The Fair Housing Movement: An Overview and a Case Study

The fair housing movement is a recent development in the general civil rights movement. While subscribing to the ideology of the general movement, community fair housing groups concentrate upon making middle-income, and particularly suburban, housing available to financially qualified Negroes. Few fair housing groups are affiliated with Negro civil rights groups, and most are all-white in membership. Their methods utilize many of the concepts first developed in sociology and social psychology; their programs emphasize community relations when a Negro move-in is imminent, property listing services which bypass the practices of discrimination entrenched in the real estate industry, and subscription by community members to open covenants. They seldom try to "force" integration using test cases, attempting rather to prevent discrimination against Negroes seeking homes in their communities and to avoid violence. The major portion of the research was a case study of a fair housing group in Greenbelt, Maryland. The program of this group emphasized a "planning" approach to integration and publicly avoided the moral-ethical arguments which have been central in the general civil rights movement. Such resistance as they encountered was from individuals concerned about the possible effect of Negro occupancy on property values in the older, low-income section of the city. The leaders of the group were active in civic activities, representative of most religious faiths, tended to be college-educated, and many had a history of affiliation with other "liberal" groups. Few were active in other facets of the civil rights movement. It was concluded that the fair housing movement tends to be moderate rather than radical in its membership and strategy, and that its scope (some 600 groups in metropolitan areas across the United States) represents near-spontaneous action at the grass-roots level based on a conviction that discrimination on the basis of race is wrong

Self-Evaluation of Black and White College Students

A major issue in the social psychology of race relations has been the axiom that blacks tend to manifest lower self-esteem than whites.[1] Much of the empirical support for this hypothesis came from studies demonstrating that blacks are stigmatized and subjected to a variety of unpleasant and derogatory experiences.[2] However, these studies are limited in two respects: first, by their use of small, nonrepresentative samples (primarily nursery school and kindergarten children) and second, by their reliance upon inferential (semi-projective) measures of self-esteem.[3

A social psychological study of ethnonyms: Cognitive representation of the ingroup and intergroup hostility

Ethnonyms (M. G. Levin & L. P. Potapov, 1964; from the Greek roots meaning "a national group" and "name") are the names an in-group uses to distinguish itself from out-groups. There has been no social psychological research to date exploring the effects of ethnonyms. The authors report the results of 3 studies examining the potential effects of various features of ethnonyms on intergroup behavior. Analyses of archival data indicate that among indigenous African cultures (Study 1), indigenous Native American cultures (Study 2), and African Americans (Study 3), intergroup hostility was greater among in-groups characterized by less complex ethnonyms. Discussion considers the implications of these results and suggests new directions for research in the social psychological study of ethnonyms

W. E. B. Du Bois on Brown v. Board of Education

The 1960s have been described as the civil rights decade in American history. Few scholar-activists have been identified as strongly with the legal, social, economic, and political changes culminating in the 1960s as has African American historian, sociologist, psychologist W. E. B. Du Bois. Inexplicably, in 2003, the 100-year anniversary of Du Bois\u27 classic, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), came and went with little fanfare within or outside of academia. However, in 2004, the 50-year anniversary of the initial U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) presents an opportunity for ethnic studies in general, and Black studies in particular, to acknowledge the intellectual and political contributions of Du Bois to the civil rights movement in the United States. In the post-Civil Rights Era, some authors have suggested that Du Bois opposed the initial Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling. In contrast, I observe in the present paper that Du Bois (1957) opposed the U. S. Supreme Court\u27s subsequent (1955) ruling that invoked the much-criticized term with all deliberate speed, rather than the initial (1954) ruling that rendered the separate but equal doctrine unconstitutional. Moreover, I contend that Du Bois\u27 own values and attitudes were fully consistent with his position on the (1954, 1955) decisions

The Relation among Parental Factors and Achievement of African American Urban Youth

Research has repeatedly suggested that SES is a major factor in diminishing academic achievement of African American urban youth; however, there are other factors also influencing children’s achievement. In an effort to examine how other factors contribute to academic achievement, this study, investigated a subsample of 60 low-resource middle school parents and students (41 boys and 19 girls). Several questions addressed the relation of SES to achievement, support, social support and mother’s well-being, respectively. Additionally, the relations between mother’s well-being, and students’ perceived monitoring by their parents, and negative learning attitudes were examined as were the perception of parental monitoring and academic achievement, negative learning attitudes and achievement. The results revealed a significant relation between perceived social support and mother’s well-being but in a negative direction. Parents reporting lower levels of well-being reported higher levels of social support. The results also revealed that youth who perceived their parents to monitor their activities more had higher levels of achievement. These findings illustrate the importance of the perceptions of adolescents as well as the potential role of parental monitoring on adolescents’ academic achievement. Although several factors were examined, only those factors with significant relationships will be discussed

Webliography of African-American Champaign-Urbana

This Lab Note reflects one part of a year-long project called eBlackChampaign-Urbana. Our interest here is to provide better access to the dispersed documentation of local African-American history and culture in ChampaignUrbana, using digital technology to aggregate and enliven historical and contemporary information. Although this webliography focuses primarily on substantial, in-depth texts documenting local African-American life, we are also aggregating into the eBlackCU.net website URLs for local African-American websites, facebook pages, photographs, newspaper clippings, flyers, posters and other ephemeral documentation of Champaign-Urbana's Black heritage.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe

Eliminating Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities: Reconsidering Comparative Approaches

