amos n’ Andy, there is still a struggle for more complete portrayals of African Americans. It also illustrates that BET, a network targeted to Black viewers, has tension between its mission to uplift its audience (BET Networks PR website, para. 2) and its raison d’être, to generate money as one of Viacom’s networks. The battle for more representative images will continue in reality TV, other television genres, and the media in general. In addition, another explanation for the findings is the possibility that some of the negative portrayals of the cast members might become inseparable from the portrayal of the HBCU in the mind of the viewer. On one hand, the findings certainly support Browne’s opinion (Leger “‘This is TV’” section, para. 4) that College Hill is about the students attending the HBCUs. On the other, the concerns displayed by attendees and administrators of the show in addition to the show’s viewers suggest it is impossible to completely separate the students’ portrayal in the show from the portrayals of the universities featured (Dix et al., para. 12; ­Ragster para. 9). As a UVI student stated, “The decision of a small group of people is going to affect a large group of people because now when people from the States see the name ‘University of the Virgin Islands,’ they are going to say, ‘Oh, that’s that crazy school!” Therefore, even though the HBCUs were referenced only forty-three times on the scene level, one could argue the portrayals of the African American cast members act as (re)presentations of the HBCU. To further this point, because people store information in clusters (Fiske and Taylor 1991), it is possible that physical altercations, sexual situations, and other circumstances deemed negative by viewers become

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attached not only to the show but to HBCUs. A priming effect could be occurring, such that when viewers think of College Hill, they automatically think of negative images and cognitively link them to HBCUs (e.g., Scheufele and Tewksbury, 11). More specifically, a physical altercation such as the one between Krystal and Vanessa featured on Season 4, can become incorporated into a viewer’s schema such that when she thinks of College Hill, she also thinks of the fight. As stated previously, there is concern about the public perception of HBCUs and their students because it is possible that many people do not have direct contact with HBCUs or African Americans. Therefore, College Hill might assist in the development of prototypes or exemplars regarding both. This suggests the African American cast members act as (re)presentations of the HBCUs. Other reality TV shows could be priming other cognitive responses in their viewers. This possibility would be best explored with an experimental method. 6b. Limitations of the Study The major limitation of this study concerned the sample. Though there have been seven seasons of this program, only four were filmed at HBCUs. In addition, only two seasons, Seasons 3 and 4, were available on DVD. These two seasons, therefore, yielded thirty episodes that included both African Americans and HBCUs. As a result, coder training required use of the actual sample; an independent sample that could be used just for training purposes did not exist. Therefore, only College Hill episodes were appropriate for coder training. 6c. Implications for Future Research To continue research inspired by the current study, an audience reception study of College Hill viewers would be an appropriate next step. This project would explore if those familiar with HBCUs (e.g., students, alumni) would read the text differently from these who are not familiar with HBCUs. Of particular interest would be those who learn about HBCUs mainly through media such as TV and film. As Bobo (90, 91) discussed in her exploration of African American women audience members, different cultural locations and identities can influence how one reads a text. This study would likely use focus group methods. In closing, communication scholars must continue to examine the portrayals of institutions important to African American history, including

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HBCUs. They must also explore how the portrayals of African Americans act as (re)presentations of these institutions. It is the researcher’s hope that this study will be another step in the effort to understand, evaluate, and change the current media landscape with regard to race portrayals. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank her dissertation advisor, Dr. Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and her committee members, Dr. Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, Dr. Melissa Click, Dr. Michael J. Porter, and Dr. Ibitola Pearce at the University of Missouri. She also wants to thank her coders, Nuzhat Chowdhury and Nick Synder. This project was completed with funds from the University of Missouri’s Department of Communication Graduate Student Research Support Fund. Notes 1. This is a reference to the closing theme of College Hill: Virginia State University, which promises viewers imminent drama during the show. 2. Throughout this document, I write “(re)presentation(s)” and “(re)produce” to refer to the cultural work our language performs. According to Stuart Hall (24), representations are reflective, presenting that which already exists. In addition, representations are social constructions, created through our language. Therefore, the media are not the initial sources of stereotypical images, but some of the major sources that continue to recreate and share these cultural constructions. 3. Both Kenneth Edmonds and Tracey Edmonds are African American. Neither attended an HBCU (International Movie Database, a, b). Their production company, Edmonds Entertainment, of which Tracey Edmonds is CEO, has produced television shows such as BET’s Lil Kim: Countdown to Lockdown, Showtime’s Soul Food, and feature film Good Luck Chuck (The Edmonds Entertainment website, n.d.). 4. Percent agreements are provided because there were no 0-0 pairs in the coincidence matrices since there were no occasions when both coders would have indicated “not a scene.”

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Clark, Cedric. C. “Television and Social Controls: Some Observations on the Portrayals of Ethnic Minorities.” Television Quarterly 8 (1969): 18–22. Print. Dilworth, Mary. E. “Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Taking Care of Home.” The State of Black America. Ed. Billy. J. Tidwell. New York: National Urban League, Inc, 1994. 127–151. Print. Dix, Jacqueline, Gibbs, Dominique, and Bannister-Black, Nikki. G. “‘College Hill’ Debut Followed by Rampage at Southern U.” Black College Wire. Web, 1 Feb. 2004. 4 Feb. 2010. Edmonds Entertainment. “Main.” Web, n.d. 24 Jan. 2010. Entman, Robert M. and Rojecki, Andrew. The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print. Fiske, Susan T. and Taylor, Shelley E. Social Cognition. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991. Print. Gasman, Marybeth. “Truth, Generalizations, and Stigmas: An Analysis of the Media’s Coverage of Morris Brown College and Black Colleges Overall.” University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons. 1 Jun. 2007, Web. 24 Jul. 2013. Glass, Gene V., and Hopkins, Kenneth D. Statistical methods in education and psychology. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996. Print. Gray, Herman. “It’s a Different World from Where You Come From.” Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 93–112. Print. Greenberg, Bradley S., Mastro, Dana, and Brand, Jeffrey E. (2002). “Minorities and the Mass Media: Television into the 21st Century.” Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. 333–351. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction.” Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. 1st ed. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Sage, 1997. 1–12. Print. Hughes, C. “Historically Black Colleges in Pennsylvania.” eHow Family website. Web, 2010. 25 May 2011. Iedema, Rick. “Analyzing Film and Television: A Social Semiotic Account of ‘Hospital: An Unhealthy Business’.” Handbook of Visual Analysis. Ed. Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001. 183–204. Print. International Movie Database. “Biography for Kenneth ‘Babyface’ Edmonds.” International Movie Database website. Web, n.d., a. 24 Jan. 2010. —. (N.d., b) “Biography for Tracey E. Edmonds.” International Movie Database website. Web, n.d., b. 24 Jan. 2010. Irving, Desiree’. Parlaying their “College Hill” fame. Black College Wire. Web, 5 Mar. 2006. 24 Feb. 2010. Krippendorff, Klaus H. Content analysis: An introduction to Its Methodology. 2nd ed. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 2004. Print. Leger, Aslin. “‘College Hill’ Caused Uproar in Virgin Islands Visit.” Black College Wire. Web, 25 Apr. 2007. 1 Jan. 2010. Lincoln University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “About Lincoln: A Legacy of Producing Leaders.” Lincoln University website. Web, n.d., 28 Jan. 2009.

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Lowe, Marona. “College Hill- Virgin Islands, 2007, 180 Minutes, Not Rated. MOSAEC website. Web, 2007. 4 Feb. 2010. Matabane, Paula W., and Merritt, Bishetta D. African Americans on Television: Twenty-five Years after Kerner. The Howard Journal of Communications 7 (1996): 329–337. Print. Mbajekwe, Carolyn. O. W. “Introduction.” The Future of Historically Black colleges and Universities: Ten Presidents Speak Out. Ed. Carolyn O. W. Mbajekwe. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc, 2006. 3–40. Print. Native Son. “BET: College Hill Has Gone Too Damn Far [Blog post]!!!” Native Son website. Web, 26 Apr. 2007. 3 Feb. 2010. Neuendorf, Kimberly A. The Content Analysis Guidebook. Thousand Oaks: CA. Print, 2002. Parrott-Sheffer, Adam. “Not a Laughing Matter: The Portrayals of Black Colleges on Television.” Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Triumphs, Troubles, and Taboos. Ed. Marybeth Gasman and Christopher L. Tudico. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2008. 207–251. Print. Poindexter, Paula M., and Stroman, Carolyn A. Blacks and Television: A Review of the Research Literature. Journal of Broadcasting 25 (1981): 103–122. Print. Ragster, LaVerne. E. “‘College Hill 4’ and UVI”. University of the Virgin Islands website. Web, 12 Mar. 2007. 31 Oct. 2008. Reuters. “BET’s ‘College Hill’ is Back and Better Than Ever with a Recordbreaking Fifth Season Premiere.” Reuters website. Web, 13 March 2008. 12 February 2009. Reality TV World Staff. “BET’s ‘College Hill’ ‘First Ever Black Reality Show’ Premiering January 28.” Reality TV World. Web, 28 Jan. 2004. 12 Feb. 2009. Ross, Brian H., and Makin, Valerie. S. “Prototypes Versus Exemplar Models in Cognition.” The Nature of Cognition. Ed. Sternberg, Robert J. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. 205–241. Print. Scheufele, Dietram. A. and Tewksbury, David. Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Models. Journal of Communication, 57 (2007): 9–20. Print. Stewart, Del. Advice to HBCUs: Use the Media to Your Advantage. Black Issues in Higher Education 18 (2001): 31. Print. Taylor, K. “FAMU student heats up BET’s ‘College Hill.’” Black College Wire website. Web, 25 March 2009. 13 Aug. 2009. Williams, Juan, and Ashley, Dwayne. I’ll find a way or make one: A tribute to historically Black colleges and universities. New York: Amistad, 2004. Print.

8 African-centered Research Frameworks: Expanding the Boundaries of Cultural ­Competence in Evaluation Sarita Davis Introduction Several implied domains are helpful in understanding the broader concept of cultural competence. They include multiculturalism, cultural sensitivity, cultural assessment, and diversity awareness (Resnicow, Baranowski, Ahluwalia, & Braithwaite, 1999). Mental health professionals in the 1960s and 1970s were among the first to conceptualize multicultural care. Multiculturalism is defined as incorporating and appreciating perspectives of various racial and ethnic groups without assumptions of superiority or inferiority (Resnicow et al., 1999). In the 1980s, multiculturalism evolved into cultural sensitivity in response to the changing cultural diversity of the population. According to Resnicow (1999), cultural sensitivity can be defined as the extent to which ethnic/cultural characteristics, experiences, norms, values, behavioral patterns, and beliefs of a target population, as well as relevant historical, environmental, and social forces, are incorporated in the design, delivery, and evaluation of particular health promotion materials and programs. According to Brach and Fraser (2000), cultural competence extends beyond cultural awareness or sensitivity to include possession of cultural knowledge and respect for different cultural viewpoints, including the effective use of knowledge and skills in cross-cultural situations. Cultural 125

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competence refers to the capacity of practitioners to exercise interpersonal cultural sensitivity (Marin et al., 1995). Thus, cultural competence refers to practitioners, whereas cultural sensitivity relates more to intervention materials and messages. In sum, cultural ­competence reflects a ­practitioner’s ability to acquire and use knowledge of beliefs, attitudes, practices, and communication patterns of individuals and their communities to improve research, strengthen programs, increase community ­participation, and close gaps in health status among diverse population groups. While the empirical evidence on culturally sensitive interventions is growing (Belgrave, 1991; Boone, 2006; Gilbert, 2009), there is scant attention on cultural competence in formulating and constructing the evaluation process. The evaluation framework is critical to the inquiry process, as it carries the validity of the evaluation question, the assumptions of the inquirer, the framing of the investigative process, the interpretation of the findings, and the implications on the community (Carruthers, 1996; Dixon, 1976; Hilliard, 1992; Kershaw, 2003). While other ways of knowing are widely practiced in program evaluation, positivism is still considered the gold standard (Carruthers, 1996; Smith, 2002). Consequently, it is important that we interrogate claims of cultural competence to ensure that they are not positivist practices dressed up in post-positivist clothing. In an era when cultural competence is being touted as a necessary response to improve evaluation with historically marginalized groups, very little attention has been given to the application of African-centered research frameworks as a process for formulating and constructing evaluations that affect people of African descent. The intent of this article is to fill this gap by conducting a comparative analysis of the principles guiding AEA’s cultural competence statement with those informing African-centered research. The American Evaluation Association and Cultural Competence The American Evaluation Association (AEA) is an international professional association of evaluators devoted to the application and exploration of program evaluation, personnel evaluation, technology, and many other forms of evaluation. AEA has approximately 7,300 members representing all fifty states in the US as well as over sixty foreign countries. In sum, AEA is the primer evaluation association in North America (AEA, 2011). In 2011, AEA published a public statement on cultural competence in evaluation. According to AEA, cultural competence is a stance taken toward culture, not a discrete status or simple mastery of particular knowledge and skills. A culturally competent evaluator should be prepared to engage with diverse segments of communities to include cultural and

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contextual dimensions important to the evaluation. Culturally competent evaluators should also respect the cultures represented in the evaluation. AEA outlines four core concepts that are foundational to the pursuit of cultural competence. First, culture is central to economic, political, and social systems as well as individual identity. Thus, all evaluation reflects culturally influenced norms, values, and ways of knowing—making cultural competence integral to ethical, high-quality evaluation. Second, given the diversity of cultures within the US, cultural competence is fluid. An evaluator who is well prepared to work with a particular community is not necessarily competent in another. Third, cultural competence in evaluation requires that evaluators maintain a high degree of self-awareness and self-examination to better understand how their own backgrounds and other life experiences serve as assets or limitations in the conduct of an evaluation. Fourth, culture has implications for all phases of evaluation—including staffing, development, and implementation of evaluation efforts as well as communicating and using evaluation results. In summary, AEA acknowledges that evaluations take place in the context of values, worldviews, and culture. AEA’s statement on cultural competence affirms the significance of cultural competence in evaluation from inquiry formulation to data interpretation. It also informs the public of AEA’s expectations concerning cultural competence in the conduct of evaluation. Consequently, cultural competence in evaluation theory and practice is viewed as critical for the profession and for the greater good of society. Africana Studies The philosophies guiding Africana Studies are ancient and deep— beginning in Ancient Egypt, through W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson to contemporary scholars such as Asante and Nobles. According to Hill (1990), there are four key stages in the development of Africana Studies. The first stage occurred from the 1890s through World War II. During this stage, professional associations, organizations, and research projects (primarily directed by people of African descent) documented, analyzed, and published works about the history and culture of African peoples. The second stage began after World War II and lasted through the 1950s. Hill describes this stage as a setback, as it was guided primarily by Eurocentric scholars whose research served to pathologize the bio/psycho/social existence of Negroes in society. The third stage, 1960s to 1980s was birthed out of civil rights and black power movements. During this time black students

