Journal of Black Studies

This article explores the impact of welfare reform policies on African American college students who are single mothers and how race plays a key role in shaping such policies and college access.

Afrocentric scholars have consistently emphasized the thematic importance of the humanistic viewpoint to the overall liberation struggles of African Americans. Often, the essential principles defining this humanist outlook have been assumed rather than specified or described. This oversight has facilitated the exclusion of those who represent the main vanguards and chief practitioners of this humanistic vision of social change: African American women. Culling key points presented in the writings of mostly Afrocentric scholars, this article identifies some of the major tenets that characterize that humanistic perspective. It also discusses how African American women have interpreted and applied those principles through their activism in the Black community. Black women activists represent the best instructional models for discourse and analysis on the humanistic vision of liberation. The presentation also highlights what has been commonly perceived and subtly suggested as the feminine characteristics of the humanistic motif.

The purpose of this article is to re-evaluate the independent impact of urban and regional residency on racial tolerance from 1972 to 2006. Recent scholarship has questioned the extent to which the effects of these subcultures reflect general toleration and/or more deep-seated underlying racial attitudes. Using data collected by the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, this article builds upon past research by including different measures of racial tolerance borrowed from the contemporary work of Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan to reassess the impact of these subcultures over a four-decade period. Findings indicate that Southerners remain more obdurate regardless of how racial tolerance is measured and this effect appears to be persisting across the four-decade period. The impact of urbanism, on the other hand, and its effect across time is much more variable and dependent on how racial tolerance is measured. This article further discusses these findings in the framework of the classical theories of Louis Wirth and Samuel Stouffer.

This article examines inscriptions of the Black body in French colonial performances. It shows how stage representations of the Negro in exhibitions, theatre, and cinema have consistently portrayed Africans predominantly in bodily terms and thus invented an archetype of the colonial subject akin to an animal. In addition, the article points that although the imperial system purposely characterized the Other as merely physical—in opposition to the European defined as cognitive and intellectual—a number of African intellectuals and artists have involuntarily continued to promote the same stereotypes and archetypes in discourses portraying African identities in mostly corporeal terms.

This article examines Imani Perry’s explanation of the African creation and development of hip hop music. Through the lens of critical theory, she argues in her book Prophets of the Hood that hip hop is primarily African American in its aesthetic values even though it has embraced and absorbed the views, values, and practices of the dominant ruling class and culture. The premise of her book is valid and Perry largely provides a useful text that affirms the African American creation, development, and contribution to hip hop music, but Perry’s text has problems that speak to the location of the intellectual framework she relies on for explanation—the critical race framework.

Historically, the mission of Black Studies has been two-fold: scholarship and service. Both the pioneering students and the faculty of Black Studies called for the discipline to produce socially responsible scholar-activists, and studies have proven that the most proficient method of ingraining social responsibility is through service-learning. Therefore, Black Studies must require service-learning in its curriculums. It is argued that Black Studies should also require these service-learning elements because of their long legacy in Black education in general and Black Studies in particular. However, required service-learning courses are rare in departments and programs, a study conducted by the author shows. In order to increase the number of Black Studies units with service-learning elements, this article concludes with a service-learning proposal that programs and departments could use to institute a required service-learning component into their curriculums.

What emerged as a goal for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825—1911) was no less than making a paradise on Earth—beginning with the United States. She embraced a socioreligious mission fueled by two concerns: First, material success should not stand as the major focus of one’s life; second, reform had to begin with the individual but expand to the community. Especially in Sowing and Reaping (1876), she emphasized these ideas and the necessity of excluding oppression and selfishness by acting as Christ’s followers— namely, by sacrificing the self for others. Harper paralleled three issues in their power to kill the soul: slavery as sin, intemperance (of any kind) as sin, and gold-seeking materialism as sin. She offered the same solution for the elimination of all three: a life spent doing good deeds.

An application of Dogon epistemology proposes an analysis of African knowledge—classical, indigenous, and diasporan—in view of broader ontological realities that include the synergy of metaphysical perception and cultural production. It analyzes several texts in light of four Dogon categories of knowledge and Karenga’s framework for the creation of knowledge in Africana studies: San Spirituality: Roots, Expression, and Social Consequences, by J. David Lewis-Williams and David G. Pearce; Legends, Sorcerers, and Enchanted Lizards: The Door Locks of the Bamana of Mali, by Pascal James Imperato; and HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes , edited by Musa W. Dube. The result is a framework for discussing the dynamics of the synergy of metaphysical perception and cultural production.

A study was conducted to investigate how the interaction of race, gender, and class impacted lives of African American women and strategies they used to overcome these three barriers. Six African American women from various socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds holding supervisory positions were interviewed. The findings did not support the expected interactive effects of race, gender, and class as an impediment to upward mobility. All six participants cited gender as the major obstacle to their progress.

This research adds to the literature seeking to clarify the social psychological mechanism through which self-esteem is related to physical health for African Americans. Specifically, this study investigates the relationships among self-esteem, happiness, and physical health limitations for a representative sample of African Americans. Utilizing the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions, these results indicate that the impact of self-esteem on physical health outcomes is mediated by happiness. Interestingly, the positive influence that happiness exerts on physical health is suppressed by age. This study suggests that positive emotions such as happiness are beneficial to outcomes such as physical health by transforming traits such as self-esteem into adaptive capability and personal resources that individuals can use to improve health outcomes.

For decades, Afrocentric education has been mentioned as a potential resolution to the many academic and social problems being faced by Black children in U.S. public schools, but, ironically, it has rarely if ever been defined and assessed within mainstream discourses. This article explicates some of historical developments and dimensions of constructs that appear within the literature on cultural reattachment Afrocentric education. Cultural reattachment is a process whereby people of African descent begin to adopt (wholly or partially) aspects of an African culture. Afrocentric education is defined as the adoption of Afrocentric ideology and cultural relevancy for use within classrooms. Proponents of cultural reattachment Afrocentric education advance important “cultural constructs” that they believe should be part of any effort to educate Black children. As a result, educationists (teachers, administrators, researchers) who are familiar with the constructs are armed with the necessary tools to advocate for a more authentic education for Black children.

The literature covering child sexual abuse within the South African context, though substantial, has ignored issues of resilience, especially relating to the victim’s racial background. Particular reference is made to the victim’s ability to draw on elements relating to his or her cultural upbringing—socialization and identification. Using three cases (ages 16 to 23 years old) drawn from a major study that investigated the educational implications of child sexual abuse in South Africa, the article presents Black female survivors who experienced educational resilience regardless of having been sexually abused, and other contributory factors that could have driven them to react otherwise. Educational resilience is evident in the following ways: (a) participants’ interpretations of their experience, (b) behavior exhibited at school, (c) determination to succeed, and (d) educational and career aspirations. These responses are then related to the identification and socialization of people of African ancestry living in South Africa. Data were obtained by means of a series of in-depth interviews conducted with each participant, conducted on a one-on-one basis.

Rap music has always been under surveillance, and the purpose of this article is to explore the most significant ways that the genre has been influenced by it. It begins with an overview of some of the ways in which surveillance has played a crucial role in the emergence of hip hop in general and rap in particular. It then uses a close analysis of 2Pac’s track “Can’t C Me” as a point of departure for a broader discussion of the way many of rap’s lyrical, structural, and thematic features can be interpreted as a response to the perception of being watched. As this article will demonstrate, despite rap’s ostensible emphasis on visibility and recognition, these features indicate a countervailing strain in rap’s aesthetic, one that favors invisibility and anonymity.