African American Parents' Perceptions of Early Literacy Strategies

Few research-based family studies have focused specifically on the perceptions of African American hearing parents' use of home literacy strategies. This study was conducted with a small group of African American families, taking into account family's individual literacy needs (African American hearing families with deaf/hard of hearing [DHH] children), African-American culture and language, emergent literacy research, American Sign Language (ASL), and parent-child book reading strategies. The purpose of this study was to document parental perception of the literacy process, while establishing opportunities for parents to practice under the guidance of mentors and within the home environment. Recordings documented parental progress and their comments about the reading process. Field notes were generated from the mentors' discussions with parents. This exploratory case study identified changes in parental perception of communication and literacy development during a nine-week intervention and records their reactions to those support strategies.

The Ramifications of Covid-19 Within the African American Community

The coronavirus (Covid-19) perplexed many aspects of everyday life. Sadly, Covid-19 took a greater toll on African Americans. As Covid-19 developed, medical professionals, health care authorities, and advocates recognized several day-to-day living situations and intrinsic medical conditions that distressed African Americans with higher mortality rates during the pandemic. It is imperative that healthcare leaders understand the ramifications that have occurred and that may continue to surface from the Covid-19 affliction, which could be utilized to adjust and amend current policy surrounding the adversely affected African American population. We explored several substantial questions regarding this pandemic: the perceived reasons for the vast impact of Covid-19 within the African American culture; and what recommendations are needed to aid healthcare leaders in the fight against Covid-19 within the African American community. There are six ramifications that the authors address in this general article, including- employment, poverty, deaths, mental illness, and distrust. We offer suggestions to implement, prevent, and educate the African American public to circumvent these ramifications for present and future pandemics.

Everybody’s Protest Cinema

This article uses Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” to consider that literary mode’s corollary in the 1990s New Black Cinema. It argues that recent African American movies posit an alternative to the politics and aesthetics of films by a director such as Spike Lee, one that evinces a set of qualities Baldwin calls for in his essay about Black literature. Among these are what recent scholars such as Ann Anlin Cheng have called racial melancholy or what Kevin Quashie describes as Black “quiet,” as well as variations on Yogita Goyal’s diaspora romance. Films such as Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and Joe Talbot and Jimmy Fails’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) offer a cinematic version of racial narrative at odds with the protest tradition I associate with earlier Black directors, a newly resonant cinema that we might see as both a direct and an indirect legacy of Baldwin’s views on African American culture and politics.

Race, Reconstruction, and the Invention of “Negro Superstition,” 1862–1877

This article traces the postbellum development and dissemination of the notion of “negro superstition.” By the end of Reconstruction, many whites across the nation, both liberal and conservative, shared in the belief that credulity was the keystone of African American culture. The formulation of superstition as innate racial trait served the conjoined causes of sectional reconciliation and white supremacy, eroding white support for black citizenship. As liberal estimations of black Christianity declined and conservative depictions of African American magical beliefs proliferated, “voodoo” gained traction as a potent imaginary, shorthand for racial atavism, unreason, and dangerous sexuality.

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

Intragroup differences in COVID-19 vaccine attitudes among Black Americans

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans threatens to further magnify racial inequities in COVID-19 related health outcomes that emerged in the earliest stages of the pandemic. Here we shed new light on attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines by considering intragroup variation. Rather than analyzing Blacks as a homogenous group, we examine the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine attitudes and the extent to which participants are aligned with African American versus White culture (i.e., level of “acculturation”). In a sample of N=997 Black Americans, we find that stronger alignment with African American culture predicts substantially more negative attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination, above and beyond variation explained by age, gender, education, and socioeconomic status. This relationship was substantially attenuated when controlling for suspicion of the healthcare system, but not perceptions that healthcare system treats Blacks unfairly, science knowledge, or cognitive reflection. The intragroup differences among Blacks in COVID-19 vaccine perceptions uncovered here provide insights into designing interventions that provide health information that targets the relevant factors for vaccine hesitancy in differing subgroups.