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attending traditionally white institutions of higher learning protested and demanded more black faculty and the establishment of Africana Studies programs. The fourth and current stage is described by Hill as a reflective time in which Africana Studies needs to determine the path for its future based upon the needs of students, community, and the discipline. Africana Studies as an academic discipline can be defined as the critical analysis of the Africana experience, people, and culture, through the usage of the African worldview, with the ultimate goal of changing the life chances of African descended peoples (Burgess & Agozino, 2011). Africana studies provides students and scholars with a dynamic means to investigate the current conditions and future prospects of people of African descent. Since the institutionalization of Africana Studies, scholars within the discipline have been critical of mainstream methodological approaches to research when it comes to understanding the conditions and behaviors of Africana people. Whether these scholars were trained as anthropologists, economists, educators, historians, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, or social workers, all have questioned the methodological foundations of their particular discipline (Carruthers, 1996; Clarke, 1984; Dixon, 1976; Hilliard, 1992; Kershaw, 2003; Nobles, 1985; Schiele, 2000). Africana scholars generally agree that research methodology within the discipline must question the significance and contribution of any inquiry, along with its intended goal. Carruthers (1996) summed up the challenge well when he said that Africana scholars are trapped between a philosophy of liberation and a methodology of oppression. Here, Carruthers is suggesting that Africana scholars are philosophically and ideologically committed to addressing the issues facing Africana people through social science research, but are hampered by harmful and even detrimental methodological ideologies and tools. The African-centered research frameworks proposed herein are based upon the work of Africana scholars past and present who were at the forefront of creating culturally specific methodological approaches to the study of Africana culture, people, and experiences. Central to this discussion of research methodology in Africana Studies is a distinct relationship between worldview and methodology (Dixon, 1971, 1976). This relationship lays the foundation of Africana Studies and gives focus to the cultural specificity of the discipline. Thus, African-centered research frameworks are not Eurocentric methods in blackface, but rather culturally grounded approaches to understanding the behavior, beliefs, and conditions of African people (Carroll, 2008).

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Worldview and Methodology The relationship between a researcher’s worldview and their particular research methodology is of extreme importance, especially when they are attempting to investigate culturally specific phenomenon (Carroll, 2008). A research methodology, in part, refers to the assumptions that one brings to the research project. Dixon (1971) suggests that assumptions are declarations about phenomena that are recognized as valid without submission to tests of their truthfulness. Within the process of research, assumptions constrain the research practice. Once we acknowledge the importance of assumptions to one’s research methodology we are forced to question the sources of these assumptions. Unequivocally, the sources of these assumptions are a person’s worldview (Dixon, 1976). Therefore, a researcher’s worldview must be interrogated in order to properly understand the cultural implications on research projects on and about people of African descent (Dixon, 1971; Hilliard, 1992). Since worldviews are products of culture, it is pertinent to acknowledge one’s worldview orientation within the inquiry process. The mission of Africana social scientists is to dedicate their energies to the reconstruction of the disciplines in which they have been trained. Without such an approach, African descended people run the risk of incorporating oppressive theoretical, methodological, and ideological models of social science into their own methodologies, thereby unknowingly internalizing harmful ideologies and knowledge construction practices. So the question we are here to explore is, “How can African-centered research frameworks expand the boundaries of cultural competence in research and evaluation praxis?” Before we can address the question at hand, we must first identify the principle tenets underlying African-centered research. African-centered Research Frameworks: Two Schools of Thought There are generally two value systems guiding African-centered research frameworks: Afrocentricity and the African Worldview. While there is overlap between the two value systems, there are distinctions as well. The origins and intentions of each are discussed below. Afrocentric Research Methods Afrocentric (or Africentric) Research Methods are rooted in Afrocentricity (1990). At its most fundamental expression, Afrocentricity places the lived experiences of the African-descended community at the center of any inquiry and challenges oppressive ideologies and practices (Asante, 1987; Asante, 1990). Through an Afrocentric lens the bio/psycho/

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social issues affecting African-descended people are viewed historically and through the lens of oppression. The resulting perspective allows for a holistic perspective on the depth, scope, and framing of a phenomenon. Since its inception, many perspectives and cultural concepts have evolved from Afrocentricity, including Kwanzaa and the Nguzo Saba— seven principles of African community celebrated as a cultural holiday (Karenga, 1977); NTU—a Bantu concept that means the essence of life (Belgrave, 1991). Asante asserts that there are two principles intrinsic to African cultures throughout the diaspora: Ma’at and Nommo. In ancient Egyptian culture, Ma’at was the goddess of ideals, law, order, and truth. Ma’at seeks justice. The second principle is Nommo, which means “the productive word.” Nommo requires that knowledge be useful and improve human relations. In his four major works on Afrocentrisim (1987, 1990, 2003, & 2009), Asante identifies three basic beliefs about research. According to Asante, Afrocentric research frameworks should: (a) attempt to uncover subtle and overt racist theories and methods; (b) work to legitimize African ideals and values as valid frames of reference; and (c) ensure that inquiry is contextually rooted (Asante, 1990). While most Africana scholars generally acknowledge and embrace the principles set forth by Asante (Collins, 1990; Banks, 1992; Kershaw, 2003; Mazama, 2001; Milam, 1992; Schiele, 2000), there is no universal definition that operationalizes these constructs. Reviere (2011) however, does a good job of distilling Asante’s concepts into five actionable canons Table 8.1. Afrocentric Research Methods Canon

Meaning

Ukweli (Truth)

Requires that the research be grounded in the experiences of the community being research. That community is the ultimate validating authority.

Kujitoa (Commitment)

Requires the researcher to consider and acknowledge all value-laden assumptions inherent in the research question. Do not feign objectivity because it does not exist, but rather bring all perspectives to the foreground of the research question.

Utulivu (Justice)

Requires the researcher to actively avoid creating, exaggerating, or sustaining divisions between or within communities but rather strive to create harmonious relationships.

Ujamma (Community)

Requires the researcher to reject the researcher/participant separation.

Uhaki (Harmony)

Requires that the research procedure be fair to all participants, especially those being researched.

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that articulate a concise definition of culturally grounded research that is inclusive of context (Table 8.1). Ultimately, the goal of Afrocentric research is to give the researcher a place outside of the Eurocentric framework from which to construct and analyze phenomenon and oppressive research praxis. The African Worldview The African Worldview as defined by Carroll (2008) is an outgrowth of the cultural and historical experiences of African people. Building on the works of Dixon (1976) and Banks, (1992) Carroll explains that the Africana worldview encompasses the beliefs, values, and morals of Africana people, along with their outward expression. Research methods evolving from this worldview are rooted in the global experiences of Africans on the continent and throughout the diaspora. Table 8.2 outlines the seven principles that constitute the African Worldview. Axiology, epistemology, and logic play key roles in defining worldview orientation and its relationship to knowledge construction. A researcher’s values and logic shape the content and form of assumptions implemented in the research process. Cosmology and ontology refer to one’s existence in and Table 8.2. Africana Worldview Tenet

Meaning

Axiology

Refers to the values being exposed. What is being valued?

Epistemology

Refers to knowledge. What is the basis of the knowledge?

Logic

Refers to reasoning. How does one organize what they know?

Cosmology

Refers to the nature/structure of the universe. All things are interconnected.

Ontology

Refers to the nature of reality/being. The nature of reality and being is spirit/energy. There is knowledge beyond the five senses.

Teleology

Refers to a sense of direction. Purpose.

Ideology

Refers to the beliefs and ideas used to advance the needs and social aspirations of a cultural group.

Nommo: (The productive word) Here it describes Cultural competence is an the creation of knowledge as a vehicle for ethical issue that represents improvement in human relations. the intentional effort of the evaluation team to produce work that is valid, honest, respectful of stakeholders and considerate of the general public welfare.

3. Research is Productive

4. Research is culturally- Ukweli: Research is grounded in the experiences Evaluations are not culture grounded of the community. Therefore the inclusion free. of the personal is imperative. There is no objectivity.

Does not address

Teleology (purpose)

Ideology (combines an interpretation of the social world with a moral commitment to change it).

Culturally competent evaluators work to minimize error grounded in cultural biases, stereotypes, and lack of shared worldviews among stakeholders.

Ma’at & Utulivu: Requires that the researcher actively avoid creating, exaggerating, sustaining divisions between or within communities but rather strive to create harmonious relationships between and within these groups.

2. Research seeks Justice/Truth

Cosmology (interconnectedness)

Africana Worldview

Insight: Does not address

Does not address

1. Research is Interdependent

AEA Cultural Competence Statement

Afrocentric Worldview

Construct: Foundational Africana Research Constructs

Table 8.3. Africana Research Methods Concepts of Evaluation/Research

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Insight: In it, but not off it.

Does not address

Uhaki: Requires a research procedure that is fair to all participants, especially to those being researched.

9. The research process must be fair

Culturally competent evaluation emerges from an ethical commitment to fairness and equity for stakeholders

Does not address

Does not address

Utulivu: Requires that the researcher actively avoid creating, exaggerating, sustaining divisions between or within communities but rather strive to create harmonious relationships between and within these groups.

8. Research seeks Harmony

The knower attempts to be a part of the phenomena s/he is attempting to know. Ontology (spirit/energy)

Does not address

Axiology (value orientation), Epistemology (techniques by which knowledge is assessed) & Logic (reasoning and organizing what you know)

Does not address

Ujamaa: Requires that the researcher reject the researcher/participant separation. Research is communal.

6. There is no separation between the researcher/participant

Evaluator must possess knowledge of the culture (mores, values, local history)

7. Research is comprised Does not address of Energy/Spirit

Kujitoa: Knowledge is socially constructed and value-laden. Therefore researchers need to be aware of how their values, beliefs, and biases influence the research process.

5. Knowledge is socially constructed

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relationship to the world. Teleology and ideology refers to one’s actions based upon their beliefs. These tenets are grounded in an African worldview that is guided by how people of African descent view the world and their place in it. These seven precepts function as a holistic framework for knowledge construction, relationship in the world, and guidance for action. Each element calls on the researcher to engage in critical reflection and iterative processing in order to shape a process of inquiry that encompasses each tenet. While Afrocentric research frameworks share some of the same principles with the African Worldview (e.g., knowledge construction, researcher/ participant connection, and denial of objectivity), they can be distinguished by their demand for activism and social justice on the part of the researcher. To understand the commonalities and differences between African-centered research frameworks and AEA’s Cultural Competence statement, I have conducted a comparative analysis of each. The resulting matrix allows us to clearly identify points of overlap, distinguish differences, and highlight new opportunities to elevate our thinking around evaluation boundaries. Table 8.3 shows that the AEA Cultural Competence statement is in agreement with both African-centered paradigms on three of the seven (33 percent) canons/ tenets: Research should be productive/purpose (Nommo and Teleology); Knowledge is socially constructed (Kujitoa and Axiology/Epistemology/ Logic); and Research should seek Justice/Truth (Ma’at or Utulivu). The AEA Cultural Competence statement is also in singular agreement with two of the five Afrocentric Research methods canons (22 percent): Research is culturally grounded (Ukewli); and Research should be fair (Uhaki). However, the AEA Cultural Competence statement makes no reference to three of the canons/ tenets (44 percent): Research is interdependent (Cosmology); there is no separation between the researcher/participant (Ujamaa); The knower is a part of the ­phenomena s/he is attempting to know; and Research is comprised of energy/spirit (Ontology). These findings lead me to the following observations. First, African cosmology assumes that the nature/structure of the universe is based upon an interconnected and interdependent network where all things in the universe are connected. Whether comprehended logically or illogically, we live in a fundamentally communal universe. The cosmological assumption of independence and separation, which is reflective of the European worldview, guides the majority of research methodologies in Western social sciences. However, this assumption requires separation between interrelated areas. The multi/interdisciplinary nature of Africana Studies requires the acceptance of the cosmological assumption of the African worldview as relevant to a discipline-specific methodology. Assuming the culturally competent evaluator can suspend

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this Western ideology, she would have to construct an evaluation framework that simultaneously addresses micro and macro level phenomenon as well as the dynamic nature of that interaction. This practice is a radical departure from the reductionist nature of Western research. Second, with the exception of the researcher/participant separation, AEA’s cultural competence statement and Afrocentric Research Methods are in virtual alignment. It may be sign of “respect” for the culturally competent evaluator to suspend herself from the context she is investigating, but it calls into question the evaluator’s ability to accurately assess and interpret the findings. For example, the evaluator who separates herself from the lived experiences of people of African descent might align herself with other relatable worldviews (e.g., feminism, empowerment, etc.) that do not capture the historical and multiple intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender. Consequently, the bifurcated self possesses an interesting quandary that offers no easy resolution. Finally, the African worldview posits that energy/spirit is a central concept in how African-descended people live in the world and interpret our reality. From this perspective spirit is God energy, and it exists in all living and non-living things. It also operates in accordance with the laws of cause and effect. In the context of evaluation, energy/spirit manifests in the purpose of the evaluation and its benefit to the greater good. Consequently, the evaluation is not benign, objective, or without passion. The culturally competent evaluator who embraces this principle is an advocate who actively intervenes on behalf of the most marginalized stakeholder. Discussion In recent years, there have been a number of appeals to Africana scholars to work across disciplines and collaborate to address the inequities and social conditions that affect people of African descent (Gilbert, 2009; Kershaw, 2012; Schiele, 2009). Africana scholars are on the frontlines of studying and documenting the conditions affecting people of African descent and their responses to the world around them. Consequently, they are in the best position to inform cultural competence in evaluation when communities of African descent are the focus. Further discussion on using African-centered research frameworks in other disciplines is warranted given the significant socioeconomic disparities plaguing people of African descent. For example, schools of social work are held accountable for developing comprehensive curricula that prepare students to deliver social services effectively within a complex society. Schiele (1997) states that “Afrocentric knowledge should not