The focus on eliminating racial/ethnic health disparities has brought critical attention to the poor health status of minority populations. Assessing the health outcomes of racial minority groups by comparing them to a racial majority standard is valuable for identifying and monitoring health inequities, but may not be the most effective approach to identifying strategies that can be used to improve minority health outcomes. Health promotion planning models and public health history both suggest that minority health promotion is more likely to be derived from interventions rooted in culturally and historically grounded contextual factors. In this essay, we highlight limitations of comparative approaches to minority health research and argue that integrating emic (or within-group) approaches may facilitate research and interventions more consonant with national goals to promote health and reduce disparities than comparative approaches

Subverting the racist lens: Frederick Douglass, humanity and the power of the photographic Image

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, the civil rights advocate and the great rhetorician, has been the focus of much academic research. Only more recently is Douglass work on aesthetics beginning to receive its due, and even then its philosophical scope is rarely appreciated. Douglass’ aesthetic interest was notably not so much in art itself, but in understanding aesthetic presentation as an epistemological and psychological aspect of the human condition and thereby as a social and political tool. He was fascinated by the power of images, and took particular interest in the emerging technologies of photography. He often returned to the themes of art, pictures and aesthetic perception in his speeches. He saw himself, also after the end of slavery, as first and foremost a human rights advocate, and he suggests that his work and thoughts as a public intellectual always in some way related to this end. In this regard, his interest in the power of photographic images to impact the human soul was a lifelong concern. His reflections accordingly center on the psychological and political potentials of images and the relationship between art, culture, and human dignity. In this chapter we discuss Douglass views and practical use of photography and other forms of imagery, and tease out his view about their transformational potential particularly in respect to combating racist attitudes. We propose that his views and actions suggest that he intuitively if not explicitly anticipated many later philosophical, pragmatist and ecological insights regarding the generative habits of mind and affordance perception : I.e. that we perceive the world through our values and habitual ways of engaging with it and thus that our perception is active and creative, not passive and objective. Our understanding of the world is simultaneously shaped by and shaping our perceptions. Douglass saw that in a racist and bigoted society this means that change through facts and rational arguments will be hard. A distorted lens distorts - and accordingly re-produces and perceives its own distortion. His interest in aesthetics is intimately connected to this conundrum of knowledge and change, perception and action. To some extent precisely due to his understanding of how stereotypical categories and dominant relations work on our minds, he sees a radical transformational potential in certain art and imagery. We see in his work a profound understanding of the value-laden and action-oriented nature of perception and what we today call the perception of affordances (that is, what our environment permits/invites us to do). Douglass is particularly interested in the social environment and the social affordances of how we perceive other humans, and he thinks that photographs can impact on the human intellect in a transformative manner. In terms of the very process of aesthetic perception his views interestingly cohere and supplement a recent theory about the conditions and consequences of being an aesthetic beholder. The main idea being that artworks typically invite an asymmetric engagement where one can behold them without being the object of reciprocal attention. This might allow for a kind of vulnerability and openness that holds transformational potentials not typically available in more strategic and goal-directed modes of perception. As mentioned, Douglass main interest is in social change and specifically in combating racist social structures and negative stereotypes of black people. He is fascinated by the potential of photography in particular as a means of correcting fallacious stereotypes, as it allows a more direct and less distorted image of the individuality and multidimensionality of black people. We end with a discussion of how, given this interpretation of aesthetic perception, we can understand the specific imagery used by Douglass himself. How he tried to use aesthetic modes to subvert and change the racist habitus in the individual and collective mind of his society. We suggest that Frederick Douglass, the human rights activist, had a sophisticated philosophy of aesthetics, mind, epistemology and particularly of the transformative and political power of images. His works in many ways anticipate and sometimes go beyond later scholars in these and other fields such as psychology & critical theory. Overall, we propose that our world could benefit from revisiting Douglass’ art and thought

Production and Transnational transfer of the language of difference: the effects of Polish migrants’ encounters with superdiversity

While Polish migration to the UK has attracted much academic attention, there has been less discussion about the consequences of Polish migrants’ encounters with difference in socially diverse UK contexts. In particular, relatively little has been written about how Polish migrants describe or refer to ‘visible’ difference in terms of ethnicity, nationality, religion, class and gender. This reflects a broader tendency in migration studies to frequently overlook the production and transnational transfer of migrant language. In this article, I explore how Polish post-2004 migrants to the northern English city of Leeds produce ‘the language of difference’ and how this migrant language is passed on to non-migrants in Poland. I distinguish two types of language of difference – the language of stigma and the language of respect. I note that migrants construct both speech normativities through engaging with rhetoric existing in the Polish and/or the UK context as well as through developing ‘migrant slang’ of difference. I further argue that the language of stigma and the language of respect are transferred to Poland via the agency of migrants. The article draws upon a broader study of Polish migrants’ values and attitudes towards difference and the circulation of ideas between these migrants and their family members and friends in Poland. It contributes to emerging debates on Polish migrants’ encounters with difference and social remittances between the UK and Poland

American Medical and Intellectual Reaction to African Health Issues, 1850-1960: From Racialism to Cross-Cultural Medicine

During recent decades, social scientists, particularly anthropologists, sociologists and medical historians, have looked increasingly at how social and cultural factors inform a society\u27s medical community and vice-versa. As Roger Cooter recently stated, ... medicine is a social phenomenon capable of being properly studied only when treated as a part of its social, political, economic and cultural totality. [1] In America, a steady flow of medical sociologists -- most notably Henry E. Sigerist in the 1940s, Talcott Parsons in the 1950s, David Mechanic in the 1960s and 1970s, and Vern and Bonnie Bullough in the 1980s -- contributed numerous empirical studies that revealed that the development of American medicine was shaped moreso by its social and cultural context than clinical discoveries.[2] These studies have demonstrated conclusively that the American health profession\u27s approaches to disease (etiology and therapy), the institutional structure of medical research and care, and public health care policy all have been deeply influenced by socioeconomic and cultural factors specific to historical epochs of evolving American society