Journal of African American Studies

This special issue of the Journal of African American Studies is an interdisciplinary collection of original research manuscripts, which contextualize Black girls and women’s experiences from Black feminist perspectives. Naming and Reclaiming seeks to achieve several goals: (1) discuss and critique intersectionality and the complexities of Black girls and women’s identities; (2) adopt a strength-based approach to exploring the assets, resiliency, resistance, and agency of Black girlhood and womanhood; and (3) draw upon interdisciplinary scholarship that reflects historical, sociological, psychological, and legal perspectives within African American Studies. The first section of the special issue consists of three articles that explore the representations of Black girls and women and their internalization and resistance of these representations. The second section relies on social science research to examine ways that Black women cope with daily gendered-racial oppression. We end our special issue with a Black feminist theoretical model designed to reclaim power for Black girls and women. Through this special issue, we decidedly focus on Black women’s resistance and agency with the hope of highlighting ways that Black girls and women attempt to successfully navigate a sociopolitical reality that places them at significant disadvantages economically, physically, educationally, and socially.

This study addresses African-Americans’ retirement readiness and the factors that contribute to African Americans being prepared or not prepared for retirement. Specifically, this study explores the relationship between educated African-Americans’ financial literacy and their retirement readiness. To analyze this relationship, a binary logistic regression model was fitted to primary data collected from graduates, professors, and business professionals associated with a liberal arts university located in the southeastern USA. The researchers found that educated African-Americans who are more financially literate are more likely to be ready for retirement versus educated African-Americans who are less financially literate. This finding suggests that education does not equate to financial literacy. Moreover, millennials are more likely to be prepared for retirement compared to other age groups, and those who are single and those who do not work full time are less likely to be prepared for retirement.

Contemporary South Asian sociality is marked by signifiers of race, caste, ethnicity, and colorism. Examining the particular social inequalities and marginalization experienced by Africana people in these societies uncovers the dialectical interrelationship between caste, race, and colorism. This yields an understanding of how race and its more trenchant inflection, racism, function in South Asia. Interpreting implications for Africana politics in South Asian societies requires a theorization of these categories. Racialized casteism is an analytic that reveals the relationship between race, caste, and colorism in South Asia and highlights how Africana presence indisputably raises the significance of race thereby intensifying the outcomes faced by Siddis and Kaffirs.

Well-known in educational circles is the terminology that encapsulates the achievement discrepancy between white and Black students. The so-called achievement gap, the signature language used to represent the different achievement levels, challenges educators everywhere to find best practices to attend to the needs and interests of Black students. With dubious beginnings, the achievement gap arguably began during the period of American history when black people were enslaved and disallowed to educate themselves with even the most basic literacy components. This writing traces the lineage of black literacy from the mid-1700s to the present and makes the case that there is no achievement gap, there only exists a so-called achievement gap that has continually proven harmful to Black children. Accordingly, this article uses BlackCrit to examine the so-called achievement gap and to offer suggestions for mitigating its impact in educational environments.

In 1968, students from historically black South Carolina State College, angered over the continued segregation of a local bowling alley, engaged in an on-campus conflict with law enforcement. This was a landmark event in the Civil Rights Movement as it represented the first occasion where deaths resulted from an on-campus confrontation between police and students. In this study, oral histories and written documentaries from participant observers of this event were analyzed in the context of four social phenomena of the era: political culture, race in higher education, the Civil Rights Movement, and student unrest. The results were discussed in terms of the degree of influence that each of the social phenomena had on the historical source.

Poor, black, single women heads of household account for the majority of those the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) initiative impacts. The stated goal of the HOPE VI program is to “revitalize” central cities, which involves demolishing “distressed” public housing complexes and replacing them with “sustainable communities.” The purpose of this article is to present findings of my fall 2006 fieldwork in Spartanburg, SC, and a critical analysis of these findings. I visited and interviewed a sample of 25 black women heads of household, relocated from the Phyllis Goins public housing project. My study provided these women the opportunity to reflect on their relocation experiences in order to assess the impact of the relocation. The detected trends revealed relocation largely imposes hardships on families. My sociological analysis examines the relationship between historically established structures and the women’s personal biographies. The feminist analytical frames I apply aim to explain the tensions exposed between the women in my sample and the Spartanburg Housing Authority that may be indicative of nationwide trends.

This is an interview with Harold Taylor by Curtis Austin.

African American youth have responded with hope and action to protect their well-being in violent political, economic, and social conditions, through organizing. While contemporary organizing frameworks prioritize self-care to promote sustainability, there is little research on the meaning and definition of self-care for African American youth organizers, in their own words. In this paper, findings from interviews with 20 Black youths in navigating organizing spaces in New York City will be presented, highlighting how they destabilize the narrowness of commonly defined self-care to embody “collective-self” care strategies. Implications for community practice, recovery from systemic violence, and historical trauma among African Americans will be explored.

Racism is the by-product of European imperialism. By definition, anti-racism is a prejudicial function linked with fear, stress, or various forms of power-loss anxiety. Data tends to show that not only are black adult males over-represented in the criminal justice system as the focus of said power-loss anxiety but their adolescent counterparts are as well. The fact that society tolerates the black male as a societal failure is a matter of anti-racist racism sanctioned by judicial decree. Furthermore, in its decree, the Supreme Court facilitated anti-racist racism via opposition to affirmative action enabling the most marginal among white applicants in lieu of non-white applicants whose racial contributions stood to move society as a whole forward. The most conscientious among the citizenry must then necessarily take it upon themselves to reverse judicial decree, i.e., anti-racist racism to meet the racial challenges of the twenty-first century and beyond.