Recognizing and Developing STEM Talent Among Diverse Populations

STEM talent is often overlooked in underrepresented students resulting in limited opportunities to increase STEM interest and talent inside or outside of school settings. Academically qualified underrepresented students are less likely to be recommended for advanced placement STEM courses causing a racial divide and contributing to a lack of belonging in these courses. Methods to encourage STEM talent development and persistence in students from underrepresented populations include frontloading talent development interventions, creating afterschool or informal STEM programs, providing enrichment opportunities for highly capable students, and creating equitable access to advanced courses. This chapter presents the characteristics of STEM talent in underrepresented populations and strategies to identify high potential students, provides frontloading examples to develop STEM talent, offers examples of effective programming, and suggests instructional strategies to encourage STEM talent development in diverse populations.

The Racial Divide at Micro Places: A Pre/Post Analysis of the Effects of the Newark Consent Decree on Field Inquiries (2015–2017)

Objectives: An initial investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) found that the Newark Police Department (NPD) had engaged in a “pattern or practice” of constitutional violations with regard to stop and arrest practices, prompting the city to enter a consent decree. Methods: This study draws on official event-level data on FIs recorded by NPD officers (N = 50,322) and uses random effects panel regression models to examine how socioeconomic characteristics interact with the implementation of the consent decree at micro places in the short term. Results: Spatial analyses indicate a concentration of FI encounters. The implementation of the consent decree coincided with improvements in the quality of data collected by officers conducting FIs of citizens. It was also associated with decreased rates of reported FIs for the city’s Black and Latino citizens relative to their share of the local population, and patterns of FI encounters. Conclusions: Newark’s consent decree improved the quality of data collection. However, the spatial concentration of reported FIs and subsequent arrest of Black and Latino individuals have not experienced the same effect as they presumably require a culture change that is likely to necessitate a longer time frame to manifest.

Digital Communities

This chapter explores Dubsmash and TikTok, two related but divergent social media apps. While providing a critical overview of the apps that facilitates the analysis that follows, this chapter examines their racial divide, arguing that Dubsmash is a Black space and that TikTok is a White space. An understanding of the racial politics of the social media dance world is essential to painting a full picture of how Zoomers of color navigate digital spaces to create content that then becomes the mainstream and to push against systems of White Supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and the like.

A Culturally Immersive Approach to Teaching Cultural Tolerance in a Pandemic

This paper is one approach to teaching graduate students in education to become culturally empathetic. This paper was written when America’s racial divide expanded and Black and Brown Americans were killed by police who were not charged, and White American nationalists who want to “Make America Great Again”. The pandemic that locked down our nation and stopped business as usual left people isolated and idol thus creating a petri dish for civil unrest to grow. The population of adult educators was immersed in other cultures through critically analyzing ethnographies, memoirs, through the lens of cultural theories. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that graduate adult education students can develop empathy for populations, they will encounter within their spaces of work that they may feel oppose their access to opportunity. Participants boast about how the narratives reminded them of the common plight amongst populations previously viewed unfavorably. Within these themes, learners acknowledged that the process had transformed how they think about the other.

Review

This chapter examines how attempts to subdivide the imperial public sphere along racial lines so as to undermine dissent led to the development of new mass media forms in which the racial divide was explicit. This affected both the ways audiences were addressed and the ways information was amassed and presented. For such knowledge, the chapter investigates how an imperialist form of white supremacy influenced the emergence of two “reviews of reviews” at the turn of the twentieth century, within which the digestion and redaction of other periodicals was seen as a way to accelerate an imagined community into a lived reality. The chapter unpacks a specific instance of this phenomenon in detail, demonstrating how an Indian periodical loosely based on W. T. Stead's Review of Reviews affected Stead's ideas as well as his publishing enterprise more broadly. It also discusses the Calcutta-based journal, the Indian World, that was explicitly and cannily a derivative of Stead's.

Community Prosecution and Building Trust Across a Racial Divide

Community prosecution seeks input from local groups to shape the priorities of the prosecutor’s office. Prosecutors who listen to the community aim to develop a relationship of trust between the community and the local prosecutor’s office; such outreach is especially valuable in connection with racial minority groups with a history of negative experiences with criminal justice actors. A community prosecution strategy calls for the office to work with community partners both upstream and downstream from the criminal courtroom. The upstream efforts involve diversion of defendants out of criminal proceedings and into treatment and accountability programs outside the courts. Downstream efforts include programs to promote the smooth re-entry of people returning to the community after serving a criminal sentence. Community prosecution is best accomplished in offices committed to collection and use of data, transparency, and accountability to the public.

The American Racial Divide in Fear of the Police

We measured personal and altruistic fear of the police in a nationwide sample of Americans (N = 1,150), which included comparable numbers of Blacks (N = 517) and Whites (N = 492). Whites felt safe, but Blacks feared the police even more than crime, being afraid both for themselves and for others they cared about. The racial divide in fear was mediated by experiences with police mistreatment. In turn, fear mediated the effects of race and past mistreatment on support for defunding the police and intentions to have “the talk” with family youths about the need to distrust and avoid officers. About half of Blacks said they would rather be the victim of a serious crime than be questioned or searched by the police. The results show that when it comes to the police, Blacks and Whites live in different emotional worlds, one of fear and the other of felt safety.

Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

“Green Life Matters”: Place and the Politics of Environmental and Commemorative Justice

This article analyzes newspaper discourse in Richmond, Virginia surrounding the placement of a statue to Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman bank president in the United States, and the proposed removal of a live oak tree to make way for the installation of the Walker statue in the city’s Jackson Ward neighborhood, once known as the “Harlem of the South.” While at first glance, the heated debate surrounding the live oak tree’s proposed removal might conjure a familiar racial divide between white environmentalists and Black community members, this article suggests that the debate in the majority Black city instead captured a broader tension within Black communities torn between advocating for commemorative and environmental justice.