Cognitive Impairment Among Collegiate African American Student-Athletes Who Have One Or More Concussions

The purpose of this research was to examine concussion induced cognitive impairment among collegiate athletes for a long term. This study attempted to determine if there was a significant decrease in cognitive function in student-athletes with a history of concussion after one year of concussion. Totally 46 student athletes who were qualified was included in this study. Of all the 46 student athletes, 14 are females, and 32 males from the following sports: Women’s Basketball (n=3), Men’s Basketball (n=2), Football (n=30), Softball (n=7), Women’s Tennis (n=2), and Women’s Volleyball (n=2) (Table 1). The age range was18-23 years old. Seven of them had two or more concussions Results of this study showed that while all the scores of the ImPACT test improved after one year of concussion for the student-athletes with one or more concussions, there was significant improvement only in the processing speed. For the student-athletes with two or more concussions, the processing speed score after one year of concussions was a little lower even than the score after initial concussion, but it is not statistically significant.

From Antiblackness to Cultural Health in Higher Education

Antiblackness has a long and storied history in higher education in the United States, and unfortunately, antiblack attitudes and practices continue in the 21st century. With implications for countering antiblackness in higher education and institutionalizing support for cultural health and wellness, we documented experiences of antiblackness in the African American Student Network (AFAM). AFAM was a weekly networking group, co-facilitated by Black faculty and graduate students, where Black undergraduates could come together and share their experiences. Participation in AFAM was associated with Black holistic wellness, and AFAM was a source of cultural health, where we conceptualized cultural health as having a sense of pride and resilience in one’s cultural background. We analyzed notes of 277 AFAM discussions from 2005–2006 to 2017–2018 using an adaptation of consensual qualitative research methods to identify four domains of antiblackness: racial trauma (n = 51), racial microaggressions (n = 34), racial rejection (n = 33), and systemic racism (n = 25). In moving from antiblackness to cultural health, we advocate for institutional resources in higher education, such as an institute for cultural health on campus, that values the cultures of Black students and students of color, and that focuses on building communities in which students can generate a wellspring of pride and resilience in their cultural backgrounds.

The Emergence of Racialized Labor and Racial Battle Fatigue in the African American Student Network (AFAM)

Although little may be new with respect to the lived experience of racialized labor for People of Color navigating whiteness and white spaces, this study is the first to identify racialized labor in everyday life. Adapting consensual qualitative research methods to a phenomenological frame, we examined 277 notes summarizing weekly discussions in the African American Student Network (AFAM) over a 13-year time period. Co-facilitated by Black faculty and graduate students, AFAM was a space for Black undergraduates to make meaning of their experiences and find community on campus. We defined racialized labor as the ongoing process of navigating hostile environments steeped in a white racial frame and identified six categories: (1) self-monitoring/self-policing; (2) flexing/making adjustments; (3) questioning; (4) affirming; (5) avoiding; and, (6) being the change or standing up for justice. Racial battle fatigue was one outcome of all the racialized labor—primarily anger, stress, frustration, hypervigilance, pressure, and exhaustion along with numbness, shock, sadness and disappointment. Both racialized labor and racial battle fatigue also occurred at the intersections of students’ lives in structural, political, and representational ways. Future studies that capture the ways in which racialized labor in everyday life is enacted by People of Color are needed. The ability to name racialized labor provides an important analytical tool for distinguishing the ongoing process of navigating racism from negative consequences such as racial battle fatigue. This line of research also has implications for creating spaces that facilitate racialized labor and wellbeing for Black people and People of Color.

Colonizationism versus Abolitionism in the Antebellum North: The Anti-Slavery Society of Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary (1836) versus the Hanover College Officers, Board of Trustees, and Faculty

In March 1836, nine Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary students, almost certainly including Benjamin Franklin Templeton, a former slave enrolled in the seminary, formed an antislavery society. The society’s Preamble and Constitution set forth abolitionist ideals demanding an immediate emancipation of Southern slaves with rights of citizenship and “without expatriation.” Thus they encountered the ire of Hanover’s Presbyterian trustees—colonizationists who believed instead that free blacks and educated slaves, gradually and voluntarily emancipated by their owners, should leave the United States and relocate to Liberia, where they would experience greater opportunity, equality, and justice than was possible here in the United States and simultaneously exercise a civilizing and Christianizing influence on indigenous West Africans. By separating the races on two different continents with an ocean between them, America’s race problem would be solved. The efforts of the colonizationists failed, in part because of a lack of sufficient resources to transport and resettle three million African Americans. Then, too, few Southern slaveholders were willing to emancipate their slaves and finance those former slaves’ voyages, and most free blacks refused to leave the country of their birth. In Liberia, left largely to their own resources, colonists encountered disease, the enmity of local tribes, the threat of slavers, and difficulties in farming that left these former slaves struggling for existence, even if free blacks who engaged in mercantile trade there fared well. In the United States, the trustees’ conviction that American society was racist beyond reform, together with their refusal to confront the system of slavery in the South in hope of preserving the Union and their refusal to allow even discussion of the subject of slavery on the Hanover campus, left their central question unanswered: Would it ever be possible for people of color and whites to reside together in the United States peaceably and equitably? The trustees’ decision exerted another long-term impact as well. Although today the campus is integrated, Hanover College would not admit an African American student until 1948.

African American Child and Adolescent Academic Help-Seeking: A Scoping Review

To influence school achievement, researchers investigate student academic help-seeking. However, a growing population of students of color combined with the risk of poorer academic performance yields attention toward African American student academic help-seeking. In this review, 13 studies analyzed sampling characteristics, theoretical frameworks, and designing methodologies. Results illustrated that samples varied in terms of data collection, settings, participant characteristics, and research purpose. Also, frameworks differed with the majority of the studies referencing culture or motivation-informed theory. The methodology focused on quantitative measures of help-seeking behavior, attitude, and influencing variables. Qualitative measures showed African American students experienced help-seeking challenges, family involvement, and assumed responsibility for seeking help. Implications for research and practice are provided.

Get Out

In this chapter, the authors propose that education, which historically has been mainly under the jurisdiction of religious institutions and has been administered by spiritual leaders and attendants, is a sacred and spiritual transaction. Thus, churches and schools are equivalent and have the same spiritual obligation, which is to create in an individual a new spirit. Given the spiritual nature of education, we see the colonial schooling system as a conduit for spirit infusion that provides the opportunity for not only “acting White” but also for the possibility of becoming White by spirit possession. This line of thought leads to the main objective, which is to dismantle current notions of African American student success that is often positioned as going to or graduating from college rather than getting out of the schooling process altogether.