Student Work Showcase
Senior Capstones
American Studies Program
Class of 2011
Kelsey Bell
Senior Special Project
Two Neighborhoods: Roxbury & The South End
Advisors: Christina Sharpe & Jean Wu
In October of 2010, on the heels of a wave of violence just south of Boston proper, The Boston Globe published an article, which provoked a range of reader responses. The subject matter wasn't the violence that had occurred, but rather, the lack of clear definition between Roxbury and The South End. The boundary never seemed fixed but changed to fit perceptions of what types of newsworthy events take place in each neighborhood. Crimes are reported as occurring in Roxbury and new restaurants are listed as located in the South End. There is resentment that Boston has long ignored the needs of Roxbury, calling it “the heart of Black Boston,” while minimizing its presence. Having grown up just an hour outside the city, but never told about the tempestuous racial climate of Boston's history, I was intrigued. How did Roxbury come to be such a dangerous place in the minds of my parents? Why was the nearby South End not plagued by the same sentiment? By analyzing the history of these two neighborhoods and the racial climate in Boston, I explore the events that caused their reputations. Through the medium of photography and my knowledge of urban studies, I examine the present uses of space in each neighborhood and attempt to answer the following questions: Is there a visible divide between Roxbury and The South End, and where is this divide? Why has The South End developed into a trendy neighborhood while Roxbury has retained its reputation as a dangerous one? What could be done to change the perception of Roxbury?
Hameto Benkreira
Senior Special Project
Filling in the Gaps:
A Pedagogical Analysis of the Oakland Community School
Advisors: Sabina Vaught & Christina Sharpe
In 1982, California Governor Jerry Brown and the State Legislature granted the Oakland Community School (OCS) a special award for “having set the standard for the highest level of elementary education in the state.” Established first as a home school by the Black Panther Party (BPP), the OCS rapidly developed with strong community support into a full elementary school that annually served 150 students. The OCS operated under a student-centered mantra that prioritized the unique needs of its student population which was predominantly poor and Black. The school provided breakfast, lunch and dinner; transported students to and from school; taught a standard curriculum, plus environmental studies, martial arts, and meditation; facilitated health screenings; held adult education courses after hours; and more. While the BPP collapsed in 1980, the OCS sustained its operations because of its sturdy community roots and was the last surviving program of the tumultuous BPP. Yet despite all of this, the OCS has been neglected in both historical and educational scholarship. This paper seeks to bolster the patchwork of writings on the OCS to make more accessible this important piece of history. I rely primarily on archival research, personal correspondence with former students and staff, and other primary source materials. I employ a broad pedagogical framework—guided primarily by the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings—as a lens that is student-centered and thus functions as an ideal platform for retroactively studying student experiences. Additionally, I will explore the pertinent topics of community schooling, culturally relevant schooling, survivance, and liberatory education vis-à-vis education for oppression.
Sharon Cho
Honors Thesis
Anti-Asian Racism in Higher Education: We Will Not Be Silenced
Advisors: Jean Wu & Sabina Vaught
On April 9, 2009, an anti-Asian hate incident took place at Tufts University. Thirteen members of the Korean Student Association, who were practicing for an upcoming culture show, were subject to racial epithets and harassment by a white male student. In my work, I analyze this hate incident by using theories such as Critical Race Theory and Asian Critical Race Theory and challenge the dominant narrative by utilizing the method of counter-storytelling through which the voices of three KSA students serve as valid experiential sources. Contextualized within a long history of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S., this incident demonstrates that anti-Asian racism is not anomalous to Tufts nor to one individual. Parallel incidents on college campuses reveal an identifiable pattern of anti-Asian racism in which schools abandon institutional responsibility to ensure students' safety and continued learning while victims' experiences are minimized, invalidated and ridiculed in a hostile campus climate. This thesis works to create a space in academic discourse where the experiential stories of victims of anti-Asian racism can be heard; and ultimately contributes to the mobilized effort to resist against the institutional silencing that Asian American students face.
Chartise Clark
Honors Thesis
Once a Plantation, Always a Plantation: Black Women at Tufts University
Advisors: Christina Sharpe & Sabina Vaught
In this post-racial era, some universities, including those in New England, are beginning to discuss their ties with slavery, yet Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, has omitted slavery from its own history. I analyze Tufts’ link to slavery and its continued legacy as they pertain to Black women at the University. My thesis exists in four parts: a) a look at the implications of using production as a litmus test for a Black woman’s worth; b) a biography of Belinda Royall, a slave of the Royall family at the Ten Hills Farm, a plantation much of Tufts now rests upon; c) brief biographies of Tufts University’s founders; d) Black women’s collective history and their current lives at Tufts. My research consists primarily of archival research, the last four years of my life at Tufts, and interviews of Black female undergraduates currently attending the University. I write using African cosmology, Africana philosophy and Black feminist thought, as my theoretical framework, and I also integrate history, cultural studies, and critical race theory. I operate within the conventional paradigm used to evaluate a person’s worth, focusing on American society’s preoccupation with examining people’s lives and their value as balance sheets. The legacies of slavery and Belinda are evident in the University’s continued use of Black women as an integral source of labor, production, and value, and its demand for Africana Studies to be erected, if at all, at the expense of Black women at Tufts. Tufts’ continued exploitation of Black women only reiterates the fact that the past is extant and inseparable from our yoked futures.
