Browsing by Subject "Racialization"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Born Unveiled: The Process, Protest, and Product of Racialization Among International Black African Collegians in US Graduate Education
    (2024-01) Watson, Ashley
    This dissertation focuses on the racialization of graduate international Black African collegians (IBAC) and the effects it has on their racial identity development. The intercentricity of race maintains that race is a defining factor for how one is situated in US society. However, many international students do not come from communities stratified by race first. For example, Black US Americans (BUSA) are socialized to view race as a master narrative from an early age. Yet, IBAC, are socialized in ways that tend to prioritize clan, tribal, or ethnic heritage as differentiating characteristics. I argue that despite being raced as similar, BUSA and IBAC undergo different socialization processes and therefore, the identity formation around race for IBAC follows a different trajectory than that of BUSA. The study includes semi-structured interviews conducted with ten graduate IBAC recruited through purposeful selection. Transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative approach which seeks to provide detailed examinations of a person’s lived experiences. Based on this analysis, four thematic clusters and 14 subthemes were identified revealing how participants made sense and meaning of their racialization. The first theme, Becoming Veiled, outlines the process of becoming Black in a US context. The second theme, Living Under the Veil, draws attention to how IBAC maneuver through highly racialized environments. The final two themes, Resisting/Refusing the Veil and Opting Out both relate to how participants enact their agency to preserve their core essence. This dissertation extends current understanding of international student identity development by bringing into conversation critical intercultural studies, sociology, Black studies, and comparative education. Results from this study (in conversation with others) makes a strong case for reconsidering a blanket application of Cross’ (1978) Nigrescence Model as a schema for all Black students.
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    Constructions at the borders of whiteness: The discursive framing of contested white students at a predominantly white institution of higher education
    (2018-08) Mohajeri, Orkideh
    This dissertation examines the discursive construction of race for contested whites, a population of U.S. undergraduate and graduate students with a liminal racial location. Contested whites inhabit an ambiguous racial positioning along the borders of whiteness. They do not fit neatly into current U.S. racial structures. Sometimes they can pass as white. Sometimes they have a white parent or grandparent, but are read as a person of color, and sometimes they are compelled to identify as white by current technologies of racial categorization even though their day-to-day experiences are ones where they are racialized as nonwhite. Their racial status is under question, either by themselves, others, institutions, or larger contexts. This study centers the stories and voices of 20 self-identified contested white undergraduate and graduate students attending a predominantly white institution of higher education. Critical narrative analysis and a feminist poststructural approach enable the identification of specific racial discourses, which work alone or in tight formation, to construct subjectivities for contested white students. Methods of data collection included individual qualitative interviews and participant observation of meetings of a multiracial student group. Higher education constitutes an important site for the study of racialization as it both promotes and sometimes challenges white supremacy. Additionally, the years typically spent in pursuit of higher education constitute a critical time of individual identity development. This research demonstrates that racial discourses are active and productive in U.S. higher education settings, and construct a series of subjectivities for contested white students. Overall, contested whites are subjugated as unwanted, incomprehensible, and marginalized entities. In addition to constructions meant to be inhabited by contested whites, racial discourses simultaneously construct habitations for uncontested whites, thus lending evidence to the assertion that illogics of race produce distortion and affliction for both oppressor and oppressed. By centering the narratives of contested whites, this study helps displace normative whiteness and delineates some of the various and flexible ways in which racial discourses construct enactments of white supremacy.
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    Disciplining Latino/A Youth In Greater Metro Atlanta: A Mixed Methods Approach
    (2020-06) Cuthbert, Jessica
    Since the 1960s more police and security measures have been used to monitor youth. Today 42 percent of schools have a school resource officer (SRO) stationed inside their buildings; 26 states allow schools to expel students for “willful defiance”; and 91 percent use surveillance cameras. These policies and practices are more prevalent in predominantly Black and Brown schools, and serve as race-based social control mechanisms. This dissertation explores school criminalization in greater metro Atlanta, Georgia, using panel data from the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) and Georgia’s Department of Education (GaDOE) to identify school trends from 2009 to 2015. It has two primary aims: first, to expand racial threat theory beyond the black and white model by exploring how Latino/a students are criminalized in comparison to Black students; and second, to investigate how school resource officers contribute to racial and gender bias in school discipline. In the quantitative portion of this study, I analyze data using a mixed-methods approach, including linear fixed effects estimates of the racial composition of school and school discipline rates. In the qualitative portion, I report the results of my yearlong ethnographic study of one SRO’s relationship to staff and students in a predominantly Latino/a high school. The quantitative findings show that increases in the Latino/a population schools do not yield higher discipline rates, except for expulsion rates. Meanwhile, the qualitative findings demonstrate that the criminalization and racialization of Latino/a and Black students take different forms, especially when viewed through the lens of gender as well as race. I hope that the conclusions of this and similar studies will influence the decisions of policy-makers and key stakeholders in the educational and criminal justice systems at this pivotal moment in U.S. history, when the nation is collectively confronting the ugly truth of how state punishment shores up systemic racism.