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be marginalized or relegated to discrete, elective, or required courses but rather infused throughout areas of social work” (p. 816). Infusion of Afrocentric theory and research also fits within the public health agenda to reduce health disparities among communities of color. The Office of Minority Health, for example, has made recommendations for national standards on culturally and linguistically appropriate services in health care (Ross, 2001). These standards were organized into three themes: (1) culturally competent care, (2) language access services, and (3) organizational supports. The recommendations were put in place to ensure the availability of respectful care that takes into consideration the cultural beliefs, practices, and the preferred language of the individual. Awareness of and knowledge about African-centered research frameworks also have potential use in other professions such as education and criminal justice. Advancing these ideas within other academic disciplines and professional research settings will require continued focus on interdisciplinary research. One major barrier to full integration of African-centered frameworks into other disciplines is that African-centered frameworks lack cohesive documentation, which limits their chances of being established as best practices or through replication. At the same time, we know that culturally relevant interventions are more likely to lead to enduring behavior change than are interventions that do not consider one’s culture and social context (Davis, 1997; Nobles, Goddard, & Gilbert, 2009). Advocacy for increased African-centered research frameworks within Africana Studies and across disciplines will begin to close this gap. Africana scholars who want to advance African-centered research frameworks are encouraged to work on interdisciplinary teams, especially when they are disseminating information or seeking state and federal funding sources. Building professional and research alliances with other social scientists is critical to advancing the scientific discourse on the effectiveness of African-centered frameworks. African-centered frameworks address structural (macro) and individual (micro) challenges to promote well-being and, as such, are consistent with the Africana Studies commitment to social justice. More efforts should be made to disseminate information about existing African-centered research frameworks, with emphasis on documenting those that have been evaluated and those that are in need of additional studies, with the aim of developing guidelines for best practices. It is my hope that this work initiates a dialogue between Africana Studies and advocates of cultural competence. I hope this article sparks a conversation among Africana scholars about working collaboratively and across disciplines to build on the existing body of knowledge.

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References American Evaluation Association. (2011). American Evaluation Association Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation. Fairhaven, MA: Author. Retrieved from www.eval.org. Asante, M. K. (1987). The Afrocentric idea. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Asante, M. K. (1990). Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc. Asante, M. K. (2003). Erasing racism: The survival of the American nation. Amherst, New York, NY: Prometheus Books. Asante, M. K. (2009). Africology: Naming an intellectual enterprise in our field. Retrieved from http://asante. net/articles/3/africology-naming-an-intellectualenterprise-in-our-field/. Banks, W.C., (1992). The theoretical and methodological crisis of the Afrocentric conception. Journal of Negro Education, 61 (3): 262–272. Belgrave, F. Z. (1991). Survey of the Association of Black Psychologist AIDS consultants. (Available from the NAIEP, the Association of Black Psychologists, Washington, DC. Boone, L., Mayberry, R., Betancourt, J., Coggins, P., & Yancey, E. (2006). Cultural Competence in the Prevention of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, American Journal of Public Health, 21 (4): 199–208. Brach, C. & Fraser, I. (2000). Can cultural competency reduce racial and health disparities? A review and conceptual model [Supplement]. Medical Care Research and Review, 57, 181–217. Burgess, M. & Agozino, B. (2011). A Review of Africana Methodologies from Molefi Kete Asante, Terry Kershaw and Ama Mazama: The Africana Paradigm We Need to Embrace, The Western Journal of Black Studies, (35) 1:67–73. Carroll, K. (2008). Africana Studies and Research Methodology. Revisiting the Centrality of the Afrikan Worldview. The Journal of Pan African Studies (2) 2: 4–27. Carruthers, J. (1996). Science and Oppression,” in African Psychology in Historical Perspective and Related Commentary, ed. Daudi Ajani Ya Azibo, Trenton: Africa World Press. Clarke, J.H. (1984). Africana Studies: A Decade of Change, Challenge and Conflict,” in The Next Decade: Theoretical and Research Issues in Africana Studies, edited by James E. Turner, Ithaca: Africana Research and Research Center, 31–45. Collins, P.H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Gilbert, D., Harvey, A., & Belgrave, F. (2009). Advancing Africentric Paradigm Shift Discourse: Building Evidence-Based Africentric Interventions in Social Work Practice with African Americans, Social Work, 53 (3): 243–252. Davis. K. (1997). Consumer driven standards and guidelines in managed mental health for populations of African descent: Final report on cultural competence. Rockville, MD: Center for Mental Health Services. Dixon, V. (1971). African-oriented and Euro-American-oriented worldviews: Research methodologies and economics, Review of Black Political Economy, (7) 2: 119–156.

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Dixon, V. (1976). Worldviews and research methodology in African Philosophy: Assumption and Paradigms for Research on Black Persons, ed. Lewis King, Los Angeles: Fanon R & D Center, 51–102. Hill, R. (1990). The Intellectual and Institutional Development of African Studies. In N. Norment Jr. (Ed.), The African American studies reader, Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 395–400. Hilliard, A.G. (1992). Behavioral style, culture, teaching, and learning. Journal of Negro Education, 61 (3): 370–377. Karenga, M.R. (1977). Kwanzaa: Origin, concepts practice. Los Angeles: Kawaida. Kershaw, T. (2003). The Black Studies paradigm: The making of scholar activists. In J.L. Conyers (Ed.) Afrocentricity and the academy: Essays on theory and practice (pp. 27–36), Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Kershaw, T. (2012). Africana Studies and the Production of Future Scholars. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 34 (2): 292–297. Marin, G., Burhansstipanov, L., Connell, C.M., Gielen, A.C., Helitzer-Allen, D., Lorig, K., Morisky, D.E., Tenney, M., & Thomas, S. (1995). A research agenda for health education among underserved populations. Health Education Quarterly, 22 (3): 346–363. Mazama, A. (2001). The Afrocentric paradigm: contours and definitions. Journals of Black Studies, (3) 1: 387–405. Milam, J.H. (1992). The emerging paradigm of Afrocentric research methods. Minneapolis, MN: Association for the Paper of Higher Education. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED-332–903). Nobles, W. (1985). Africanity and the Black Family: The development of a theoretical model. Berkeley, CA: Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture. Nobles, W.W., Goddard, L. L., & Gilbert, D.J. (2009). Culturecology, women and African-centered HIV prevention, Journal of Black Psychology, 35, 228–246. National Association of Social Workers. (2000). Cultural competence in the social work profession. In Social work speaks: NASW policy statements (pp. 59–62). Washington, DC: NASW Press. Norment, N. (2007). Introduction. In N. Norment Jr. (Ed.), The African American studies reader (pp. xxvii–8). Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press. Resnicow, K., Baranowski, T., Ahluwalia, J. S., & Braithwaite, R. L. (1999). Cultural sensitivity in public health: Defined and demystified. Ethnicity & Disease, 9, 10–21. Reviere, R. (2011). Toward an Afrocentric Research Methodology. Journal of Black Studies, 31 (6): 709–728. Ross, H. (2001). Office of Minority Health publishes final standards for cultural and linguistic competence. Closing the Gap, (pp.1–3), February/March. Retrieved November, 2012, from http://www.omhrc.gov/ass. Schiele, J. (2000). Human Services and the Afrocentric Paradigm. Haworth Press, NY. Smith, Linda (2002). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Ltd.

9 “Work to Be Done”: Democratic Pursuits and Black Women Activists, 1940s–1965 Courtney Thompson As long as people use tactics to oppress or restrict other people from being free, there is work to be done. —Rosa Parks, Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation

In the American psyche, Rosa Parks is best known for refusing to give up her seat on a crowded bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. Yet, her impact on the Civil Rights Movement extends beyond this defining moment. Her persistence reflects a key feature of Black women’s tradition of resistance in the battle for democracy. In their struggles to create a more just and equitable society, Black women activists challenged and transgressed barriers that inhibited their democratic freedoms. In a spirit akin to that of Rosa Parks and her predecessors, they confronted injustice wherever it lurked, in whatever forms it assumed. In this essay, I situate Black women’s struggles for democracy within an overtly political framework from 1940 until 1965. In order to illuminate the struggles of Black women activists to realize freedom and justice, I consider the autobiographical accounts of Septima P. Clark in Ready From Within (1986) and Echo in My Soul (1962) and Daisy Bates in The Long Shadow of Little Rock (1987), and I draw upon Chana Kai Lee’s biographical account of Fannie Lou Hamer in For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (2000). I argue that Black women’s constant struggles against inequalities

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rife throughout the nation revealed their perception of US democracy as unfinished or—as Rosa Parks aptly put it—“work to be done.” For Septima Clark, the struggle to preserve the freedoms and civil liberties inherent in democracy became her life’s work. As a teacher, Clark understood the role of education in the development of a more equitable society. In her work to secure Black citizenship rights, she recognized the absence of “democratic freedoms” among Blacks who were largely excluded from the political process. In Echo in My Soul, she gravely observed, “Negro people have the fewest of democratic freedoms” (236). Restricted to the bottom of the social hierarchy, Blacks were forced to navigate a racially stratified society where their access to the hallmarks of democracy was severely curtailed. Throughout her life, Clark worked to ameliorate conditions that threatened democracy. Through the development of citizenship schools, she promoted adult literacy and voter education in the South. She believed that democratic freedoms could be recovered if the status quo underwent radical changes, which would require the incorporation of Blacks into US society as first-class citizens. The social inequities found throughout the nation made it impossible for the full panoply of democratic freedoms to coexist. She resolved that the “test of our democratic form of government” would determine the extent to which democracy succeeded or failed at preserving freedom (Echo 236). Clark’s work demonstrated that change would require the expansion of democratic freedoms. Her most sustained struggle to realize democracy would occur as she pursued Black enfranchisement in the South. The efforts to preserve democracy globally informed Black women’s interpretation of equal rights within the United States. As an investigative journalist, Daisy Bates documented the contradictions in US democracy, as she worked to transform it. In The Long Shadow of Little Rock, Bates describes a waning of the “democratic spirit” among Negroes.1 According to Bates, this disillusionment was the result of the widespread indifference to Black participation in military service and wartime industries during World War II. Bates warned that without a democratic spirit, the nation would lose its strength—its ability to fully sustain itself and coalesce internally. It would be unable to project a compelling image of national unity within a global context, and its international reputation would be damaged. This was a poor prognosis for a nation that touted itself as quintessentially democratic. Although Bates’s characterization of the nation’s democratic spirit is made against the backdrop of World War II, her assessment of the diminished spirit of democracy was applicable much earlier. Black participation in World War I was met with a similar disregard. For Bates, the strength of

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the nation depends upon the extent to which the “Negro masses” manage to maintain their “faith” in American democracy. In the absence of this collective faith, she predicted a widening racial divide and greater vulnerability. The challenge to the nation is twofold: To renew the “democratic spirit” so that Black faith in American democracy can be restored and, from a global perspective, to regain its integrity and boost its stability. Bates’s commitment to advancing the democratic project is evident in her work as a journalist and supporter of public school desegregation in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Black women’s contributions to the long Civil Rights Movement reflected a broader struggle to transform democracy. As a poor sharecropper, Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed the worst that the South had to offer. The political disfranchisement, economic marginalization, and physical violence that Blacks suffered prompted Hamer to publicly question democracy. In a statement marked by ambivalence, Hamer recalls, “I grew up believin’ in God, but I knew things was bad wrong” (qtd. in Egerton, 97). Hamer’s description of the South as “bad wrong” alludes to its depravity and supplies a bleak image of life in Mississippi. It expresses the plight of Blacks residing in a kind of purgatory, wherein they are denied basic freedoms. For those who rebelled, the penalty was often unrestrained violence or death. In a 1965 interview with J. H. O’Dell for Freedomways, Hamer described the plight of Black and poor Mississippians in a way that conveyed the gravity of their circumstances, and she acknowledged the potential that could be summoned if the downtrodden were given an opportunity to improve their condition. Hamer maintained, “Only a person living in the state of Mississippi knows what it is like to suffer; knows what it is like to be hungry; knows what it is like to have no clothing to wear. And these people in Mississippi State, they are not ‘down’; [sic] all they need is a chance” (233). In this plea, Hamer acknowledges that the conditions that prevail in Mississippi are contrary to the way that things should be. These conditions maintain not because they are just but because of unfair power relations in which Blacks are systematically deprived of their rights. Hamer’s commitment to democracy is expressed in her willingness to improve “somethin’ about” the quality of Black life in the South. Hamer resolved, “I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the south if it would cost me my life; I was determined to see that things were changed” (O’Dell, 232).2 Although Hamer was physically battered, her spirit remained unbroken.

