Browsing by Subject "Race"

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Christianity in South Korea has long been touted the one success story in Asia, dubbed the “Korean miracle,” whose traction and trajectory of explosive growth are unanimously traced back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in numbers at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them, one monumental figure towers over all: the Presbyterian Reverend Horace G. Underwood (1859-1916), widely considered the single most important and influential western missionary ever to set foot on Korea, in large part due to his extraordinary sacrificial love for the nation and the people of Korea.

As such, his theology and practice of missions represent a work of love from the missionary par excellence of Korea, who missiologically operated out of best intentions and overwhelming love for the natives. However, as this dissertation critiques, it is a work of love compromised by his racial imagination, not incidental to his missiology but at its core. Specifically, this dissertation theologically examines how race manifests and functions in Underwood’s missiology as a multifaceted pseudo- or anti-Christology. Hence, the story of Underwood is one in which his theology of mission problematically operated out of a thick and dynamic racialized Christology, even as he imagined he was espousing and performing the very teachings of Jesus, making it all the more ironic and tragic. At the core of such a false and faulty “Christology,” whiteness, with Underwood himself as its white masculine exemplar, as racially constructed and stabilized, unrelentingly seeks to usurp the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. In this way, race as an anti-Christology with the white masculine posing as Christ functions as the missiological basis for his formation of a de facto white Korean Christianity.

The dissertation deconstructs and critiques Underwood’s racialized Christology in two parts. In Part I, I argue that Underwood’s missiological approach in making Koreans known through a comprehensive and comparative racial characterization presupposes a racialized doctrine of creation, whereby the white body, in lieu of Jesus, is deemed the revelation of full humanity (Chapter 1). What is more, in this doctrine, the white body positions itself also as the definitive judge of all humanity, and through its “all-seeing, all-knowing” judgment, the white body creates humanity anew, which in Underwood’s case meant re-creating Koreans as racialized modern subjects with a subjectivity posed to perform whiteness. As such, whiteness arrogates for itself Christ’s divine roles as the Judge and the Creator (Chapter 2).

In Part II, I shift to the heart of Underwood’s missiology: his racialized soteriology. I show that his argument for the missionary investment in Koreans is predicated on a racialized doctrine of salvation, which designates the white body, as opposed to Jesus, as the very incarnation of the elect, the very image of the saved (Chapter 3), along with the nation, as opposed to the church, as the body politic of the elect, with the emerging American empire the very image of the elect nation (Chapter 4). Moreover, in his racialized soteriology it is the white body who is the savior or the one electing, in place of Jesus, the true Elected One and Savior. Here, his racialized doctrines of creation and salvation come together in his re-creation of Korean religious subjectivity for the sake of saving the nation and the people of Korea. In this way, Underwood helps to establish a vision of racial nationalism for Korea that continues to shape the interaction between Christian practice and nationalist goals of well-being and progress in whiteness within Korea and in other parts of the world.

At the heart of "American Realities, Diasporic Dreams" lies the following question: How and why do people generate longings for diasporic experience, and what might this have to do with nationally-specific affective and political economies of race, gender, and age? This dissertation focuses on the women of Girlfriend Tours International (GFT), a regionally and socio-economically diverse group of Americans, who are also members of the virtual community at www.Jamaicans.com. By completing online research in their web-community, and multi-sited ethnographic research in multiple cities throughout the U.S. and Jamaica, I investigate how this group of African-American women makes sense of the paradoxical nature of their hyphenated-identities, as they explore the contentious relationship between "Blackness" and "Americanness."

This dissertation examines how these African-American women use travel and the Internet to cope with their experiences of racism and sexism in the United States, while pursuing "happiness" and social belonging within (virtual and territorial) diasporic relationships. Ironically, the "success" of their diasporic dreams and travels is predicated on how well they leverage their national privilege as (African) American citizens in Jamaica. Therefore, I argue that these African-American women establish a complex concept of happiness, one that can only be fulfilled by moving--both virtually and actually--across national borders. In other words, these women require American economic, national, and social capital in order to travel to Jamaica, but simultaneously need the spiritual connection to Jamaica and its people in order to remain hopeful and happy within the national borders of the U.S. Their pursuit of happiness, therefore, raises critical questions that encourage scholars to rethink how we ethnographically document diasporic longings, and how we imagine their relationships to early 21st century notions of the "American Dream."