Amber Frommherz
Senior Special Project
A Reflective Counternarrative Empowered by Indigenous Knowledge
Advisors: Joan Lester & Jean Wu
“We’re not Indians and we’re not Native Americans. We’re older than both concepts. We’re the people, we’re the human beings.” -John Trudell
This is a personal reflection about my racial identity development documenting my racial transition through different racial identity stages. I am utilizing Bryan Brayboy’s Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) as my framework because he understands that native people need to incorporate their cultural knowledge and survival knowledge, as well as academic knowledge to successfully respond to ongoing colonization and systematized racism. TribalCrit fully validates oral history in the form of stories, stories that serve as Indigenous theories like "roadmaps for our communities and reminders of our individual responsibilities to the survival of our communities" (Brayboy, 2006). In my SSP, I hope to bring forth the stories (cultural knowledge) and evolving survival mechanisms that informed my racial understanding as I was growing up in Page, AZ, serving in the Navy, and learning at Tufts. I intend this reflection to serve as a resource for the shi Dine'é, especially the younger generation: my girls, my niece, and my nephews.
Rebecca Goldberg
Senior Special Project
Appointment TV: How 18-25 Year-Olds Watch Television
Advisors: Sarah Sobieraj & Jeanne Dillon
This senior special project encompasses a qualitative sociological study regarding the television viewing habits of contemporary 18-25 year-olds in light of the significant technology and content changes in the past decade. For my research, I conducted one-hour interviews with six current and former Tufts students, paying particular attention to their preferred platforms for television content, as well as the circumstances in which they choose to watch. In this paper, I argue my respondents expressed a preference for watching TV content on a television, but they are not willing to forgo the flexibility that they have come to expect from time-shifting technologies. However, the potential flexibility of modern television viewing is not a free-for-all; the respondents’ preferences are limited by a threshold of video quality and the social context that continues to factor into their television viewing practices.
Alejandro Gomez
Senior Special Project
Canon X: The Young Adult Fiction of Generation Xers
Advisors: Ronna Johnson & George Scarlett
As American society is increasingly saturated with mass media and accelerated by the Internet, the notion of emergent gaps between generations is both a disconcerting and an exciting marker of progress, or at least change, in the United States. Those Americans born between 1961 and 1981, also known as “Generation X,” endured a media-fueled barrage of generation gap commentary amplified in part by the Baby Boomers, whose pride in their own generational unity contributed to Generation Xers’ reluctance to embrace a universal generational character. Labeled as “slackers,” Gen Xers had many reasons to be skeptical of mass media rhetoric, especially as teenage audiences became a target market for advertisers. Teen-directed media also included Young Adult Literature, however, a genre that emerged in the late 1960s and provided teen Xers with a reflection of themselves and their issues (e.g. divorced parents, escapism via substance-use, intergenerational conflict, and anxiety about the future) in a less exploitative discursive space than the commercialism of MTV. Many of these books offer a clear picture of Generation Xers as they developed their identities amid a postmodern atmosphere of cynicism and artificiality. In this paper, I argue that the following five Young Adult novels written during Gen Xers’ adolescence epitomize the Xer experience of youth: A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973); Very Far from Anywhere Else (1976); Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978); Weetzie Bat (1989); Freak the Mighty (1993). By portraying contemporary members of the Xer peer group, these five YA texts legitimized adolescent self-consciousness and acknowledged the burdens of the ordinary.
Julie Gray
Honors Thesis
Working to Learn: The Effect of Vocational Education Programs on Working Class Student Engagement
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Sabina Vaught
Increasingly, districts are phasing out vocational education programs as the emphasis on standardized testing and measurable academic skills becomes stronger. Yet, these programs often fill an educational void for working class students, teaching them a specific, applicable skill set and locating their culture and knowledge within the institution of the school. This study explores how vocational education programs positively impact working class students’ engagement. To investigate this claim, I collected qualitative data consisting of a five-month period of classroom observations and interviews with teachers and students in the drafting and machine technology shops in the Somerville High School Center for Career and Technical Education. Drawing upon pedagogical theories of student engagement of sociological theories of cultural capital and reproduction, this investigation demonstrates that because vocational education programs cater to working class youth in a way that traditional academic programs do not, they has a positive impact on working class student engagement. Pedagogically, vocational classrooms utilize the classroom-business model, authentic assessment, and active, independent student learning to provide students with applicable skill sets and tie abstract academic concepts to the real world. Sociologically, vocational education programs recognize the importance and value of working class cultural capital while simultaneously teaching students aspects of the dominant cultural capital that they need in order to advance socially and economically. Finally, vocational education programs provide a physical space within the school in which working class culture and capital is promoted, protected, and appreciated.