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She was determined to set things right by changing the social climate in the South. Although their struggles were distinctive, the lives of Clark, Bates, and Hamer were linked in purpose by virtue of the fact that they fought tirelessly to transform US democracy through democratic reform. In defense of herself, Fannie Lou Hamer contended, “I ain’t going no place. I have a right to stay here. With all my parents and grandparents gave to Mississippi, I have a right to stay here and fight for what they didn’t get” (qtd. in Garland 34). Hamer understood stakes in securing for herself the rights that had been denied to earlier generations and routinely invoked her right—as a US citizen—to seek redress. Given the violent legacy of white supremacy in the South, Hamer’s vow to stay put is courageous; Blacks who were deemed troublemakers or instigators because of their refusal to accept injustice often suffered harassment, intimidation, brutality, and (in the most egregious cases) death. Black women activists who took a public stand put their lives on the line. In their efforts to achieve full incorporation into US society, Septima Clark, Daisy Bates, and Fannie Lou Hamer rejected the status quo in a region that vehemently resisted any challenges to its established way of life. The struggles waged among these activists are complementary in nature and reveal meaningful overlap. Clark was concerned with equipping “underprivileged folk” with the literacy skills necessary to exercise their political rights. Often, this occurred in citizenship schools where Clark sought to empower the disadvantaged by instilling within them the skills necessary to advocate for themselves and their communities.3 The activism of Daisy Bates and Fannie Lou Hamer illustrates the dual commitment to education and politics found in Clark’s legacy. Bates rose to national prominence after leading the crusade in Little Rock, Arkansas, to integrate Central High School following the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Like Clark, Hamer was concerned with helping Blacks and poor whites gain political autonomy. A case in point, Hamer had gained her own voting rights by directly struggling against the white power structure embodied by W. D. Marlowe, III, the plantation owner who questioned Hamer about her intentions to vote and threatened her with expulsion if she continued with her voter registration activities. Demonstrating her characteristic forthrightness, Hamer remembered, “I made up my mind I was grown, and I was tired. I wouldn’t go back” (qtd. in Egerton 98). Although expulsion from the plantation resulted in the loss of her home and job, those sanctions failed to stifle Hamer’s political activities.4

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While the work of these women directly benefited their communities, Black women activists were committed to realizing a more democratic society “with liberty and justice” for all. For this reason, Blacks were not the only recipients of the strides made by these activists and other social justice advocates. In a 1967 newspaper interview with The Movement, Fannie Lou Hamer acknowledged, “You see, I’m 100% in the same way that I felt when I started working, and I say now, if the white folk fight for thyself, and the Black folk fight for thyself, we gonna crumble apart. These are things that we gonna have to fight together. . . . Because we got to fight in America for ALL the people, because you know there’s a whole lot of people” (qtd. in Kling 33–34).5 In Hamer’s view, all Americans benefitted from comprehensive struggles against discrimination. The willingness of these activists to challenge the exclusion of Blacks and other marginalized groups demonstrates a mutual and abiding belief in moving the democratic project forward. A closer look at the lives of Clark, Bates, and Hamer underscores this commitment. Septima Poinsette Clark Born in Charleston, South Carolina, at the turn of the twentieth century, Septima Clark began her career as an educator in 1916. In her autobiography, Echo in My Soul, Clark identifies herself as “a Negro school teacher who as an eighteen-year-old girl in 1916 began teaching on Johns Island off the coast of my native Charleston, South Carolina” (3). The affirmation “I am Septima Clark” reflects the slave narrative tradition in which Blacks were forced to write themselves into being. This disclosure gives the reader a clear sense of how Clark situates herself. First, she establishes herself as a complete entity, as “Septima Clark,” then she acknowledges her racial and professional identities. The way in which Clark positions herself at the very beginning of her narrative is significant for two reasons: It demonstrates her awareness of her complex identity as a Black female educator, and it highlights the intersections between these subjectivities and her politics as an activist struggling to bring about change for the politically disfranchised through literacy and leadership training. A decade later, in 1926, Clark began teaching in the Columbia Public School system in Columbia, South Carolina. Clark’s profession made her well suited for championing social justice causes; her exposure to the impoverished conditions of Black students in her early years of teaching and awareness of the racial and class disparities that affected her students and their communities sensitized her to injustice. In one of her earliest

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confrontations with racial discrimination, Clark recalls, “While I was teaching in Columbia [South Carolina], I worked on the problem of getting equal pay for teachers. Each school district set its own salaries, and usually the black teachers got about half of what the white teachers were paid” (Ready 117). The disparity in compensation reflected the dominant belief that Black teachers were inferior to their white counterparts and, therefore, deserved less pay regardless of certification. Paying Black teachers less was a practice rooted in white supremacist ideology, wherein privileges were extended to whites solely on the basis of their whiteness. Although Clark was dedicated to the salary-equalization campaign, many teachers were reluctant to cooperate. In contemplating her failure to rally Black teachers to action, Clark admits, “I don’t know why I felt that black teachers would stand up for their rights. But they wouldn’t. Most of them were afraid and became hostile” (Ready 37–38). Guided by her resolve to stand for justice, Clark underestimated the power of fear to inhibit the ability of many teachers to self-advocate. The fear of job loss, stigmatization, and other reprisals kept many would-be allies from taking a stand. Eventually, the struggle pays off. Clark recalls, “When I left Columbia, after being there eighteen years, from 1929 to 1947, my salary, after tripling following the court decision on equalization, had advanced from $65 a month to almost $4,000 a year” (Echo 87). Although Clark waged her battle without the support of many who stood to benefit from the equalization of Black and white salaries, she was not dismayed. Instead, she learned that those suffering from discrimination had to be prepared to struggle internally or “ready from within.” In Echo in My Soul, Clark credits her parents with instilling in her the value of service, a value that would inform much of her work. Clark reflects: They have left me courage to sustain me and to propel me, and better, they have left me a desire and a determination to expend myself in serving my people, and by my people I mean just people, neither rich nor poor nor white nor black, just people, all people to whom I may have the good fortune of being able to give a little help in their efforts to advance themselves. (Echo 29)

Clark interprets service to others as her life’s purpose, and her desire to help others manifests itself in her work as a teacher in the public school system and in the interracial learning environment at Highlander Folk School.6 Clark’s recollection reveals the establishment of a common bond with ­others. To illustrate this point, Clark qualifies “my people” as “just people” or more simply as humankind. Judging from this all-inclusive referent, Clark situates

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herself within a diverse community, which provides her with more opportunities to foster change. Although a good deal of Clark’s work impacted Blacks, such as her efforts on behalf of Black teachers denied equal pay, Black citizens denied access to voting rights, and Black students denied equal access to a decent standard of education, she was adept at working across racial lines. She would render a “little help” to anyone in need. In 1954, Clark attended her first workshop at Highlander. In Echo in My Soul, Clark describes Highlander as “fighting on behalf of people everywhere who believe in the freedoms inherent in our democracy” (11). The integrated workshops at Highlander were designed to give participants the skills to confront segregation when they returned to their communities.7 While promoting cultural understanding and tolerance, training Blacks and whites to work collaboratively in their communities shows the role of consciousness-raising in the democratic process.8 In 1956, when her teaching contract was not renewed, Clark joined the staff at Highlander. As Clark reflects upon the course of her life, she observes, “I felt then—and I feel now—that a kind Providence directs us when we strive to do what we think is right, and I have sought all the years since as an eighteen-year-old girl I went over on Johns Island, to do what is right, not only for my own people but for all people” (Echo 118). From this perspective, Clark’s path leading to Highlander was intentional rather than unintentional, and it reflects her convictions and willingness to make a difference.9 From the outset, Clark viewed education as essential to improving one’s quality of life; therefore, she used it as a point of departure for creating change. The leading philosophy at Highlander is consistent with perceptions many Black women activists held of “real democracy” as necessarily egalitarian, wherein every individual has equal access to democratic freedoms such as “a livelihood, an education, health, cultural interests, and public services.” Notwithstanding its progressiveness, Highlander’s aims are controversial among its critics. Clark maintains: The school is seeking to meet forthrightly the attack upon its very existence [it] has been fighting on behalf of people everywhere who believe in the freedoms inherent in our democracy. Freedom has always been lost by a people who allowed their rights gradually to be whittled away. The threat to silence and to keep forever silent the voice of Highlander is a threat to the very existence of every organization in this nation and to the basic freedom of thought and expression of every American. (Echo 11)

The struggle for freedom was central to Highlander’s mission. As a defender of democratic freedoms, threats against the school revealed

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efforts to silence the voice of Americans in pursuit of freedom, justice, equality, and access. Clark’s work with the citizenship schools in the South equipped Blacks with the literacy skills necessary to assume broader “democratic freedoms” such as citizenship rights.10 By bridging cultural divides and developing a strong leadership base among the masses, Clark advanced the democratic project at Highlander. She fostered interracial cooperation that served as the foundation for deeper cross-cultural understanding between whites and Blacks during an era in which amicable social relations were discouraged. Clark summed up her views on leadership by explaining, “I thought that you develop leaders as you go along, and as you develop these people let them show forth their development by leading” (Ready 78). Clark’s emphasis on cultivating leaders would be echoed in the democratic leadership philosophies of contemporaries like Ella Baker and subsequent generations of Black women activists who defended the legitimacy of leadership from the bottom up. Clark’s standpoint on leadership is underscored by her description of herself as a “worker” rather than a “Negro leader.”11 For Clark, leadership was a collective endeavor among individuals working together to foster progress and prosperity for all. Arguably the most compelling testimony of Clark’s work to resist undemocratic practices and transform democracy is Highlander’s statement of policy, penned by Clark herself. In the statement, Clark acknowledges, “We reaffirm our faith in democracy as a goal that will bring dignity and freedom to all; in democracy as an expanding concept encompassing human relations from the smallest community organization to international structure; and permeating all economic, social, and political activities” (Echo 197). Democracy is framed in terms that are decidedly comprehensive. Clark concludes: We hold that democracy is inactive unless workers are given a full voice in industry through unions; or farmers are given a voice in the market place through co-operatives; or when freedom of thought and discussion is limited; that democracy is outlawed by legally entrenched discrimination and segregation; that there must be diversity of approach but each step must be in conformity with the goal, which is dishonored by each undemocratic act. (Echo 197)

For Septima Clark, the struggle for democracy was not solitary in nature, it was a continuous and inclusive struggle that involved “workers” across the spectrum willing to speak out against the absence of democratic freedoms and unwilling to silently abide.

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Fannie Lou Hamer Born in 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer grew up sharecropping in Ruleville, Mississippi. In a 1972 interview with Neil McMillen for the Mississippi Oral History Program at The University of Southern Mississippi, Hamer explained, “I’m the twentieth child of a very poor family, sharecroppers never had anything—family life. Didn’t hardly have food to eat.”12 Hamer’s description of life on the plantation is bleak and revolves solely around sharecropping. She explains: Life was very hard; we never hardly had enough to eat; we didn’t have clothes to wear. We had to work real hard, because I started working when I was about six years old. I didn’t have a chance to go to school too much, because school would only last about four months at the time when I was a kid going to school. Most of the time we didn’t have clothes to wear to that [school]; and then if any work would come up that we would have to do, the parents would take us out of the school to cut stalks and burn stalks or work in dead lands or things like that. It was just really tough as a kid when I was a child. (McMillen)13

The plight of Blacks in the South relegated to plantation life was grave. The “life” that Hamer describes reflects a miserable existence, with no rest for the weary. The sharecropping system not only exacted a grim toll men and women, it intensified the suffering of children, who experienced material deprivation and years of insufficient schooling. The absence of an educational system that could make their lives better only made their lives worse. Without mincing words, Hamer describes her life on the plantation as “Worse than hard. It was horrible! We never did have enough to eat and I don’t remember how old I was when I got my first pair of shoes, but I was a big girl. Mama tried to keep our feet warm by wrapping them in rags and tying them with string” (qtd. in Garland 28). The phrase “worse than hard” reveals the inexpressible nature of Hamer’s suffering. Her memories of childhood on the plantation give voice to the desperate circumstances in which many poor Black families found themselves and the despair and hopelessness that these conditions often produced. Yet, for Hamer these circumstances become a catalyst for change in Mississippi and throughout the South as she begins to “get sicker and sicker of the system there” (O’Dell 232). Finding herself at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, Hamer had no choice other than to rebel against these deteriorating conditions. As an adult, Hamer continued to work on the plantation, and as she matured her consciousness grew. It was within this racially stratified space that she began to hone basic strategies for survival and develop a

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strong critique of undemocratic practices. Hamer’s work in the fields as a sharecropper and outside the fields as a timekeeper provided her with a unique vantage point from which to evaluate interracial relations.14 The awareness of an unchanging power dynamic in which Blacks were subordinate to whites may have strengthened her fortitude to resist undemocratic practices. Hamer recalled, “Sometimes I be working in the fields and I get so tired I’d say to the people picking cotton with me, hard as we have to work for nothing, there must be some way we can change this” (qtd. in Garland 29). Hamer had observed enough to know that if left unchecked, the white resistance that kept Blacks politically, economically, and socially disfranchised would persist. Hamer’s attitude was influenced by her pain of those around her and the wretchedness of her own daily existence.15 The majority of Blacks in Mississippi were deprived of their democratic rights, and many had been victims of unprovoked and unrestrained violence. As Hamer’s consciousness developed, she realized that there was no alternative to fighting back and no way to slow down the struggles for democracy that were gaining momentum in Mississippi. Julian Bond observed, “She [Hamer] was a democrat. I mean that with a small ‘d.’ She was a democrat. She believed in involving everybody. . . . She believed that there’s something in everybody. That everybody can make some kind of contribution” (Gritter 31). Hamer’s commitment to democracy materialized in her work as a grassroots organizer. In her first encounter with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Hamer witnessed Black political power.16 When SNCC visited Ruleville in 1962, Hamer was ready to change the conditions that prevented poor Blacks such as herself from exercising a political will. In “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired” (1968), Hamer maintained, “I shall never forget when I attended my first mass meeting, in Ruleville, Mississippi, on the Monday night after the fourth Sunday in August, 1962. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came into Mississippi in August 1962 to get black people to register to vote” (qtd. in Riggs 173). What distinguished this mass meeting was the presence of SNCC and SCLC and the dissemination of little-known information. Hamer admitted: I didn’t know anything about voting; I didn’t know anything about registering to vote. . . . They talked about how it was our right, that we could register and vote. They were talking about we could vote out people that we didn’t want in office, we thought that wasn’t right, that we could vote them out. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it.” (McMillen)

