Racism

Newark, Asbury Park, and Paterson all suffered in the second half of the 20th century due to the failure of city governments to begin to remedy decades of racism and discrimination and respond to the causes of the 1960s riots. The history of racism and discrimination in New Jersey informed the riots that occurred across the state in the 1960s and 1970s. After the riots, local governments misunderstood or ignored the driving causes and attempted urban renewal projects that either did not work or were never built. While the 21st century has seen these three cities bring in new investment and attractions, those developments may hurt lower-income and minority residents as rents rise.

Racial bias remains a prevalent issue in society. Clues to the cognitive basis for such biases have been found in EEG studies of the ‘Other Race Effect’ (ORE) in relation to the P100 and N170 event related potentials (ERPs). Previous research in this area has focused on adults, and only one such study has looked at implicit racial biases (He et al., 2009), while only a few have looked at experience with own- and other-race persons (Herzmann et al., 2011; Stahl et al., 2008; Walker et al., 2008). The present study is the first to examine how race might modulate ERP responses in children, and the first to relate these responses with both implicit racial biases and race contact experience. We examined EEG responses in 5- to 10-year-old children and adults, and whether such responses were associated with implicit racial biases and own- and other-race experience. Results showed that both children and adults displayed larger P100 and N170 responses to other-race faces, greater implicit racial biases related to larger N170 responses to other- than own-race faces, and greater other-race experience related to larger P100 responses to other- than own-race faces. In terms of age differences, we found that compared with adults, children displayed larger and more delayed P100 and N170 responses, and that in children but not in adults, greater experience with own- and other-races were associated with more delayed N170 responses to other- than own-race faces. These findings suggest that age, experience with own- and other-race persons, and implicit racial biases all influence early ERP responses to own- and other-race individuals.

The Trayvon Martin shooting of 2013 and the Michael Brown shooting of 2014 by a White security guard and White police officer sequentially led to the Black Lives Matter movement which has grown internationally to 40 chapters. Police agencies have responded with active community outreach programs to proactively reduce conflict. The question arises whether a language of peace such as Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication would be an effective tool to be used in instances of conflict similar to the carnage involving Black men and White police officers between 2013-2017. Local members of the Black community, Black Lives Matter, and law enforcement were interviewed asking the efficacy of Rosenberg’s NVC and deliberative dialogue as well. The study showed that since Blacks and Whites view racism differently, a more comprehensive approach is needed to address the challenges of racism and race relations. This thesis describes the possible use of a few models structured to discuss the racial conflict between all parties affected by racism.

Popular fantasy is often populated by members of different species, such as dwarves, elves, and orcs. Much of the narrative structure of the genre comes from the interactions and conflicts between these species, with many of them serving as stand ins for real world culture. This has become the underlying fabric of fantasy fiction and has deep resonance in our contemporary pop culture. However, many of these depictions are founded on colonialist constructions of race and otherness, turning the genre into a medium for reproducing racist ideologies, often unconsciously. This thesis examines the origins and trajectory of this trend by looking at one of the most well- known examples of contemporary fantasy: Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft.

Oral history’s purposes have metamorphosed from a record of lifeways and
stories of the elite to a means of healing for minority communities oppressed by trauma.
This dissertation focuses on the power of oral history to catalyze the restorative justice
process of moral repair for victims—in this case the Mexican Americans of Texas—who
were traumatized by the Jim Crow laws and practices prior to 1965. I researched the
racial, socio-cultural history of Texas from its colonial days up to the Jim Crow historical
era of 1876-1965 and utilized archival, legal, and historical sources for my study.
Additionally, I explore theories and frameworks of trauma, structural violence, and
restorative justice, and analyze twenty-eight oral histories from the Voces Oral History
Collection (University of Texas, Austin). Lastly, I apply oral history methodology to
collect seventeen oral histories for my own project, Project Aztlan.
My findings reveal a community suffering from structural violence—a theory that
argues unjust laws harm individuals as much as physical violence. The oral histories unearth several issues: first, both groups of narrators were victims of structural violence
as a result of traumatic racism. I anticipated finding traumatic racism, but not on such a
broad scale. The results reveal it occurred in all four corners of Texas. Second, these Jim
Crow laws and practices targeted members individually and collectively through racially
restrictive housing covenants, segregation of schools/public facilities, job discrimination,
and disfranchisement or poll taxes. Thirdly, the oral histories demonstrate and legitimize
the fact that the Mexican American community deserves atonement, apology and
reparation from historically guilty institutions. The State of Texas battered them with
mass lynchings, disfranchisement, racially restrictive housing covenants, school
segregation, and discrimination, oppressing them for over 100 years.
My dissertation concludes that the oral history process helps victims attain moral
repair because, similar to moral repair, it also allows them the space to voice their stories
of injustice. In turn, the oral historian validates their claims and reconciliation occurs
when narrators received vindication through this reparatory process. This
acknowledgment fuses broken moral bonds by equalizing members of society.

There is much disagreement and uncertainty among critics over the message in James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. It has been misconstrued as a "passing novel" or as another novel with the "tragic mulatto" theme. In James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man the double consciousness of the protagonist reveals the central concerns Johnson had about racial identity and individual psychology. The protagonist's choices are between isolation and integration, the central issue in Johnson's later published pamphlet Negro Americans What Now? He believed that successful integration could occur through the arts and education. By the protagonist's revealing that he is capable of experiencing negative capability in Europe, Johnson describes the atmosphere to be striven for in America through social change.

The question of hybridity is a complex social issue that commonly addresses agendas of heart, politics, and mind. It is a question that is both deeply personal and overtly political and addresses the entire spectrum of American society. Hybridity, in my view, can be used to interrogate a society rooted in ideas of race definition. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Jean Toomer's Cane, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man depict the struggles of the mixed-race characters as they seek an identity of wholeness through attempting to live up to a social prescription of sameness. These characters wander in search of a raceless society; they cross boundaries of language and live in silence in a dichotomized world of public conformity and private duality despite their efforts to unite the two.

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act devolved much of the authority for welfare policymaking to the state governments. The goal was to promote variation in welfare policies in order to find the most effective way to keep low-income families in the work force and deter teenage pregnancy and family breakup. Without federal entitlement and federal oversight, black populations may be subject to more restrictive policies and may become the victims of welfare racism. This study examines variation in the generosity of state welfare policies and assesses the role of racism in welfare policy outcomes. This is done using a regression analysis that tests the relationship between the generosity of state welfare policies and state social, political and cultural characteristics. The analysis shows that one area of policy---personal requirements---subjects blacks to more restrictive rules but the overall generosity of welfare programs is most significantly affected by the professionalism of state bureaucrats.