Problem gambling, a fairly recent addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is estimated to affect between two and five percent of the US adult population (Volberg 2001). While present in all racial groups, this disorder is not evenly distributed, as Blacks are more likely than any other group to become problem gamblers (Welte et al. 2006). And while this pattern is consistent with those found with other disorders (Black 1984; Ford and Widiger 1989; Strakowski et al. 1993), it is important to note that thirty years ago, when the first study of problem gambling prevalence was conducted and the disease had only recently been institutionalized, there was no difference in rate of illness by race (Kallick et al. 1979). This dissertation aims to explore this phenomenon: the role of race in the making of problem of gambling.

Through a multi-site and multi-method approach, this study examines the assumed race neutrality of gambling addiction. By tracing the history of gambling policy and North Carolina's adoption of a lottery program, this study explores how the state further defined problem gambling as a mental illness. Following this, participant observation of state-sponsored problem gambling counselor training workshops provides insight into the ways racialized understandings of behavior are constructed and maintained through counselor education. To gain a sense of how gambling is lived, this study involves participant observation of lottery gambling in convenience stores to interrogate racialized conceptions of behavior and reveal how financial gain motivates gambling across groups.

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Bodily Trespass situates the fantastic as a discourse of spatial production in twentieth-century black American literature. Eruptions of the fantastic in realist and surrealist narratives index and ameliorate the spatial constriction that informs black American subjectivity from the Middle Passage up through to the contemporary carceral state. The black fantastic is a narrative response to a spatial crisis that is corporeal and ontological. As a literary mode, in the Todorovian sense, the fantastic identifies the real as a production of the "unreal" and calls attention to ideological and institutional apparatuses that sustain the dominant order. Taking Pauline Hopkins' turn of the twentieth-century serial Of One Blood, Or, The Hidden Self as a point of departure, this project examines the fantastic as a discourse of Pan-Africanism during a period Farah Griffin describes as the "nadir" of post-emancipation black life. Hopkins reaches outside of U.S. borders suturing Ethiopia to America in order to fashion a new and "rival" black geography that challenges the eradication of black legal, civic, and social space.

In the postwar years, the production of imaginative space extends to the task of recording and refuting the racial discourse that articulates urbanity. Chester Himes' The Real Cool Killers, Ann Petry's The Street, and Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha depict racially encoded urban geographies as corporeally informed psychosocial "interfaces." These novels identify cartographic locution as a strategy for spatial occupation and psychic rehabilitation. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" and Ralph Ellison's "The King of the Bingo Game locate in the sonic a blueprint for refashioning the space of the modern metropolis according to a logic of interiority. Baldwin and Ellison identify the fantastic as a discourse of aurality that alters the texture of space by channeling what I call "scalar consciousness," a heightened awareness of the ways in which one might manipulate scale in the service of spatial production. Meditations on belonging, displays of corporeal violence, discourses of Africanity, and the identification of the aural as a pathway for liberation illustrate, in all these works, the black fantastic's rootedness in spatial production, subject formation, and resistance to a dehumanizing social order.

Black girls who attend elite, predominantly white schools face a host of unique challenges and tasks in achieving a positive, resolved gendered-racial identity; they must learn to reconcile external and potentially negative definitions of Black girlhood while making their own meaning of being a young, Black woman. I take an intracategorical approach to understanding the development and experience of this intersectional identity in a predominantly white, elite independent school. This study highlights Black girls lived experience in this specific context to reveal how their multidimensional identities develop, shape and are shaped by their schools. First, I explore the sources on which the girls relied to better understand their Black girl identities. Second, I examine the relationship between school context and the girls’ romantic experiences and romantic self-concept. Last, I investigate whether and in what manner school settings influence second-generation, Black immigrant girls’ identity development. Using data collected from fifty semi-structured, narrative style interviews, I find that in elite, white school settings, (i) Black girls were the most influential figures in one another’s identity development process; (ii) their white school contexts limited Black girls’ romantic opportunities in ways that contributed to a negative romantic self-concept; and (iii) in elite, white school settings, second-generation Black immigrant girls developed hybrid identities that integrated their ethnic heritage, their experiences in America as Black girls, and their experiences of difference and desire for racial community at school.

