English (ENG O1-O4).

The scholarly discussion on colorism has focused primarily on the disadvantages dark-skinned African Americans face, while highlighting the advantages light-skinned African Americans have such as having a higher chance of being hired at a job or having a higher salary. For this research, I am focusing on the disadvantages light-skinned African Americans face with colorism, which includes alienation from the black community for being too light and bullying from darker-skinned African Americans. By surveying Spelman students who identify as light-skinned to learn more about their experiences with colorism, I analyze the role that their experiences with colorism played in them coming to Spelman and to what extent their racial identity has been questioned as well as to what extent students perform Blackness by anchoring themselves in cultural Blackness, for example through speech or hair, as a way to cope with their experience of colorism and racial questioning.
 

This presentation explores American hip-hop’s interaction with immigration policies in the contemporary era marked by Donald Trump’s presidency. Hip-hop will be used as a cultural genre, providing the framework to examine some of the political voices of American Black people surrounding immigration. This presentation seeks to answer the question: How do hip-hop artists counter xenophobic rhetoric highlighted throughout Trump’s campaign and presidency? This topic is explored, first, through close readings of lyrics of songs that were released from 2015 to 2019 pertaining to immigration policies; second, through critical examinations of current social justice movements’ interactions with these songs; and, third, through analysis of the way American society at-large has responded to them. Close readings of lyrics from influential artists such as YG, Nipsey Hussle, Beyoncé Knowles and 21 Savage illustrate the collective Black position on immigration in the United States, demonstrating that regardless of whether one is a descendant of share croppers or a first-generation immigrant, the overall oppression of Black folks allows artists to empathize and identify injustices within sub-communities. 

 
In an interdisciplinary analysis of Black women’s diasporic geographies entitled Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick argues, “Black matters are spatial matters…Black women’s histories, lives, and spaces must be understood as enmeshing with traditional geographic arrangements in order to identify a different way of knowing.” Utilizing McKittrick’s unique cartographic framework, this research project presents an in-depth literary analysis of the 2013 National Book Award-winning novel Americanah by Nigeria native Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie. Interpreting space as political, social, and inescapably meaningful, the presentation argues that Adichie challenges popular American mythos of frontiers as empty spaces and sees them instead as the scaffolding we use tomake meaning from our lived experience. This work connects Adichie to the literary work of African women writers more generally and engages with themes relevant both during the time in which Adichie wrote the novel and in the current age of Trump in which the political world is dominated by themes of immigration, home, displacement, and race.
 
 

 

This presentation will examine the construction of Blackness through Middle Class Black Men as depicted in Lethal Weapon (2016) and Black-ish (2014). By taking a case study approach this presentation will explore social codes and visual culture used to show the dynamics of legible and illegible masculinity. The episodes “There Goes the Neighborhood” of Lethal Weapon and “'Don't You Be My Neighbor” of Black-ish examines the role of middle-class Black men living in Sherman Oaks. The goal of this presentation is to illustrate how Black masculinity is constructed through the presence and absence of lower-class Black men. By using Mark Anthony Neal’s concept of Il/legible masculinities, this presentation will indicate how Roger Murtaugh (Lethal Weapon) and Andre Johnson (Black-ish) are examples of illegible Black masculinity. These characters’ relationship with the “Blacklife world” as coined by Ed Guerrero creates a division between these characters and Black men of a different social class. By highlighting the physical and socio-economic borders of Sherman Oaks, these characters employ values that are distinctively different for the people outside of their neighborhood.