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This meeting enhanced Hamer’s outlook and gave her a sense of purpose. Outfitted with the knowledge that she was entitled to vote as a US citizen, Hamer became more determined to exercise her rights. In her memorable testimony before the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention in 1964, she described the aftermath of her unsuccessful attempt to register to vote at the courthouse in Indianola. Hamer explained, “Reverend Jeff Sunny carried me the four miles in the rural area where I had worked as a time-keeper and sharecropper for eighteen years. I was met there by my children, who told me the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register” (Levy, 139). Hamer is threatened by the plantation owner and informed that she will “have to go” if she doesn’t “withdraw.” The conciseness of her reply reveals her unwillingness to mince words, “I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself” (139–40).17 Without regret, she admits, “I had to leave that same night” (140). Hamer’s refusal to be intimidated indicates that there was no cost too steep, no price too dear for the right to vote. Rather than surrender to the unjust and undemocratic demands of the plantation owner, Hamer’s resolve is strengthened. She willfully defends her right to vote and rejects his authority. Her inability to remain on the plantation reveals the cost of maintaining democratic freedoms. Despite undue pressure, Hamer is determined to resist intimidation. When everything is at stake, she chooses to “stand her ground” (Lee 68). In “Builders of a New South,” Phyl Garland notes, “She [Fannie Lou Hamer] was subjected to continuing threats and harassment in the best Delta tradition. Yet she refused to retreat back into silence so many Southern Negroes have maintained throughout centuries in sheer self-defense . . .” (27). For Hamer, “retreat[ing] back into silence” was not an option; like many who had gone before her, she chose another approach—resistance.18 While her tireless efforts reinforce her commitment to the democratic project, Hamer’s indictment of a brand of democracy that excludes Blacks and the poor reveals a direct challenge to white supremacist ideology.19 For Hamer, democracy was an unfinished struggle that could only be fulfilled if a social system rife with injustice was transformed. She cogently argues, “This thing they say of ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ is all on paper. It doesn’t really mean anything to us. The only way we can make this thing a reality in America is to do all we can to destroy this system and bring this out to the light that has been under the cover all of these years” (O’Dell 234). In her critique, Hamer exposes the concept of liberty extolled in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States as fraudulent. She concludes,

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“We can no longer ignore the fact that America is NOT the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’”—a strong indictment of the paradoxes of US democracy (O’Dell 236). Hamer’s work registering Black voters and her role as cofounder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964 demonstrate her commitment to increasing the participation of Blacks and other underrepresented groups in the political process in spite of state-sanctioned violence and the obduracy of the white power structure.20 In her analysis of the dearth of Black voters, Hamer explains, “It is not because Negroes don’t want to register. They try and they try and they try” (O’Dell 236). Hamer’s ongoing struggles to expand the political sphere of activity in the South reflected that there was “work to be done.” Even more significantly, her willingness to forge ahead in spite of unrestrained violence is a testimony to her desire to stand and be counted in the struggle to move democracy forward. When Hamer promised to “do somethin’” in the South to make life better for Blacks and others relegated to the margins, she took her vow seriously. Daisy Bates Daisy Bates was born in 1914 in Huttig, Arkansas.21 In her memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, published in 1962, Bates recalls, “As I grew up in this town, I knew I was a Negro, but I did not really understand what that meant until I was seven years old. My parents, as do most Negro parents, protected me as long as possible from the inevitable insult and humiliation that is, in the South, a part of being ‘colored’” (7). When a white shopkeeper refuses to wait on Bates until the last white customer is served, she experiences a rude awakening. When Bates is finally recognized, it is grudgingly; the shopkeeper’s belligerence reveals his perception of Blacks as inferior. When Bates shares this mistreatment with her parents, she expects her father to defend her honor by confronting the shopkeeper. Although she has done nothing wrong, Bates realizes that it is her mere presence that incites this hostility. To her dismay, Bates discovers that her father is in no more of a position to rectify the unfair treatment than she; instead, he can only soothe her hurt feelings. As she matures, her awareness of how the racial divide compromises the “democratic spirit” grows. Incensed by the brutal assault and killing of her mother, Bates develops a compassion for suffering that makes her unwilling to condone the brutalization of Blacks. In a 1976 interview with Elizabeth Jacoway for

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the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Bates concedes, “Well, I think I’ve been angry all my life about what has happened to my people. [unknown] [Tape repaired] [Mrs. Bates refers here to the rape and murder of her mother by a group of white men] [unknown] finding that out, and nobody did anything about it. I think it started back then” (1). When shown by Blacks, anger has often been regarded as unconstructive, particularly when associated with struggles for social justice. However, the anger that Bates describes is constructive. It increases her awareness of the racial violence plaguing Black communities, beginning with the painful memory of her mother’s fate, and fuels her determination to change things. Like many Black women activists who were roused to action by the injustices which surrounded them, Bates’s concern with “what happened to my people”—which can be interpreted narrowly as a reference to her mother or, more broadly, as a reference to the overall conditions of Black people—serves as a catalyst that spurs her to action years later. In the early 1940s, Bates and her husband, L.C., began publishing a weekly newspaper, The Arkansas State Press. Bates’s journalistic work for the State Press demonstrated her early commitment to ­realizing ­democracy.22 In an atmosphere where white-supremacist ideology ­prevails, Bates’s investigative journalism, her willingness to expose and subject to scrutiny the racism embedded in a purportedly democratic society is courageous. She followed in the tradition of Black women such as Ida B. Wells Barnett (b. 1862) and Alice Dunnigan (b. 1906), who were both staunch activists as well as gutsy journalists. In her editorials, Bates targeted the second-class status of Blacks in order to expose the discriminatory practices that contradicted a “democratic spirit.”23 Bates was a fierce critic of her adversaries in the pages of the State Press. Her work as a journalist only solidified her commitment to destroying racism. Bates confided: L.C. and I felt from the beginning that the world was changing. We were determined to help our people and our country to contribute to that great social revolution by removing the barriers, based upon race that had stood in our own nation for so many decades. More specifically, we were convinced that the American South, homeland to millions of darker Americans, must be the scene of major activity. (221)

As supporters of the “social revolution,” Bates and L.C. were “determined” to help usher in a more “democratic spirit” in the South whereby “darker Americans” could secure equal rights. Bates’s concept of “change” encompasses the world; it is not restricted to the nation. Her outlook on social change resonates with the politics of World War II in which

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“changes” in the nation were heightened by the championing of democracy abroad. Somewhat presciently, Bates indicated that the “scene of major activity” would be the American South. Little did she know then that Little Rock, and more pointedly she, would be an integral part of that scene. In the early 1950s, Bates, like many Black women activists, worked for change through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In her interview with Jacoway, Bates confesses that the State Branch of the NAACP was actively trying to change “the whole darned system” (8). In this analysis, it is the “whole” social system that is damaged rather than a small part or segment, which explains why “change” in the American South for Bates represented “that great social revolution.” The NAACP worked to combat the entire system of inequality that regarded Blacks as inferior and deprived them of their equal rights. Bates underscores this point, “We concentrated, I think, on everything. This was across the board. Wherever we could, we hit it. It was no special thing, but everything, the whole system” (9). Black women’s struggles for social justice have been multidimensional. Working collaboratively with others, Black women activists have often pursued freedom, equality, and justice on multiple fronts. By the late 1950s, Bates was serving as the state president of the NAACP in Arkansas. It was in this capacity that she joined the “scene of major activity” through her close work with the “Little Rock Nine” to integrate Central High School in 1957.24 Bates recalls, “As State President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People I was in the front-line trenches” (4). As a result of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which found that “separate but equal” institutions were unconstitutional, Blacks and advocates of school desegregation expected that change would be forthcoming. Bates recalls, “We had, of course, hailed the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school integration as a great forward step in achieving true equality for our race; and we felt the school board of Little Rock, while moving all too slowly, was determined to obey the law at least in token form and make a start on integration according to plans it had formulated and announced well in advance” (3). Despite the optimism regarding the decision and the sense that the school board would “obey the law at least in token form,” the realization that the school board did not intend to adhere to the federal mandate came. In light of the school board’s resistance, efforts to desegregate public schools in Little Rock intensified during the period. With the support of the NAACP, Bates and the Little Rock Nine, along with their supporters, worked to advance the project of democracy. By bravely confronting racial discrimination

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they worked to revive the “democratic spirit.” As they struggled against undemocratic practices, hard-won progress was met with direct and often violent resistance.25 Black women activists who took a stand were routinely threatened by violence, and Daisy Bates was no different. Although crosses were burned on her property and firebombs were launched and shots fired at her home, Bates remained steadfast. The front glass window was perpetually broken. Bates recalls: And we taped it. And I had the glass put in, and they broke it out that night. Then we had those guards, window guards, made; they were a hundred dollars apiece. [unknown] But I was determined. [unknown] Well, at one time I talked to my husband. We were determined that they were not [unknown] going to chase us out of town. This was the big thing they wanted to do. Had they chased us out of town, [unknown] the movement would have died. (19)

The damage sustained by Bates’s front window is symbolic. It represents the damage that white supremacists opposed to desegregation wished to inflict upon Black bodies. It also reflects a long history of unmitigated racial violence against Blacks who refused to be silent as their rights and civil liberties were denied. The damage represents the desire among white supremacists to destroy any threats, real or imagined, to the status quo. Although purchasing “window guards” to protect themselves was one way to curtail unchecked violence, Bates and her husband resolved to remain in Arkansas. If necessary, they were willing to sacrifice their lives. In a conversation with the Little Rock Nine, Bates reveals the gravity of the situation. She remembers: I told them that we were taking a great chance, and the kids knew they were taking a great chance, because white people had gotten to where they were killing negroes, you see. This was something entirely new. And they had said they’d kill negroes; a child meant nothing. So I told them that one [unknown] of us might die in this fight. And I said to them, “If they kill me, [unknown] you would have to go on. If I die, don’t you stop.” (Jacoway 20)

Bates’s concern is not with whether she lives or dies in the struggle for school integration, but whether the struggle will continue in her absence. The directive, “If I die, don’t you stop,” reveals that Bates does not view herself as indispensable. She insists that the struggle can continue if the students and others committed to change persevere. Bates’s concerns reveals important details about the democratic leadership style adopted by many Black women activists. By imploring the students to keep pushing in her absence, Bates makes clear that with a shared commitment to ­realize

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change and combat undemocratic practices, everyone can contribute and everyone can potentially lead. The virulence of white resistance will forever be remembered as captured in the images of white crowds jeering at a defenseless but determined Elizabeth Eckford. In The Long Shadow of Little Rock, Bates observes, Only through the unbelievable outrage at Little Rock was the world brought to a sharp realization of the shameful discrimination that the world’s greatest democracy directs even against young children—in the country that boasts of being the leader of the “free world” and prides itself upon having given mankind a Constitution based upon individual dignity and liberty. (220)

With little hesitation, Bates rejects outright the prized notion of the US as representative of the “free world.” More sharply, Bates questions the legitimacy of the “liberty” and “dignity” inscribed in the nation’s Constitution. The violent resistance against desegregation efforts in Little Rock illustrates the nation’s hypocrisy. Bates insists that the nation can no longer deny the rights of its youngest citizens and claim impunity. Instead, these flagrant violations will be broadcast on the world stage and subject to international condemnation. Bates resolves, “Little Rock demonstrated the gaping discrepancy between the Declaration of ­Independence—one of the precious documents of American history—and the reality of twentiethcentury America. Despite professions of equality, America and Americans exercise racial discrimination against millions of dark American citizens practically from the day of their birth” (220). In her 1976 interview with Jacoway, however, Bates describes in retrospect some of the positive developments of the Little Rock crusade, which were unmentioned in her earlier statements. Bates explains: I think the very fact that the kids went in Central; they got in, that Faubus had thought they’d never do. And they remained there for the full year. And that opened a lot of doors that had been closed to Negroes, because this was the first time that this kind of revolution had succeeded without a doubt. And none of the children were really hurt physically. And I think that’s one of the biggest contributions, [unknown] Because in New York, you couldn’t stay in a hotel. When they opened the hotels in New York, they put Negroes on a separate floor. All the Negroes were assigned to a certain floor. (59–60)

Comparing Bates’s perspective on the Little Rock campaign in its wake in 1962 and then in 1976 shows how Bates’s thinking on the crusade evolved. In The Long Shadow of Little Rock, Bates felt that Little Rock mainly worked to magnify the gap between democracy as pledged and democracy as practiced. Later, however, Bates described Little Rock more constructively as destabilizing the racial status quo. While Bates’s early

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perspective surfaces as an impassioned response to the very existence of the crisis, her later perspective foregrounds its unexpected outcomes.26 In their resistance to unjust practices, Black women activists like Clark, Bates, and Hamer proved that democracy was an ideal worth pursuing. Although I have highlighted the parallels among these activists, I am aware that differences exist.27 Yet, with respect to their political agendas, these women have more in common. More to the point, as Black women, neither Bates’s nor Hamer’s work received the degree of acclaim accorded to the work of Black men in the Civil Rights Movement, who occupied more visible leadership positions. In their respective struggles, both Bates and Hamer sought to realize a brand of democracy that extended equal rights to Blacks, and both worked for the widespread inclusion of Blacks in US society. In the decades following World War II, perceptions of Blacks as ­un-American served to justify their treatment as second-class citizens. For Black women activists, the fight for equal rights reflected this underlying struggle for recognition as first-class citizens. In her testimony to the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer conveyed the literalness of Black women’s struggles for citizenship rights. Hamer testified, “It was the 31st of August in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to became [sic] first-class citizens” (qtd. in Levy 139). Black men and women—despite the threat of violence or death—had a history of trying to register to vote. In this respect, the act that Hamer describes is far from unusual; rather, it is indicative of Black women activists’ ongoing struggles to exercise their rights as citizens despite undemocratic practices.28 In The Long Shadow of Little Rock, Daisy Bates recognizes the narrow view of first-class citizenship held by the white power structure throughout the country. Bates critically noted, “Most Americans seem to be blind to the signs of the times, which point clearly to first-class citizenship for American Negro citizens as a prime ingredient of a democratic world of liberty and equality. Even if most Americans are unseeing, the rest of the world is not” (222). Rather explicitly, Bates argues that “liberty and equality,” elements that constitute a “democratic world” are rendered null and void in the absence of first-class citizenship for Blacks. More specifically, Bates draws attention to the glaring contradiction present in the belief that it is possible for a democracy to exist while Blacks are systematically excluded. The only consolation is the fact that for the rest of the world the contradiction is clear.29 This tendency to regard Blacks as