According to conventional wisdom, the period of intense antiradicalism that followed World War II effectively drove all radical activity underground by the early 1950s, severing the intergenerational connection between the "Old Left" of the Great Depression era and the "New Left" of the 1960s. Building a Better World revises this narrative by examining how radical activists in New York City carved out space for young people's participation in leftwing political culture between 1945 and 1965. Contrary to most studies of the postwar Red Scare that focus on the Left's decline, this study tells a story of survival. Despite concerted efforts by social critics and governmental officials to curtail radicals' political influence among the young, radicals maintained a surprisingly robust radical social world centered in summer camps, private schools, youth groups, cultural organizations, union halls, and homes throughout New York City and its environs. In these spaces, youth continued to absorb a radical worldview that celebrated the labor movement, decolonization struggles, and African Americans' quest for freedom, while forwarding a biting critique of American capitalism. This process of intergenerational transmission would not have been possible without access to social space and an ever-evolving interpretation of radical values responsive to changes in political culture and demographics. Building a Better World relies on extensive archival research, print material, visual sources, and original oral histories to document this hidden history. In so doing, the dissertation significantly revises our understanding of the American Left, the history of American childhood, spatial change in New York City, and the evolution of political, ethnic, and racial identities in modern American history.

“Building Community Across Walls: A History of an Integrated Church Amid a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Charleston, South Carolina” is a study focused upon the integrated history of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, the congregation I serve in downtown Charleston. The church, which was an African American congregation for much of the twentieth century, integrated in the late 1980’s following the gentrification of our Ansonborough neighborhood. This ethnographic study, centered upon formal interviews with both black and white members of my church who experienced this integration together, in addition to clergy and community leaders, is an attempt to both accurately share this history and to critically examine it to mine how it might inform St. Stephen’s present and future. This study makes the argument that St. Stephen’s history of integration must be understood amid the backdrop of urban gentrification and the ways in which this social phenomenon is impacting downtown congregation’s like my own.

This project will therefore be critically examining the intersection of race and gentrification and the ways in which these forces impact any church trying to build community across the “walls” of various social boundaries in urban areas. The argument of this thesis is that no such community can be sustained without awareness of these forces and an ongoing and intentional commitment to diversity, to combating racism and the ongoing reality of white supremacy in our country.

This thesis will have four parts. The first part will aim to offer critical background meant to put St. Stephen’s story into proper context. Chapter one will detail a short overview of the issue of gentrification and focus specifically on its impact upon African Americans. Chapter two will offer a brief reflection on the significance of the black church to African American identity, culture, and collective memory. This chapter intends to impress upon the reader what is at stake and what is potentially lost when an all-black church wrestles with whether to integrate. These chapters will enable a better understanding and more accurate interpretation of St. Stephen’s story of integration.

The St. Stephen’s story will be explored through a series of ethnographic interviews I’ve conducted with nearly twenty-five black and white members of the church – lay and ordained – who lived through that history together. Archival material will also be utilized and woven into a reflection on the interview responses to deepen learnings and glean insights. Prior to parts two, three, and four pertaining to St. Stephen’s, a brief author’s note will appear. This note will include a fuller description of my interview sample and size along with an acknowledgement of potential biases and the fallibility inherent in a project based upon memory.

The second part will outline and detail St. Stephen’s history leading up to integration. It will include a third chapter that consists of a short early history of my parish and a fourth chapter laying out St. Stephen’s eventful African American history from the early decades of the twentieth century to the late 1980’s. Chapter five will include a description of the gentrification of the church’s Ansonborough neighborhood through historic preservation efforts, spearheaded by the Historic Charleston Foundation, that led to the integration of the parish.

Part three will focus on the parish’s intentional integration. Chapters six through thirteen will constitute the heart of this thesis: an accounting of St. Stephen’s late 1980’s to early 1990’s collective experience and a critical reflection upon its successes, points of tension, and missed opportunities.

Part four will consist of a detailed accounting of St. Stephen’s story since its integrative period in chapter fourteen and fifteen. Chapters sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen will include reflections upon the what the lessons of our past offer us today. I will then highlight a few significant questions for further study and reflection in chapters nineteen and twenty followed by a conclusion.

