Browsing by Author "Bratter, Jenifer L"
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Item Black Women and the World: African American Women's Transnational Activism, 1890-1930(2015-12-16) Chandler, Laura Renee; Byrd, Alexander X; Cox, Edward L; Bratter, Jenifer LThis dissertation focuses on the transnational activities of African American clubwomen during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including their work as scholars, lecturers, missionaries and organizational leaders. My project shows that the work of African American women reformers went far beyond localized, domestic issues dealing with their homes and communities and instead encompassed efforts to deal with the global ramifications of American and European imperialism, black disenfranchisement, women’s rights, and racial violence. Through their activism, scholarship and travels, African American clubwomen frequently wrestled with the machinations of racial and gendered hierarchies beyond the borders of the United States. I contend that African American clubwomen turned their marginalized position as black women in the U.S. into a privileged position of knowledge concerning the role of America in the world and the role that black women (of all nationalities) should play in the elimination of racial and gendered oppression worldwide. In addition to documenting the activities of prominent African American women's organizations, such as the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs and the National Council of Negro Women, my dissertation focuses more specifically on the careers of three exemplary women within the African American women’s club movement: Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Margaret Murray Washington. All of these women deployed a global vision in formulating their responses to race and gender discrimination, yet they did so from vastly different intellectual perspectives. Anna Julia Cooper critically examined the imbrications of American imperialism and American racist ideology; Ida B. Wells sought international collaboration as a way to transcend the obstacles impeding the struggle against racist violence in the United States; and Margaret Murray Washington sought the means to create a composite racial identity for women to color to combat racial discrimination in the post-World War I era. Scholarship on the international work of American reformers has shown a lack of familiarity with the history of African American women and has neglected using the archives and manuscript collections of African American women’s organizations in telling the histories of American reformers in the world. My dissertation accounts for the different approaches to politics and culture manifested by these women, yet it also seeks to build a framework for integrating the work of African American women within studies of internationalism and transnationalism.Item This Land is (not) Your Land: Racial Boundaries and American Appropriation in the Formation of Attitudes about Immigrants(2017-11-30) Casarez, Raul S; Bratter, Jenifer LRace strongly patterns hostility toward immigrants in the US, but few studies have detailed when racial and national identity boundaries act in concert to promote prejudice toward immigrants. The current work positions “American-ness” (i.e. what is means to be an American) as a potentially racialized concept that may elicit racial in-group boundaries when assessing immigrants. I reference literature on symbolic boundary making to offer a contingent form of national identity, American Appropriation, to test this premise. Using the 2004& 2014 General Social Survey (n=1760), I test the association between race, American Appropriation, and immigrant hostility. Regardless of race, those who grant importance to American Appropriation are likely express hostility towards immigrants. White/Black and Latino/non-Latino racial boundaries appear when assessing attitudes about immigrants, dependent upon the particular measure of immigration perspectives and dimension of American Appropriation. I find that American Appropriation strengthens racial boundaries in the formation of immigration hostility.Item Embargo Through the (Funhouse) Looking Glass: Exploring Experiences of Racial Mismatch in Interactions(2022-08-04) Farrell, Allan; Bratter, Jenifer LRacialized experiences in the USA are increasingly marked by how a person’s race is interpreted and whether that interpretation lines up with their identity. This dynamic marks the ways race is socially constructed through racial perception, shaping the racialized experience most often of some of the fastest growing groups (e.g., Multiracial, Asian, and Latinx). This experience, known as racial mismatch, is a site where racial schemas (i.e., the “rules” relating to the race that a person is classified as by outsiders) and the contextual characteristics shaping how these schema are deployed in interactions become visible. Additionally, racial mismatch significantly shapes one’s exposure to racialized advantages and disadvantages. While prior work has revealed various aspects of mismatch, there are notable gaps in our understanding of its frequency, the processes that facilitate it, and its consequences. This study utilizes unique survey and interview data from the 2020-2021 Racial Ascription and Assertion in Contextual Experiences Study (RAACES) to examine three questions. First, what contextual characteristics shape the likelihood of experiencing mismatch, and how does this vary across racial groups? Second, how prevalent are experiences of racial mismatch, and how do individuals interpret the significance of these encounters in their everyday lives? Finally, what strategies of action do individuals engage in response to racial mismatch? Results show that racial mismatch is best conceptualized as a series of experiences rather than as a discrete encounter and that all racial groups encounter some level of mismatch. Additionally, experiencing mismatch is only understood as an invalidation of one’s identity in certain circumstances, particularly if those circumstances are tied to racial discrimination. Finally, individuals use various strategies to avoid or minimize the likelihood of racial mismatch, such as avoiding spaces where it’s deemed likely or modifying one’s physical appearance. This work reveals that dynamics of racial perceptions and racial mismatch is a multifaceted experience with impacts on racialized experiences in everyday life.