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un-American prompted many Black women activists to affirm their status as Americans. Rather than simply proclaiming their identity as Americans, a declaration that expresses national belonging, Black women activists went a step further and argued that democracy was their prerogative as US citizens. Black women activists supplied fitting critiques of undemocratic practices. In “Separate But Equal,” Mary McLeod Bethune provides an analysis of US citizenship that highlights its contradictions. According to Bethune, “Theoretically, to be an American citizen implies that every American citizen shall have life, liberty and [the] pursuit of happiness without anyone else’s let or hindrance. Yet, this rule does not apply equally to the Negro as it does to the white man” (209). Given the beleaguered state of race relations, the term “theoretically” functions as a qualifier—it underscores the conditional nature of the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for Blacks. Insofar as Blacks are concerned, the tentative nature of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is an outgrowth of racial discrimination. Bethune’s use of “theoretically” reveals her misgivings about the manner in which citizenship rights are granted. Her subsequent use of the word “implies” to describe the rights of an American citizen supports this contention. In scrutinizing the “rule” that sanctions “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” Bethune highlights the inconsistencies that continue to undermine the equal distribution of US citizenship rights. Based on democratic theory, all citizens are permitted certain inalienable rights, but the widespread exclusion of Blacks prohibits full access to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For Bethune, racial discrimination, which facilitates an inconsistent application of the “rule,” invalidates the premise of equal rights for all. In The Black Women Oral History Project Melnea Cass reflects upon the status on citizenship rights for Blacks. According to Cass, “They’ve been trying to work to get their equal rights with everybody else. It’s very frustrating; every time you turn around . . . you got to have a law, you got to have something to give you, that tell you that you’re free and that you’re equal to everybody else, but when you go to test it out, and it’s not true, you wonder what is wrong?” (Hill 2:351). In her analysis of the plight of Blacks, Cass expresses the dilemma of Blacks trying desperately to exercise their rights as US citizens in a nation where democratic practice does not square with democratic theory. Cass’s observations reiterate Bethune’s concern with the disparities that undermine the rights of Blacks. Cass judges severely the inconsistencies that plague democratic practice. Cass observes that while there has to be a “law” or some form

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of legislation to serve as evidence of one’s entitlement, when either is tested, the “truth” of freedom and equality is disproved. The laws fail to counter patently undemocratic practices—they sanction it. The persistent struggles of Black women activists during the period to secure their equal rights suggest that Black women activists had their sights firmly set on realizing democracy and were prepared to struggle in order to secure their constitutional rights. Septima P. Clark, Daisy Bates, and Fannie Lou Hamer, along with many others rebelled against undemocratic practices that marred the American way of life. In an effort to undercut mainstream perceptions of Blacks as un-American, many Black women activists proudly declared their Americanness and demanded equal rights as first-class citizens. In an effort to change the racial status quo, Black women activists’ critiques of US democracy stressed its contradictory nature. For many Black women activists, World War II represented an opportunity to press for democracy on two fronts. When equal rights were not forthcoming, they pressed even harder. In this respect, the Civil Rights Movement marked neither the beginning nor the end of Black women’s struggles to further the democratic project; instead, it revealed critical moments along a trajectory that continues to unfold. Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

Bates observes, “[Disillusionment] fosters ugliness and undermines the democratic spirit from which our nation draws its strength” (224). In For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Chana Kai Lee corroborates Hamer’s tendency to advocate for the rights of others. According to Lee, “It bothered her to let others down and so she always tried to do something for people. This concern for other people’s miseries and discontent also found a place in her adult character. It was these same qualities . . . that inspired her to perform service for others in her later years through civil rights activities and personal sacrifice” (7). Clark reflects, “The teaching I did at night in my efforts to help the illiterates, therefore, was not a burden to me. Actually I did it for my own sheer pleasure; to me it was a great joy to see these underprivileged folk fairly blossom forth before my eyes and to know that through my efforts they might become citizens capable of contributing much to their communities” (Echo 151–52). In Fannie Lou Hamer: A Biography, Susan Kling notes, “After being forced to leave the plantation where she worked Fannie Lou became a virtual fugitive, staying here or there with friends or distant relatives. At last the family found a bare house into which they moved. But even here, they were not left in peace. Cars full of white men armed with rifles would ride up and back in front of the house, shouting obscenities and threatening to shoot” (20). Hamer concludes, “There’s white that suffer, there’s Indian people that suffer, there’s Mexican American people that suffer, there’s Chinese people that suffer, so as Black people, we not the only ones that suffer, and I’m perfectly willing to make this country what it have [sic] to be. We gonna have to fight these battles TOGETHER” (qtd. in Kling 33–34).

158   The Black Family and Society 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

Clark also credits her organizational work as providing necessary preparation for the struggle against injustice. Clark recalls, “[In Columbia] my participation in the programs of the various civic groups not only strengthened my determination to make my own life count for something in the fight to aid the underprivileged toward the enjoyment of fuller lives, but also gave me excellent training in procedures that could be used effectively in that struggle” (Echo 76–77). Clark remembers, “Our workshops, then, explored subjects not only of great current interest but of a ‘crisis’ nature, and since such issues are highly controversial, many persons who attended were taking considerable personal risk, not only in coming to Highlander but also in following up the work in their home communities” (Echo 178). Clark confirms, “Highlander workshops weren’t set up merely to theorize and ponder problems; they expected and demanded that theory and discussion and decision be galvanized into action and achievement” (Echo 134). Clark explains, “The Highlander program cut across racial barriers completely in its striving toward the goal of real democracy. It held, without fuss and fanfare, that freedom of thought, enjoyment of equal rights to a livelihood, an education, health, cultural interests, public services constituted a reaffirmation of democracy in its finest sense” (Echo 179). Clark proudly states, “We are working, yes, toward the establishing and bulwarking of a democracy, and if these things are necessary steps in the accomplishment of that undertaking, then I am not harassed” (Echo 12). Clark maintains, “As a dedicated . . . member of the Highlander staff, I feel that the persecutions that we have undergone are really not persecutions to me. I feel that before a person goes into work of this kind he must search his soul and decide once and for all that this is the price he may have to pay for the freedom he is trying to establish for all” (Echo 11–12). Clark insists, “I do not like to be described as a Negro leader fighting for the integration of the schools, the churches, the transportation facilities, the political parties, or whatnot. I don’t consider myself a fighter. I’d prefer to be looked on as a worker, a woman who loves her fellow man, white and Negro alike, and yellow, red, and brown, and is striving with her every energy, working—not fighting—in the true spirit of fellowship to lift him to a higher level of attainment and appreciation and enjoyment of life” (Echo 132). In For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, Chana Kai Lee describes the difficult circumstances that characterized Hamer’s childhood. Lee observes, “For the Townsends and other sharecroppers in predominantly black Sunflower County, hard work, poverty, exploitation, and violence were stark realities. Sharecropping, a postbellum system designed to replace slavery as a cheap source of labor, was the lowest rung on the ladder of farm tenancy” (2). Neil McMillen conducted an interview with Hamer for the Mississippi Oral History Program at The University of Southern Mississippi. The interview is found in the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive. There is no pagination on the transcript. According to Phyl Garland, “She worked in the cotton fields, but also served as time-keeper, maintaining records of working hours, the number of bales picked by each hand and the amount of pay due each person” (28–29). Hamer admits, “All of those things, when they would happen, would make me sick in the pit of my stomach and year after year, everytime [sic] something would happen it would make me more and more aware of what would have to be done in the State of Mississippi” (O’Dell 234). Lee explains, “SNCC was the organization that had given her a chance to move beyond the Delta and to begin dreaming about another life, one free of racial oppression” (139).

“Work to Be Done”   159 17. Reflecting upon her unwillingness to compromise, Hamer maintains, “I didn’t call myself saying nothing smart, but I couldn’t understand it. I answered the only way I could . . .” (McMillen). 18. Lee concurs, “Hamer’s own response to harassment was to speak out and continue working—to stand her ground. Partly in recognition that violence was a fact of life for the Jim Crow South, and partly in stubborn refusal to display fear . . .” (68). 19. In “A New Voice in American Democracy,” Linda Reed notes, “Hamer did not speak only for African Americans but for all Americans who felt left out of the American Dream. She believed in social change, and she believed in crossing boundaries to accomplish tasks related to social change. Her own poverty did not prevent her from becoming a catalyst for change” (258). 20. When Hamer is asked about the membership of the MFDP, she insists, “No, it wasn’t racial exclusive [sic] because we tried to include poor blacks and whites and any other body that was really concerned about real changes” (McMillen). 21. The year of Daisy Bates’s birth is contested. I have used the date indicated in Bates’s oral history interview with Elizabeth Jacoway in 1976. 22. In The Long Shadow of Little Rock, Bates notes, “From the beginning the State Press expanded its crusading role on an ever widening front. It fought to free Negroes from muddy, filthy streets, slum housing, menial jobs, and injustice in the courtrooms” (38). 23. In 1947, Alice Dunnigan became the first Black White House correspondent. ­Dunnigan believed that she could raise awareness among Blacks through journalism. In The Black Women Oral History Project, Dunnigan confides, “As a writer I had hoped to perform sort of a watchdog function for black communities, publicizing and protesting injustices imposed upon black society, and to suggest a course of action for correcting these impositions” (Hill 3:98). In particular, Dunnigan’s wish to expose racial discrimination draws upon the legacy of journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett, who used her published articles in The Memphis Free Speech and pamphlets to expose the racist violence directed at Blacks during the 1890s. 24. Bates’s organizational work was not limited to the NAACP, however, in her interview with Jacoway, Bates indicates her involvement in “The National Council of Negro Women, the YWCA and the Urban League and other organizations” (5). 25. While I will not recount the events that surround the Little Rock crisis because I believe that this is a historic event with which most are familiar, I will consider a few details surrounding the struggle that are most pertinent. 26. In her interview with Jacoway fourteen years after her memoir was published, Bates grants, “Things have changed now. You can ride downtown with my husband, and you are not disturbed by the police. We’ve changed the law; we have the laws on our side. And if you want to be friends with a Negro person, you can, without being afraid” (52). 27. In “Builders of a New South: Negro Heroines of Dixie Play a Major Role in Challenging Racist Traditions,” Phyl Garland contrasts the recognition given to Daisy Bates and Fannie Lou Hamer. Garland states, “Some, like Mrs. Daisy Bates, who led the Little Rock Nine to fame, have made their mark on the pages of progress to the acclaim of a nation. But in Mississippi and other dreadful pockets of oppression throughout the South, the fight has fallen to countless, nameless black women who wage their battle on a day-to-day basis, far from the glory and occasional glamor [sic] of the civil rights hierarchy. As one of those who has accepted this burden, Fannie Lou Hamer believes she has a right to speak for these people” (27). 28. As early as the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 when Black men gained the right to vote, at least nominally, and as late as 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote, Black women made attempts to access the ballot and thereby claim their rights as first-class citizens.

160   The Black Family and Society 29. John Hope Franklin reiterates this point in “America’s Window to the World: Her Race Problem.” According to Franklin, “We, not the Russians, have been proclaiming to the world for more than a century and a half that we subscribe to the doctrine of equality of all men. We have, therefore, set ourselves a goal that we have not attained and which a considerable number of Americans actively oppose. And this the entire world knows . . .” (Levy 24).

Works Consulted Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1962. Print. Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. University of Southern Mississippi. “An Oral History with Fannie Lou Hamer.” 1972. Neil McMillen, v. 32. Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive. Web. Clark, Septima. Echo In My Soul. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1962. Print. —. Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Navarro: Wild Trees Press, 1986. Print. Documenting the American South. “Oral History Interview with Daisy Bates.” 1976. Elizabeth Jacoway. Series G. Southern Women. Southern Oral History Program Collection. The University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Web. Documenting the South: Oral Histories of the American South. “Oral History Interview with Julian Bond.” Elizabeth Gritter. Southern Oral History Program. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 1999. Web. Egerton, John. A Mind to Stay Here: Profiles from the South. London: The Macmillan Company, 1970. Print. Estes, Steve. I Am a Man! Race, Manhood and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. Print. Evers-Williams, Myrlie. Watch Me Fly. What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999. Print. Franklin, John Hope. “America’s Window to the World: Her Race Problem.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Ed. Peter B. Levy. Westport: Praeger, 1992. 22–24. Print. Gantenbein, James W., ed. Documentary Background of World War II, 1931– 1941. New York: Columbia UP, 1948. Print. Garland, Phyl. “Builders of a New South.” Ebony Magazine Aug. 1966: 27–37. Print. Height, Dorothy. Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Print. Hill, Ruth Edmonds, ed. The Black Women Oral History Project from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College. 10 vols. Westport: Meckler, 1991. Print. Honey, Maureen, ed. Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1999. Print. James, Jennifer C. A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2007. Print.

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Katz, William Loren. The Negro in World War II. Comp. John D. Silvera. New York: Arno Press and the New York Times. 1969. Print. Kling, Susan. Fannie Lou Hamer: A Biography. Chicago: Women for Racial and Economic Equality, 1979. Print. Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. Print. Levy, Peter B. ed. Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Greenwood P, 1992. Print. McCluskey, Audrey Thomas, and Elaine M. Smith, eds. Mary McLeod Bethune: Building a Better World: Essays and Selected Documents. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. Print. Morehouse, Maggi. Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: Black Men and Women Remember World War II. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000. Print. O’Dell, J. H. “Life in Mississippi: an Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer.” Freedomways 4 (Second Quarter 1965): 231–42. Print. Parks, Rosa. Quiet Strength. The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994. Print. Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Interview.” Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. Westport: Praeger, 1992. 98–99. Print. Reed, Linda. “A New Voice in American Democracy.” Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Ed. Martha H. Swain, et al. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 2003. 249–67. Print. Riggs, Marcia Y., ed. Can I Get a Witness?: Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997. Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1987. Print. Shockley, Megan Taylor. “Working for Democracy: Working-Class AfricanAmerican Women, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in Detroit, 1940–1954” Michigan Historical Review 29:2 (Fall 2003): 125–57. Print. Wernick, Robert, et al. Blitzkrieg: World War II. Alexandria: Time-Life Books, 1977. Print. Wynn, Neil A. The Afro-American and the Second World War. Revised Edition. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1993. Print.