Nearly half a century ago, acclaimed jazz musician Alice Coltrane (1937-2007), marital partner of saxophonist John Coltrane, began disseminating Hindu (Vedanta) teachings and jazz-inflected bhajans (songs of praise) in her predominately Black, though multiracial, spiritual community in Southern California. Despite all her accomplishments–becoming the first African American guru, authoring two revelatory sacred texts, composing fifteen devotional albums (many on major record labels), and founding and directing a Vedantic center and quasi-monastic community for over thirty years–the highly acclaimed Alice Coltrane is overlooked by scholars of religion, especially of Asian religions. Similarly, Cleveland-born, Princeton graduate Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950-2005)–who initiated hundreds of disciples across North America, Africa and Eastern Europe into a Hindu religious tradition (Gaudiya Vaishnavism), authored nineteen books, and acted as a consultant to several world leaders–has also passed away hardly noticed. Since at least the 1960s, Black Americans have made lifelong religious commitments to Vedantic teachings and South Asian religious practices such as performing kirtans and bhajans. Despite this, their presence and contributions remain virtually invisible to scholars. My dissertation seeks to disclose Black Americans’ presence and influence in Hinduism since the 1960s as well as raise an urgent ethical and theoretical question for the study of religion: Can a Hindu be Black?

Through intellectual and aesthetic artifacts, literary publications, and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Black Americans across several U.S. Hindu communities, my doctoral research illustrates Black Americans’ participation in Hinduism since the 1960s through the charismatic leaders Alice “Swamini Turiyasangitananda” Coltrane, John “Bhakti Tirtha Swami” Favors, Clarissa “Krsnanandini Devi Dasi” Jones, and a successive generation of Black practitioners. Thus, my study answers the above question affirmatively; yet, building on recent scholarship on the racialization of religion and genealogies of religion, my study also provokes an indispensable examination of race, ethnicity, and geography in academic constructions of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism,’ assessing how theory and discourse have, at times, foreclosed the possibility of a Black Hindu.

This dissertation asks how the theological anthropologies of T. F. Torrance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Willie Jennings help Christians diagnose and subvert the idolatry of our current racial imagination. It concludes that an idol we can call “whiteness” competes with Christ to function as the mediator of social identity, our goal and ideal human, and the icon held between us. This idolatry interferes with our ability to become the people we are meant to be together in Christ by the power of the Spirit. This theological anthropology enables us to identify the idol of whiteness at work in popular media like blockbuster movies, and it equips us to undermine this idol through our engagement of the arts, popular or otherwise, so that we might together develop a new, healthier, and holier imagination.

Research on the military has historically focused on the potentially de-stratifying effects of service, including reductions of racial inequality and social mobility. Taking a life course approach, this prior research tends to claim that the military is a positive turning point in the lives of disadvantaged men. Scholars point to the educational benefits of the GI Bill, racial integration, and health care to claim that military service, especially during peacetime, is largely beneficial to service members. While it is certainly the case that the military has provided some historical benefits to marginalized groups, recent research has given us strong reasons to question how beneficial military service is to stigmatized groups. Significant racial and gender inequalities remain, and in some cases, are deepening. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with veterans this dissertation examines how the organizational habitus of the military, despite organizational proclamations of meritocracy, may contribute to inequality. Focusing on the unintended consequences of military polices surrounding mental health problems, discrimination, and family relations, I create a synthesis of organizational and critical race theories to show how military policies may compound problems for soldiers and veterans. Focusing on the contradictions between stated organizational policies and actual practice, I show how the organizational arrangements of the military normalize overt expressions of racial and gender based discrimination, creating a sometimes-hostile environment for women and minorities and leaving them little recourse for recrimination. When policies protecting the stigmatized undermine the power and prerogatives of commanders or conflict with the militaries mission, it is not the powerful that suffer. Further, I show how military policies promoting family, such as extra pay for married soldiers, are at odds with the multiple deployments and high mental health incidences of this generations wars. Although the military relies on women on the "home front," as a basis of support, the exigencies of service undermine relationship stability.

I argue that traditional findings on the de-stratifying effects of service are partially a product of an analytical frame that neglects internal organizational dynamics.

