Tag Archives: african americans

‘To the Mountaintop’: Journalist Discusses Social Justice Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Award-winning journalist, activist, and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault told a packed audience at Yale that lessons learned from the civil rights movement still have relevance for current and future generations.

Hunter-Gault delivered a lecture titled “Social Justice, Equity, and Public Health” during a Branford College master’s tea on Feb. 5. (more…)

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New Book Traces Black Panthers’ Evolution from Local Activists to Global Anti-Imperialists

History has long denied the political genius of the Black Panther Party. At worst, its members have been cast as unconscionable criminals. At best, such seminal figures as party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and early supporter Stokely Carmichael have been portrayed as outlaw folk heroes who, propelled by the progressive winds of the late 1960s, dared to take on the establishment.

But a UCLA graduate student in sociology who worked alongside former Panthers a decade ago as a community organizer in Oakland, Calif., didn’t buy the conventional wisdom. (more…)

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MSU Professor Provides ‘Social Class for Dummies’

Matthew Diemer, associate professor in MSU’s College of Education, talks about his paper “Practices in Conceptualizing and Measuring Social Class in Psychological Research.”

Social class has been linked to health, college attainment and other important outcomes, but the best ways to define and measure social class are still unclear to many, a Michigan State University scholar argues. (more…)

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Who Likes Bling? The Answer Relates To Social Status

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A desire for expensive, high-status goods is related to feelings of social status – which helps explain why minorities are attracted to bling, a new study suggests.

Previous research had shown that racial minorities spend a larger portion of their incomes than do whites on conspicuous consumption – buying products that suggest high status. (more…)

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Rock, Pop, White Power: How Music Influences Support For Ethnic Groups

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Just a few minutes of listening to mainstream rock music was enough to influence white college students to favor a student group catering mostly to whites over groups serving other ethnic and racial groups, a new study found.

However, white students who listened to more ethnically diverse Top 40 pop music showed equal support for groups focused on whites, African Americans, Arab Americans and Latino Americans. (more…)

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Black and White American Voters Live in One Country, But Two Different Worlds

The political outlook of blacks in America has undergone dramatic swings in the last ten years — from the depths of powerlessness during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to the zenith with the election of the first black president, Barack Obama.

Now, with another presidential election looming, blacks are again confronting new issues as they judge and sometimes question the impact of Obama’s election, contends UChicago political scientist Michael Dawson, whose work finds sharp contrasts between how African Americans and whites feel about their country. (more…)

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Marcus Garvey Movement Owes Large Debt to Caribbean Expats, UCLA Historian Finds

Conventional wisdom has long held that Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which advocated racial self-help and the unity of the African diaspora, grew out of the heady political and cultural environment of the Harlem Renaissance and benefited African Americans above all other black people. Any Caribbean role, according to this view, was separate and incidental to the primary legacy bequeathed to American race relations by the charismatic Jamaica native.

Now a UCLA historian argues the reverse in the first book of a multi-volume series on the Garvey movement and the Caribbean. From the UNIA’s organizational structure to its most valuable foot soldiers during its first half-decade, Garvey’s Caribbean links were indispensable to the movement’s success, and the region ultimately proved to be its most important theater, contends Robert A. Hill in “The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: The Caribbean Diaspora 1910–1920.” (more…)

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UMD Dig at Historic Annapolis Black Home Producing Surprisingly Rich Haul

*Archaeologists Focusing on Naval Academy Connection, Filipino Past*

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – An archaeological team from the University of Maryland is uncovering an unexpectedly rich haul of household materials from an historic African American home in Annapolis. The team has one more week to go in their excavation.

The archaeologists resumed work at the James Holliday House – a middle class home purchased in 1850 by one of the first African Americans to work for the U.S. Naval Academy. (more…)

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