This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did...
The U.S. population is rapidly changing with recent projections showing that soon whites will no longer be the majority. This information, when shown to white Americans, can generate a sense of threat. Across the three studies of this dissertation, I frame this group threat (i.e., a change in the demographic...
Transnational adoption from Asia to the U.S. was institutionalized in the 1950s, when the Korean War left an estimated 100,000 Korean children orphaned or displaced. At the time, the practice was situated as a form of emergency rescue, an act of win-win humanitarianism in which average Americans could take part...
ABSTRACT In the past two decades, the number of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants arriving in the U.S. has been increasing. Black immigrants (36% of whom migrated from Africa and 50% from the Caribbean since 2000) now account for nearly 10% of the Black population in the U.S. This growing demographic...
The purpose of this multiple-case study was to examine the lived experiences of current collegiate music education majors, both students from under-represented minorities and their well-represented peers, with attention to racial/ethnic identity and social class. Dyads of current music education students at 8 separate colleges/universities—a student from an under-represented racial...
This dissertation analyses the ways in which football, known as soccer in the United States, has historically served as a diasporic space for the articulation of black politics in the second half of the twentieth century. While modern sport is characterized as an apolitical cultural practice, I am interested in...
This dissertation provides a study of local Black media development in Detroit in the decade following the 1967 Rebellion, as Detroit became a majority Black city. I argue that Black Detroiters not only produced documentaries that challenged local white discourse within what George Lipsitz terms “a Black spatial imaginary,†but...
Recent scholarship in critical urban theory, urban political ecology, and related fields has emphasized the "hybridity" of urban-environmental systems. This argument is contrasted with the socially constructed "binary" relationship between "city" and "nature" that dominated historical understandings of urban-environmental connections. Despite wide agreement on these issues, the trajectories that precipitated...
Over the last 35 years, discourse on "diversity" has become commonplace in many U.S. institutions. My research interrogates diversity as a racialized political project, focusing on the organizational uses of diversity discourse. I base my analysis on case studies of a public university, a Fortune 500 company, and a city...
This dissertation examines the history of Mexicans' changing racial status in the Chicago metropolitan region, a place where race has traditionally been understood in strictly black and white terms. From World War I through the 1930's whites violently resisted Mexicans moving into their neighborhoods in Chicago, East Chicago, and Gary,...