Contributors Latrica Best is an assistant professor of Pan-African Studies and also holds a joint appointment with the Sociology Department at the University of Louisville. Dr. Best’s expertise is in the area of race and gender differences in population health across the life course. Her recent work explores the impact of psychosocial factors in late-life chronic disease experience in both the United States and in Ghana. She also conducts research examining possible methodological issues in studying race and biological markers in social science surveys. Prior to her arrival in Louisville, Dr. Best was a National Institute on Aging Postdoctoral Fellow at the Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California’s Davis School of Gerontology. She teaches courses in The Black Family, Social Contexts of Aging, Women and Global Health, and Research Methods. Rockell Brown, PhD (Wayne State University) is an associate professor of communications and graduate advisor for the School of Communication at Texas Southern University. She is the author of Brown, R. & Campbell, K. (2014). Representin’ the ladies: A negotiated response to Tyler Perry’s portrayals of African-American female characters. In J.S.C. Bell and R. Jackson (Eds.), Interpreting Tyler Perry: Perspectives on Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (pp. 270–287). New York, NY: Routledge; and Campbell, C.P., LeDuff, K.M., Jenkins, C.D. & Brown, R.A. (2012). Race and news: Critical perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge. James L. Conyers, Jr., PhD, is the director of the African American Studies Program, director of the Center for African American Culture, and university professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston. He is the editor of the recently published volume, Charles H. Houston: An Interdisciplinary Study of Civil Rights Leadership (2012).

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Sarita Davis, PhD (Cornell University) is an associate professor and graduate program director at Georgia State University in the Department of African American Studies. She is the author of: Davis, S. & TuckerBrown, A. (2013). The Effects of Social Determinants on Black Women’s HIV Risk: HIV is Bigger than Biology. Journal of Black Studies, 44: 273–289 and Davis, S. (2012). The Heightening Effect of Race, Class, and Gender on HIV Exposure among low-income Black Women. Journal of Race and Policy, Spring/Summer, 8 (1): 67–86. Rita Kiki Edozie, PhD (New School for Social Research) is professor of international relations at Michigan State University’s James Madison College of Public Affairs and director of MSU’s African American and African Studies. She is a Lilly Teaching Fellow 2007–8 and CIC-Academic Leadership Fellow, 2011–12. She is author, coauthor, and/or editor of five books, including The African Union’s Africa: New Pan African Initiatives in Global Governance (2014) and Reconstructing the Third Wave of Democracy: Comparative African Democratic Politics (2009), as well as “The Sixth Zone: the African Diaspora and the African Union (AU)’s Global Era Pan Africanism” in Journal of African American Studies (Volume 16, Number 2, Pages 268–299, 2012) and several othr journal articles and book chapters in research topics that include the comparative politics and international relations of Africa, global development, democratization, and pan-Africana Studies political thought. Theresa Rajack-Talley, PhD (University of Kentucky) is an associate professor and director of graduate studies, in the Department of PanAfrican Studies, at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript titled Poverty is About a Person Not Just a Statistic: Human Agency, Women and Caribbean Households. (Accepted/forthcoming, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers). Siobhan Smith, PhD (University of Missouri at Columbia) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Louisville. She is the author of: D’Silva, M. U., Smith, S. E., & Nikam, G. (2013). Traditional media, social media, and social change in India: The free Binayak Sen campaign. In R. D. Berenger (Ed.), Social media go to war: Civil Unrest, Rebellion and Revolution in the Age of Twitter (pp. 237–248). Spokane, Washington: Marquette Books.

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Courtney Thompson, PhD (Purdue University) is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. Currently, she is working on her book manuscript tentatively titled “We Are Fighting for Democracy”: Black Women Activists and the Pursuit of All Things Equal, 1920s–Present. The book reflects her broader research interests in the African American literary tradition, American political discourse, progressive movements, and Black feminist theory. Jason Thompson, PhD (University of Nebraska at Lincoln) is an assistant professor in the Department of Speech Communication Arts and Sciences at Brooklyn College - City University of New York. His research interest focuses on how people in personal and family relationships communicatively provide and obtain support both during and after the experience of various challenging life events. He is the author of: Thompson, J., & Brown, R. (in press). Examining Memorable Messages in the African American Family: Coping with Prejudice and (2013) Tangled in a complex web of relationships: Athletic/Academic advisors negotiating privacy disclosure warnings with college student-athletes. NACADA Journal. 33, 33–45. Marcia Walker-McWilliams, PhD (University of Chicago) is currently a visiting scholar in African American Studies at the University of Houston. She is at work on her first book manuscript,a biography of labor leader, women’s rights activist, civil rights activist, and minister Rev. Addie Wyatt. Additionally, she is the author of “Faith in the Struggle: Rev. Addie Wyatt and the Fight for Labor Civil Rights and Women’s Rights.” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2012, and “Wyatt, Addie.” American National Biography. Oxford University Press, April 2014. Vincent Willis, PhD (Emory University) is a visiting scholar in the African American Studies Program at the University of Houston. He is the author of “Beyond the Binary: African American Education and Black Youth Activism after the Brown Decision,” in Using Past as Prologue: Contemporary Perspectives on African American Educational History, edited by Christopher Span, Dionne Danns, and Michelle Purdy. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.

Index Pages with tables are indicated by a “T” achievement, memorable messages on, 33, 35, 45T, 46T activists. See black women activists Adichie, Chimamanda African worldview, perspective on, 83 Americanah, 3, 67–85 Half of a Yellow Sun, 79 TED talk by, 71–72, 79 AEA (American Evaluation Association), cultural competence statement by, 126–27, 132T–133T, 134–35 African/a Worldview, 83, 131, 131T, 132T–133T, 134–35 African Americans, as prototypes and exemplars, 104–5 African Diasporas, in Americanah, 67–68, 71, 74, 83–84 Africana Studies, 3, 127–28 Afrocentric/Africentric research methods, 129–31, 130T, 132T–133T Americanah (Adichie), 3 African Americans vs. American Africans, 75–76 criticisms of, 76–77 engaging race through White Americans, 76–79, 84–85 film adaptation of, 85 hair as metaphor in, 69, 70, 71–72, 77, 82 immigrant experiences as subtheme in, 79–83 importance of, 83–84 racialism as theme of, 67–71, 72, 73–74 “America’s Window to the World” (Franklin), 160n. 29 Asante, M. on beliefs about research, 130 Augusta-Dupar, Cora M., on HBCUs, 105, 109, 112

Banks, William, on black intellectuals, 57, 58 Barge, J.K., 24 Bates, Daisy, 150–56, 159n. 24, 159nn. 21, 159nn. 26 “Builders of a New South” (Garland), 149, 159n. 27 on determination to effect change, 151 on determination to stand up to violence, 153 on discrimination, 154 on Little Rock crusade, 154 The Long Shadow of Little Rock, 139, 140–41, 150, 154, 159n. 22 on possibility of death, 153 behavior, memorable messages on, 31–32, 35, 38–39, 44T, 47T Berube, Michael, 50 on black public intellectuals, 60 on roles of black intellectuals, 59 Best, Latrica, 3, 87 BET (Black Entertainment Television), 106, 107, 108, 118, 120. See also College Hill (BET) Bethune, Mary McLeod, 156 “Beyond the Nationalism of Fools” (Reed), 50–51 Bible memorable messages from, 29–30, 34–35, 44T, 46T reading by slaves, 20n. 28 Billingsley, Andrew, on leadership from black intellectuals, 57–58 black academics. See also black intellectuals Africana Studies and, 127–28 black studies programs and, 57–58 challenges for, 54–55 “Negro studies” vs. “traditional American” scholarship, choosing, 56–57 roles of, 61–62

167

168   The Black Family and Society black children. See memorable messages, as familial lessons black (enslaved) children, learning tactics of bargaining as tactic, 13 bartering as tactic, 13, 19n. 4 Henry Cheatham, 14–15 competition/personal exchange as tactics, 11–12 compromising as tactic, 15–16 Hannah Craft, 7, 9, 10, 19n. 11 James Curry, 10, 18 Frederick Douglass, 7, 10–11, 11–12, 13, 17–18 enslaved children, role of, 7 formal education, definition, 19n. 5 Sella Martin, 15–16 motivation for literacy, 8–10 Richard Parker, 12, 13 Aaron J. Robinson, 14 Edward Walker, 14 white adults as teachers, 13 white children, socialization of, 16–18 white children as teachers, 10–12, 13, 14, 15 Black families. See also memorable messages, as familial lessons feminization of poverty and, 3, 87–99 black intellectuals, 49–62 between academia and public worlds, 60 “Beyond the Nationalism of Fools,” 50–51 black academics, roles of, 61–62 black public intellectuals, definition, 60 black studies programs and black faculty, 57–58 black women, role of, 54 challenges for African American scholars, 54–55 Michael Eric Dyson, 49, 59 Henry Louis Gates, 49, 58–59, 60 bell hooks, 49, 58–59, 61 lacking debate amongst, 60–61 lacking intellectual freedom, 56 as leaders, responsibility to uplift masses, 53–54 Toni Morrison, 60, 61 “Negro studies” vs. “traditional American” scholarship, choosing between, 56–57

new black intellectuals vs. black public intellectuals, 49, 58–59 “The New Intellectuals,” 50 nineteenth century to Civil Rights era, 53–56 post-Civil Rights Movement, 57–62 “Public Academy,” 50, 59 “public,” definition of, 61 public intellectuals, definition, 59 representation and authenticity of, 49–52 research agenda of, 51–52 role of, 59, 62 slavery and, 55–56 Cornel West, 49, 59, 60 “What are the drums saying, Booker T?”, 50 Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (Banks), 58 black public intellectuals definition, 60 lacking debate amongst, 60–61 new black intellectuals vs., 49, 58–59 “public,” definition of, 61 Black/racial feminization of poverty, 91–94, 93–94 black studies programs, 57–58 black women activists, 139–57 Africana womanism, 4 Daisy Bates, 139, 140–41, 150–56 Mary McLeod Bethune, 156 Septima P. Clark, 139, 140, 143–46 Fannie Lou Hamer, 139, 141–43, 147–50 journalists as, 151, 159n. 23 Rosa Parks, 139, 140 The Black Women Oral History Project (Cass), 156–57, 159n. 23 Blaine (fictional character), 75–76, 84–85 Blood, Rebecca, 107 Bond, Julian, 148 The Bondwoman’s Narrative (Craft), 9 Boynton, Robert S., on black public intellectuals, 50, 60 Brach, C., on cultural competence, 125–26 breast-cancer memorable messages, 24 Brenner, Joanna, on minority women and poverty, 89 Brooklyn College Institutional Review Board, 27

Index   169 Brown, James (“Say It Loud”), 32, 36, 45T Brown, John, slave narrative of, 13 Brown-Burton, Rockell, 2, 21 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, 141, 142, 152 Browne, Idesha, 106–7 “Builders of a New South” (Garland), 149, 159n. 27 Carroll, K., on African Worldview, 131 Carruthers, J., on Africana scholars, 128 Cass, Melnea, 156–57 Cheatham, Henry, slave narrative of, 14–15 Civil Rights Movement black intellectuals during, 53–56, 57–62 black women activists during, 139, 140–43, 147–56 Clark, Septima P., 143–46 on democracy, 146 Echo in My Soul, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145 on Highlander’s aims, 145 on value of service from parents, 144 cognitive directives, memorable messages on, 34–35 College Hill (BET), 3, 106–13. See also research, on HBCUs in media cast members, opinions of, 106–7 focus of, 108, 113–14, 117–18 research method, 110–13 research method, data, 116T–117T staff members, opinions of, 107 textual analysis of, 108–9 viewers, opinions of, 107–8 Collins, P.H., on Black families and poverty, 94 colonialism, African Diasporas and, 70 community. See also Black/racial feminization of poverty activism and, 145, 151, 159n. 23 Africana Studies and, 128 Afrocentricity and, 129, 130T art and music, using, 39 black intellectuals/scholars, roles in, 49–50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 61 cultural competence and, 126 education and, 5, 8, 157n. 3 family structure and, 97 HBCUs and, 118

religion and faith communities, importance of, 37 slave community norms, 9–10, 16 Conyers, James, on public intellectuals, 59 Cooper, Anna Julia on representing race, 53–54 on role of black women, 54 The Cosby Show (TV show), 108 Craft, Hannah, slave narrative of, 7, 9, 10, 19n. 11 Crisis of the Black Intellectual (Cruse), 3 Crummell, Alexander, 53 Cruse, Harold, 3 cultural competence, 125–36 AEA, cultural competence statement by, 126–27, 132T–133T, 134–35 African/a Worldview, 131, 131T, 132T–133T, 134–35 Africana Studies, 127–28 Afrocentric/Africentric research methods, 129–31, 130T, 132T– 133T assumptions, worldview vs. methodology, 129 cultural sensitivity, definition, 125 culture, importance of, 127 integration of, into other disciplines, 135–36 method concepts, 132T–133T multiculturalism, definition, 125 positivism, 126 worldview vs. methodology, 128–29 cultural sensitivity, definition, 125 Curry, James, slave narrative of, 10, 18 Curt (fictional character), 77 “The Danger of the Single Story,” TED talk by Adichie, 71–72, 79 Daniel, J.E., on racism experienced by children, 26 Daniel, J.L., on racism experienced by children, 26 Davis, Sarita, 3, 125 Dead Aid (Moyo), 77 democratic freedoms, black women activists and Daisy Bates, 139, 140–41, 150–56 Mary McLeod Bethune, 156 Melnea Cass, 156–57 citizenship rights, 155–57, 156

170   The Black Family and Society Septima P. Clark, 139, 140, 143–46 costs of struggles for, 142 democracy, workers and, 146 education and, 145–46 Fannie Lou Hamer, 139, 141–43, 147–50 inclusivity of, 143 journalism, racism and, 151 Rosa Parks, 139, 140 voting rights, 148–50 A Different World (TV show), 103, 106, 108 The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Lott), 61–62 Dixon, V., on assumptions in research, 129 Douglass, Frederick master’s children’s tutor and, 17–18 overseers and, 17 self-educating tactics of, 13 slave narrative of, 7, 10–11 Drumline (movie), 103, 106 Du Bois, W.E.B. on racial prejudice, 22–23 on responsibility of black leadership, 53 Dunnigan, Alice, 151, 159n. 23 Dyson, Michael Eric, 49, 59 Echo in My Soul (Clark), 139, 140, 143, 144, 145 Eckford, Elizabeth, 154 Edmonds, Kenneth “Babyface,” 106, 122n. 3 Edmonds, Tracey, 106, 109–10, 122n. 3 education. See also black (enslaved) children, learning tactics of HBCUs, achievements of, 103 HBCUs in the media, 103–4 Highlander Folk School, 144–46 literacy and citizenship schools, promotion of, 140, 142, 143–46 memorable messages on, 33, 35, 38, 45T, 46T poverty and, 93 public school desegregation, promotion of, 141, 152–53 sharecropping and, 147 Education and Social Change (Rury), 17 Effinger, M., 26, 38 Ellis, B.H., 24 En Vogue, memorable messages from, 32 entertainers, memorable messages from, 32, 36, 39, 45T, 47T