My dissertation, “Coloring the Sacred: Visions of Devotional Kinship in Colonial Peru and Brazil,” spans disciplinary, linguistic, and imperial bounds to explore how local devotion to saints expressed through visual media informed broader debates on the enslavement and the spiritual conquest of “New” world populations in colonial Brazil and Peru. Specifically, I explore a range of social actors—African slaves, indigenous muleteers, Portuguese merchants, and Spanish clergymen—who contributed to the multi-directional process of “coloring the sacred” by producing, consuming, and circulating images of saints. Juxtaposing an iconographic analysis of sacred image-objects (paintings, prints, sculptures, crucifixes, and oratories) alongside textual sources, I historicize how lay devotion to saints and their images could simultaneously bridge and mark ethnic divides, thus contributing to rich theoretical debates on hybridity, religion, and the construction of race in the Iberian Atlantic world.

This dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.

In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.

This dissertation examines the emergence of Far West adventure tales in France across the second colonial empire (1830-1962) and their reigning popularity in the field of Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (BD), or comics, in the era of decolonization. In contrast to scholars who situate popular genres outside of political thinking, or conversely read the “messages” of popular and especially children’s literatures homogeneously as ideology, I argue that BD adventures, including Westerns, engaged openly and variously with contemporary geopolitical conflicts. Chapter 1 relates the early popularity of wilderness and desert stories in both the United States and France to shared histories and myths of territorial expansion, colonization, and settlement. Across the nineteenth century, as the United States acquired territories west of the Mississippi and assembled its continental empire, France annexed and incorporated Algeria as “national” space and expanded its second colonial empire into Africa and Asia. I show that tales of white heroics in dramatic frontier landscapes traveled between and across both empires and served the colonizing and civilizing missions of both. Chapter 2 charts the emergence of the Western genre on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the twentieth century and its conquest of French audiences by the interwar period. I demonstrate how Western storylines across media – in fiction, in the arena, in comics, and on screen – responded to shifting sentiment in America and France regarding past conquests, the livability of the industrial present, and the viability of colonial rule. Chapter 3 argues that BD adventures from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, including Westerns, worked through the challenges, legacies, and impasses of empire-building and colonization, even as censorship in France during the Algerian war of independence levied content restrictions on the children’s press. Moral referenda on comics in general steered the adventure into “acceptable” territory, which for the overlapping postwar, Cold War, decolonizing periods meant future-oriented stories in which cowboy heroes far from home played out the winning of the “West” across France’s own frontiers in Africa and Asia. My final chapter takes up BD Westerns published in France across the final decades of empire. I argue that tales of cowboys and Indians both circumvented censure and provided adolescents with a variety of ways to think within and beyond empire by displacing contemporary concerns about the wars in Indochina and Algeria onto the mythico-historical context of the settling of the American West. Using key examples from Sitting Bull, Jerry Spring, and Blueberry, I show that realist Westerns invited young baby boomers to envision different futures for France, explore taboo subjects, and work through contested histories and memories of colonial occupation in ways that colonizer tales set in Africa did not.

Examination of the moralized risk discourse that occurs during moral panics can help us better understand how discourse supports neoliberal modes of governance. Using the moral panics about crack babies in the 1980's and illegal immigration in the 2000's to conduct a content analysis of almost 1500 newspaper articles, television transcripts and congressional hearings, I found that discourses of fairness, authority, and purity supported techniques of surveillance and control that contribute to the maintenance of racial and class boundaries in the US.

Recently, research concerning the United States Criminal Justice System has been dominated by discussions of mass incarceration and deadly acts of police violence. Although there is conflicting evidence regarding the impact of racial diversity in criminal justice organizations, it continues to receive consideration as a prescription for racial disparities in policing, sentencing, and incarceration. Few studies have provided a holistic analysis of multiple components of the criminal justice system in one locality. This research focuses on the role of race throughout New York City’s Criminal Justice System. Based on court observations, ethnographic data, and semi-structured interviews I focus on the experiences and perspectives of black and Latino actors involved in the criminal justice process. Findings suggest that race itself is not predictive of active representation, while the link between passive and active representation cannot be completely dismissed. I discuss the implications of these findings for future research and policy initiatives aimed at reducing racial disparities in policing and incarceration.