Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these…

This article explores the discourse on Black Founding Fathers through Glenn Beck's television show, "Founders' Fridays". According to Beck, this 2010 summer television special was an opportunity to present Black American history in a more nuanced and truthful way. The theoretical framework, silencing the past, is used to…

Sub-cultural groups that depend on a historical account to validate their thoughts and practices may need to revise and repair those accounts as changing circumstances present new issues affecting them. The year 2013 gave us three movies that dealt with racism, mobility, and political action: Lee Daniels' "The Butler," "12…

This article argues that multiculturalism, especially when it is led and controlled by Whites, and in the absence of collective anti-racist struggles, can reproduce the ontologies, epistemologies, and practices of white supremacy. I use a case study of a reenactment of Atlantic black slavery, produced by white teachers to investigate whether…

In this article the author speaks to the teaching of Barack Obama in U.S. schools. Drawing from scholarly literature on the heroification of American historical figures in public memory, the author argues that focusing on Obama's firstness as an African American may lead students to have incomplete and misleading understandings of what the…

The movie "42" shows memorable events that have faded from our view in recent years. The events are important to the evolution of a multicultural society in America because of the importance of baseball to the common national culture that all the American people have created. Jackie Robinson's significance as a cultural hero is…

This exploratory investigation examined the link between self-reported racial-ethnic socialization experiences and perceived parental career support among African American undergraduate and graduate students. The results of two separate multivariate multiple regression analyses found that messages about coping with racism positively predicted…

The goal of this article is to examine the racially hostile environment of U.S. public schooling towards Black males. Drawing on the work of Foucault ("Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison," Penguin Books, London, 1977; "Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics," The Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982)…

Three years before his Nobel Prize, Dr. King shared his vision of non violence in a televised interview published in this article for the first time in print. King and his father both began their lives given the name "Michael" King. During a 1934 trip to Nazi Germany to attned the Baptist World Alliance Conference, the elder R. King…

In the period after the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Plessy v. Ferguson), "white" supremacy was codified and reinforced through law, custom, and mob violence. Despite this, African-descended women artists in the Western Hemisphere committed the revolutionary act of declaring, "I am; I am here; I am here remaking/reimagining the…

For most Americans, access to a quality education has always been perceived as the fundamental link to upward mobility and increased life chances within our society (Ballantine and Hammack in "The sociology of education: a systematic analysis." Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 2011; Brown et al. 2010; Holyfield 2002). This perception…

Drawing on theories of multi-modality and critical visual literacy, this article focuses on images that five-and six year-olds painted in a class-made book, Voice on the Bus, about racial segregation. The article discusses how children used illustrations to convey their understandings of Rosa Parks' bus arrest in Alabama. A post-structural view…

Historically Black colleges and universities are a unique institutional cohort in American higher education. These colleges have been celebrated for their achievements and critiqued for their composition at differing points during their collective history. This article addresses contemporary ebbs and flows of their relevance and reputation in the…

This paper considers African-American student protests in secondary schools during the 1960s and early 1970s. Taking a national perspective, it charts a growing sense of independence and militancy among black students as they made the schools a focal point of activism. Activist students challenged established civil rights organisations on a…

How do black students acquire academic literacy skills without being severed from their cultural and historical identit(ies)? In this article, the author presents instances of literacy events in an out-of-school program called Youth Voices that serves to create opportunities for development of a strong sense of historical and cultural identity. An…