Ezeala-Harrison, Fidel, on Black feminization of poverty, 91–92 “The Failure of the Negro Intellectual” (Frazier), 56 faith and religion, memorable messages on, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 44T, 46T families. See also memorable messages, as familial lessons coping strategies by, against prejudice, 2, 36–40 definitions, 1–2 family stories, importance of, 25–27, 39–40 intergenerational memorable messages, 25–27, 33–39 Fannie Lou Hamer: A Biography (Kling), 157nn. 4–5 Faucette, Lindsey, slave narrative of, 13 feminization of poverty, Black families and, 87–99 Black feminization of poverty, 91–92, 93–94 causes of, 88–89 cultural biases in assumptions, 94–96 origin of term, 87–88 poverty rates, 1980s, 88 statistics, minority female-headed households, 89–92 study methods, criticisms of, 96–98, 99 For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lee), 139, 158n. 12 Ford, L.A., 24 Franklin, John Hope on America’s race problem, 160n. 29 on problem of black scholars, 54 on role of black intellectuals, 55 on slave codes, 7 Fraser, I., on cultural competence, 125–26 Frazier, E. Franklin, on failure of Negro intellectuals, 55–56 “Free Your Mind” (En Vogue), 32 Freedomways (O’Dell), 141 Garland, Phyl, 149, 158n. 14, 159n. 27 Garvey, Marcus, memorable messages from, 32–33, 36 Gates, Henry Louis, 49, 58–59, 60

Index   171 Georgia, slave codes in, 7 God, memorable messages about, 29–30, 33–34 Goodell, William, 6 Gutman, Herbert G., 8, 13, 16 Half of a Yellow Sun (Adichie), 79 Hall, C.H., slave narrative of, 14 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 139, 141–43, 147–50, 158n. 13 “Builders of a New South” (Garland), 149, 159n. 27 on democracy, 149–50 Fannie Lou Hamer: A Biography (Kling), 157nn. 4–5 For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lee), 139, 158n. 12 “A New Voice in American Democracy” (Reed), 159n. 19 on plantation life, 147 on voting, 148 Hanchard, Michael, on defining “public,” 61 Harris, Abram, slave narrative of, 13 Harris, David R., on poverty and Black families, 94 HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges/ Universities), 103–6. See also College Hill (BET) Highlander Folk School, 144–46, 158nn. 7–10 Hill, R., on Africana Studies, 127–28 Holloway, Jonathan Scott, on black intellectuals, 53, 62 hooks, bell, 49, 58–59, 61 “How to Write About Africa” (Wainaina), 83 Ifemelu (fictional character), 71–79 as “Americanah,” 71 Blaine and, 75–76 blogging by, 69, 72–73 blogging by, about Nigeria, 82–83 blogging by, about race, 73–74, 76 musings by, 68 as “non-American Black,” 72 Obinze and, 70, 71, 79–83 on race and white privilege, 77–79 illiteracy, of slaves, 7 immigrant life, in US and Britain African Americans vs. American Africans, 75–76

African vs. African American voices, 74 as theme of Americanah, 67–68, 70, 72, 73, 79–83 Jacoway, Elizabeth, 150–51, 154, 159n. 26 Jim Crow era, 37, 159n. 18 Johnson, Robert, 108 Katz, Michael, on public policy on poverty, 97 Kelley, Robin, on black intellectuals, 51–52 Kelly, Erin, study by, 88 Kelsey (fictional character), 78 Kiki Edozie, Rita, 3, 67 Kimberly (fictional character), 77 King, Jr., Martin Luther, memorable messages by, 32, 36 King, Wilma, 6 Kling, Susan, 143, 157nn. 4–5 Knapp, M.L., 21, 28 Koenig Kellas, J., 25 Kofi (fictional character), 75 Kwanzaa, 130 Langston University, VSU, 106 Laura (fictional character), 77–78 leadership, value of cultivating, 146 Lee, Chana Kai, 139, 149, 157n. 2, 158n. 12, 158n. 16, 159n. 18 Lewis, Oscar, “culture of poverty” idea by, 97 Lin, Chih Ann, on poverty and Black families, 94 The Long Shadow of Little Rock (Bates), 139, 140–41, 150, 154, 159n. 22 Lott, Eric, on defining “public,” 61 Ma’at, 130 Martin, Sella, slave narrative of, 15–16 Martin, Trayvon, 35 Maslin, Janet, on Americanah’s plot, 76–77 Mazrui, Ali, 70 McLanahan, Sara, study by, 88 McMillen, Neil, 147, 148, 158n. 13, 159n. 17 Medved, C.E., 24–25 memorable messages, as familial lessons, 2, 21–41 on behavior, 31–32, 35, 38–39 as coping mechanisms, 22, 36–40

172   The Black Family and Society definition and purpose of, 21–22 of faith and religion, 29–30, 33–34, 37 family stories and, 24–25, 39–40 intergenerational sharing of, 25–27 Nommo, definition, 26, 37, 130 racial prejudice, during Jim Crow era, 22–24 research on, 27–29 on self-concept, 30–31, 34–35, 37–38 on self-improvement, 33, 35 using popular sayings, 32–33, 36, 39 military service, Blacks and, 140–41, 155 Mississippi, sharecropping in, 141, 147–49 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 150, 159n. 20 Mississippi Oral History Program, 158n. 13 Morrison, Toni Morrison, 60, 61 Moynihan, Danielle P., on family structure in Black communities, 97 Moyo, Dambisa, 77 multiculturalism, definition, 125 Murji, Karim, on “racialization,” 68–69 NAACP, women activists and, 152 Native Son (blogger), 107, 108 new black intellectuals, 49, 58–59, 61 “new liberal imperialism,” critique of, 79 “A New Voice in American Democracy” (Reed), 159n. 19 “The New Intellectuals” (Boynton), 50 Nguzo Saba, 130 Nigeria, in Americanah, 79–81 Nommo, 26, 37, 130 NTU, 130 Nyong’o, Lupita, 85 Obama, Barack in Americanah, 74, 76 memorable messages from, 47T Obinze (fictional character), 70, 71, 79–83. See also Ifemelu O’Dell, J.H., 141, 147 Office of Minority Health, standards by, 136 The Other African Americans (Shaw-Taylor and Tuch), 68 Palmer, Phyllis, on racial feminization of poverty, 91

parents. See memorable messages, as familial lessons; research, on coping with racial prejudice Paris, Peter, on importance of religion, 37 Parker, Richard, slave narrative of, 12, 13 Parks, Rosa, 139, 140 Parrott-Sheffer, Adam, on criticism of College Hill, 108–9, 111, 118, 119 Pearce, Diane, study by, 87–88 personal conduct, memorable messages on, 31, 35, 38–39, 44T, 47T police, killings by. See protection, memorable messages on political power, 148 popular sayings, memorable messages using, 32–33, 36, 39, 45T, 47T positivism, 126 poverty. See also feminization of poverty, Black families and causations of, 94–96 “culture of poverty” notion, 97 family structure and, 88, 89, 94 “glass ceiling” and, 88 of men, 92 of Native American female-headed households, 100n. 1 poverty studies, criticisms of, 96–97 recession and, 93–94 social class, education and, 93–94 statistics, minority women in, 89–92 statistics, 1980s, 88 stereotyping/stigmatization of poor, 94 wages and earnings growth, 91 prejudice, coping with, 2, 36–40. See also memorable messages, as familial lessons prominent figures, memorable messages from, 32–33, 45T, 47T protection, memorable messages on, 31–32, 35, 38–39, 44T, 47T “Proud to be Black” (Run DMC), 32 psychological avoidance, memorable messages on, 32, 38–39, 44T “Public Academy” (Berube), 50, 59 race, perspectives of Africans on, 3 blogging about, 73–74 new African Diasporas, 67–68, 71, 74, 83–84 non-American Black, 72–73 postcolonial Nigerian perspective, 82–83

Index   173 “racialization,” 68–71, 84 structural racism and transnationalism, 80–83 “Raceteenth or Various Observations about American Blacks (or those formerly known as Negroes)”, 72, 74 racial/Black feminization of poverty, 91–94, 93–94 racial discrimination, 143, 150, 152–53 racial prejudice, African American families and W.E.B. Du Bois on, 22–23 family stories, 22–24 during Jim Crow era, 23 racial feminization of poverty, 89–94 research discussion, 36–41 research on, 27–29 research results, 29–36, 44T–47T racial pride, memorable message on, 36. See also popular sayings, memorable messages using Ragster, Laverne, in College Hill, 107, 119 Rajack-Talley, Theresa, 3, 87, 95 Ready From Within (Clark), 139 The Real World (TV show), 108, 120 Reardon, K., 21 Reed, Adolph, on black intellectuals, 50, 60–61 Reed, Linda, 159n. 19 research, on coping with racial prejudice, 25–47 discussion, 36–40 future research, 40–41 intergenerational memorable messages, 25–27 limitations, 40 memorable messages, studies on, 24–25 method, 27–29 results, 29–36 results (data), 44T–47T research, on HBCUs in media data, intercoder reliabilities, 111, 113T episode-level references, 112–13, 118–19 future research, 121–22 goals, academic vs. social, 109–10, 114–15, 116T–117T, 117 goals vs. anti-goals, 117–18 method, 110–13

research limitations, 121 research summary, 119–21 sample size, 110–11 scene-level references, 112, 113–14, 116T–117T study, of mission/vision statements, 105, 112 research, on poverty and Black families literature assumptions, 95–96 study methods, criticisms of, 96–99 research frameworks, African-centered, 125–36 AEA, cultural competence statement by, 126–27, 132T–133T, 134–35, 136 African Worldview, 131, 131T, 132T–133T, 134–35, 136 Africana Studies, 127–28 Afrocentric/Africentric research methods, 129–31, 130T, 132T–133T cultural competence, definition, 125–26 cultural sensitivity, definition, 125 culture, importance of, 127 integration of, into other disciplines, 135–36 method concepts, 132T–133T multiculturalism, definition, 125 positivism, 126 worldview vs. methodology, 128–29 Resnicow, K., on cultural sensitivity, 125 Reviere, R., on Africana research, 130–31, 130T Ritterhouse, J., 23 Rivers, Eugene, on black intellectuals, 50, 51 Robinson, Aaron J., slave narrative of, 14 Run DMC, memorable messages from, 32 Rural Sociological Society Task Force on Persistent Poverty in Rural America (1993), 97 Rury, John, 17 Rustin, Bayard, 58 “Say It Loud” (song), 32, 45T Schiele, J., on teaching Afrocentric knowledge, 135–36 School Daze (movie), 106 Schwartz, Marie Jenkins, 6, 7 segregation, during Jim Crow era, 23 self-concept, memorable messages on, 30–31, 34–35, 37–38, 44T, 46T

174   The Black Family and Society self-confidence, memorable messages on, 30, 34, 38, 44T, 46T self-improvement, memorable messages on, 33, 35, 38, 45T Self Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Williams), 9 self-value, memorable messages on, 31, 34, 38, 44T, 46T “Separate But Equal” (Bethune), 156 service to others, value of, 144 Shan (fictional character), 75–76, 84–85 sharecropping, in Mississippi, 141, 147–49 Sharp, A., 23 Shaw-Taylor, Yoku, 68 “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired” (Hamer), 148 Sidel, Ruth, on stigmatization of poor, 94 Simon, B., 23 slavery. See also black (enslaved) children, learning tactics of adapting to, 5–6, 39 black intellectuals and, 55–56 discontent with, 7 dominant-subordinate model of, 18 education of slaves, 10–11, 14 Jim Crow era after, 23 masters, prevention of learning by, 16–17 masters as teachers, 13–14 overseers, prevention of learning by, 14–15, 16–17 resistance to, by children, 8, 9–10 slave codes, 6–7, 8 social norms of, 7, 8, 16–17, 18 Smith, S., 24 Smith, Siobhan, 3, 103 Smitherman, G., 26 Solomos, John, on “racialization,” 68–69 Southern Oral History Program Collection, 151 Southern University, 106, 118–19 spirituality and religion, as coping mechanisms, 36–37 statistics minority women in poverty, 89–92, 90 chart 1 net worth, Black women, 93–94 poverty rates, 88 Stohl, C., 21 Stone, E., 40

Talley, Clarence, 95 television, HBCUs on, 103–4. See also College Hill (BET); research, on HBCUs episode-level analysis, of College Hill, 112–13 scene analysis, of College Hill, 111–12 theology, memorable messages from, 29–30, 34, 44T, 46T Things Around My Neck (Adichie), 71–72 Thompson, Courtney, 4, 139 Thompson, Jason, 2, 21 Tuch, Steven, 68 University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), 106, 119 Voice from the South (Cooper), 54 voting rights activitism, 142, 148–50, 159n. 28 Wade, Donald, 118–19 Wainaina, Binyavanga, 83 Walker, Edward, slave narrative of, 14 Walker, Jon, 107 Walker-McWilliams, Marcia, 2–3, 49 Washington, Booker T., 36 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 151, 159n. 23 West, Cornel, 49, 59, 60 “What are the drums saying, Booker T?” (Reed), 50 white children awareness of slavery norms, 16–17 schooling of, 17–18 as teachers of enslaved children, 10–12, 13, 14, 15 white privilege in Americanah, 73, 77–79 citizenship rights and, 155 racial bias in poverty, 89–90, 91, 92, 100n. 4 Wilentz, Sean, 51 Wilkerson, Isabel, on unwritten rules, 23 Wilkins, Roy, 58 Williams, Heather Andrea, 5, 9–10, 10–11 Willis, Vincent, 2, 5 Winant, H., 23 worldview, of researcher, 128–29. See also African/a Worldview