scholarly journals "We Pray for Our Nation an(d) Our Worl(d)"

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Stella Takvoryan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Formal Context ◽  
Controlled Environment

This paper examines the effect of race, context, and white public space on the extent to which speakers articulate, hyperarticulate, hypo-articulate, or glottalize word-final English alveolar stops -/t/ and -/d/ in the controlled environment of the quadrennial US Presidential Inaugural Prayer. It shows that African-American speakers hyperarticulated and articulated /t,d/ more frequently than the white speaker, who hypo-articulated and glottalized /t,d/ consistently, especially on words like God, Lord, and Christ. These results suggest that the highly formal context required African-American speakers to perform /t,d/ to index themselves as authorities to an unfamiliar, white audience, while the white speaker did not consider race to influence listeners’ judgements of him, allowing him to index familiarity and trustworthiness. 

Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alford A. Young
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Social Power ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines how the street has become a point of reference in scholarly and public discussions of the behavior of low-income African American men living in urban communities. It begins with a discussion of how the street has attained such an overriding centrality in the cultural analyses of low-income, urban-based African American men in public space, especially in the formation of images and understandings about them. It then considers how and why African American men have come to be viewed as a frighteningly disturbing presence on the street because of the social power they are assumed to have in affecting the actions and lives of others who make use of the streets. It also looks at various frameworks for the cultural analysis of African American men and concludes by arguing that the street has been both overdetermined and incompletely theorized in terms of its significance for cultural analysis.

The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Impact

focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

Learning from New Orleans: Will Revising or Relaxing Public Space Ordinances Create a Just Environment for Street Commerce?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renia Ehrenfeucht ◽  
Ana Croegaert
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Space ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Second Line ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
The City ◽  
Instructive Case

During 2010s, in response to new food truck operators, the city of New Orleans loosened regulations for food truck vending. At the same time the city turned its regulatory eye towards other forms of street vending and introduced a new second line vending ordinance. Using the New Orleans case, we argue that relaxing rather than revising regulations—and subsequently planning for ways to make street vending compatible with other activities—would be more effective and just. The authors participated in and observed 32 second line parades (parades organized and sponsored by African-American historic benevolent societies) during one season to understand how second line vending played out and the potential impacts of the new ordinance. This analysis demonstrates that compliance with the second line ordinance would have restricted vending without resolving identified concerns. New Orleans is an instructive case because the intent was to allow rather than eliminate vending. We argue that increasing compatibility between vending and other street activities makes food and goods available in the spaces were urban residents can most easily access them, and thereby establishes a more effective and just public space.

Transformative Performances

2019 ◽  
pp. 10-34
Author(s):  
Annette Trefzer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
American South ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
The American South ◽  
Visual Record

This chapter proposes that Eudora Welty’s “Negro State Fair Parade” photographs of Jackson during the 1930s capture not only the segregated practices and spaces of the American South but also the transgressive rituals and transformative performances of an increasingly socially mobile black culture. These photographs, many of them never before published, display the tensions between cultural integration and racial segregation, and they speak sharply and sometimes humorously to the immediate political and economic contexts. Welty captures new African-American middle class opportunities in photographs that display long-standing black professions such as the burial and beauty parlor business, but also aspirations for upper middle-class vocations. Together these photos depict boisterous African American men and dignified women whose access to parade floats and cars indicates a new kind of racial and social mobility in the segregated southern cityscape. Welty creates a visual record of the act of claiming public space as she zooms in on various strategies of African American self-fashioning.

Muslim American City

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisa Perkins
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Space ◽  
American City ◽  
Muslim Americans ◽  
Muslim American ◽  
American Muslim ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Material Process ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Muslim Minorities

Muslim American City studies how Muslim Americans test the boundaries of American pluralism as a model for secular inclusion. This ethnographic work focuses on the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims in Hamtramck, Michigan, a small city situated within the larger metro Detroit region that has one of the highest concentrations of Muslim residents of any US city. Once famous as a center of Polish American life, Hamtramck’s now has a population that is at least 40 percent Muslim. Drawing attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civic life—particularly in response to discrimination and gender stereotyping—the book questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies, a viewpoint that has long played into hackneyed arguments about the supposed incompatibility between Islam and democracy. The study approaches the incorporation of Yemeni, Bangladeshi, and African American Muslim groups in Hamtramck as a social, spatial, and material process that also involves well-established Polish Catholic, African American Christian, and other non-Muslim Hamtramck residents. Extending theory on group identity, boundary formation, gender, and space-making, the book examines how Hamtramck residents mutually reconfigure symbolic divides in public debates and everyday exchanges, including and excluding others based on moral identifications or distinctions across race, ethnicity, and religion. The various negotiations of public space examined in this text advance the book’s main argument: that Muslim and non-Muslim co-residents expand the boundaries of belonging together, by engaging in social and material exchanges across lines of difference.

The Hearing Aid Effect in African American and Caucasian Males as Perceived by Female Judges of the Same Race

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Davis ◽  
Rhonda Jackson ◽  
Tina Smith ◽  
William Cooper
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Undergraduate Education ◽  
Hearing Aid ◽  
Semantic Differential ◽  
Semantic Differential Scale ◽  
Education Majors ◽  
Female Undergraduate ◽  
Lay Persons ◽  
Males And Females

Prior studies have proven the existence of the "hearing aid effect" when photographs of Caucasian males and females wearing a body aid, a post-auricular aid (behind-the-ear), or no hearing aid were judged by lay persons and professionals. This study was performed to determine if African American and Caucasian males, judged by female members of their own race, were likely to be judged in a similar manner on the basis of appearance, personality, assertiveness, and achievement. Sixty female undergraduate education majors (30 African American; 30 Caucasian) used a semantic differential scale to rate slides of preteen African American and Caucasian males, with and without hearing aids. The results of this study showed that female African American and Caucasian judges rated males of their respective races differently. The hearing aid effect was predominant among the Caucasian judges across the dimensions of appearance, personality, assertiveness, and achievement. In contrast, the African American judges only exhibited a hearing aid effect on the appearance dimension.

Final Consonant Deletion in African American Children Speaking Black English

1993 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Moran
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black English ◽  
African American Children ◽  
Vowel Length ◽  
Minimal Pairs ◽  
Speech Evaluation ◽  
American Children

The purpose of this study was to determine whether African American children who delete final consonants mark the presence of those consonants in a manner that might be overlooked in a typical speech evaluation. Using elicited sentences from 10 African American children from 4 to 9 years of age, two studies were conducted. First, vowel length was determined for minimal pairs in which final consonants were deleted. Second, listeners who identified final consonant deletions in the speech of the children were provided training in narrow transcription and reviewed the elicited sentences a second time. Results indicated that the children produced longer vowels preceding "deleted" voiced final consonants, and listeners perceived fewer deletions following training in narrow transcription. The results suggest that these children had knowledge of the final consonants perceived to be deleted. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

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