Sarah Habib
Senior Special Project
Analysis of Tufts Orientation through the Lens of Social Justice Programming
Advisors: Adriana Zavala & Sam Sommers
Tufts University prides itself in creating active citizens by preparing their students for the complex world ahead. However, the campus climate of the institution does not speak to an inclusive community, but rather one that is marred by “bias incidents” and controversial exchanges specific to the lack of social justice and diversity. Tufts’ different university programs have a significant gap between what is perceived versus what is reality when assessed through a social justice microscope. The goal of this project is to affect cultural change on campus through social justice programming, specifically for new student orientation. Through interviews, observations, and program research, this project provides comprehensive recommendations specific to Tufts new student orientation. The recommendations are outlined in four different categories including mission, structure, programming, and training. These recommendations are designed to start to develop an orientation program that provides new students with additional resources, perspectives, and expectations on inclusion, understanding, and tolerance. Such a program would provide a foundation for what Tufts expects from its students. Improving the new student orientation, will not only provide a foundation for improved diversity atmosphere, but will illustrate Tufts University’s commitment to developing active citizens who can lead the way to an inclusive global community.
Alison Hodgkin
Senior Special Project
Exploring Experience: A Case Study of an Expeditionary Learning School and the Roots of its Success
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Lisa Kuh
Amidst a failing education system and the rising emphasis on charter schools in the 1990s, the Bush administration funded a number of innovative reform movements. One of them, Expeditionary Learning, has continued to boast great statistical and subjective success. Based on Outward Bound programs and utilizing practices highly regarded in experiential education theory, EL schools’ success can be attributed to a number of factors. After observing classes and interviewing teachers and students at Codman Academy, an EL school in Dorchester, it became clear that the supportive community, high expectations, hands-on experiences, and time for reflection are among the many elements contributing to students’ success at this, and possibly all, EL schools. Though it is not perfect for everyone, the practices and accomplishments at Codman and other EL schools can serve as examples of innovative and effective methods in schools.
Matthew Kincaid
Senior Special Project
Extra Credit: Labor Extraction from Black Students at Tufts University
Advisors: Christina Sharpe & Jean Wu
Dominant narratives of history often leave out important realities of people of color. An example of this is the continuation of slavery and labor exploitation in the United States post 1865. To understand this history is to know that labor exploitation has never been foreign to the African American experience in this country. This project aims to explore how remnants of this dangerous system remain in higher education institutions like Tufts University. Labor is often extracted from black students on predominantly white campus' without compensation. This particular form of labor exploitation in higher education stifles the social, academic, mental and physical lives of black students on campuses like Tufts University
Paul Kohnstamm
Honors Thesis
The Role of the Public Health Insurance Option in the Health Care Debate of 2009-2010
Advisors: Kevin Irwin & Edith Balbach
A successful legislative strategy for passing a comprehensive health care reform bill had eluded American presidents for generations. Each reform effort had its own unique challenges, and the conventional wisdom among health care reform observers is that the public option debate was yet another obstacle that President Barack Obama had to overcome in his quest for health care reform. The public option is a proposal to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private health insurers. While the public option did pose certain threats to achieving health reform—such as creating an ideological gulf between liberals and conservatives and driving moderates away from the negotiating table—I argue the policy had a net positive effect on the effort to pass the most comprehensive health care bill possible. The public option was able to be negotiated away for significant policy achievements that arguably impact more Americans than the public option being ultimately debated by Congress. Further, the public option was used as a bargaining chip with stakeholders to negotiate for the financing of health reform and crucial political support for the bill. Lastly, the public option was a popular policy proposal that acted as a lightening rod in absorbing conservative attacks that would have otherwise been directed at less popular—yet more essential—provisions of the bill, such as the individual mandate. In this sense, the public option preserved comprehensive health care reform, and the basic structure of the Affordable Care Act.
Eunji Lee
Senior Special Project
Importance of Multicultural Education for Immigrant Students and Families in American Public School System: Acknowledging Cultural Wealth of Minority Groups
Advisors: Sabina Vaught & Steve Cohen
The immigrant population in the U.S. is continuously growing with the foreign-born population increasing from approximately 12 million to 38 million within the last ten years, not including undocumented immigrants. As young immigrants enter the American school system, they have a difficult time adjusting to their new learning environment due to cultural differences and language barriers. In the past, cultural deprivation theories blamed the individuals from racial minority immigrant groups for their own problems and for lacking dominant cultural capital. Around the time of the first multicultural education movement, however, William Ryan disputed this theory by stating that immigrant youths struggle because schools are culturally deprived, so school atmosphere and operations must be transformed to stop educational inequity in America. Critical Race Theory in education argues that the themes of white supremacy and cultural capital within the school system promotes education that best serves the white dominant society. Furthermore, non-white immigrant students are oppressed and marginalized in the American education system and suffer academically and socially. Schools can help minority families and students through programs such as multicultural education that provide services in their native language and curriculums that support knowledge and skills from their own cultural background. In practice, Somerville High School in Somerville, MA currently provides multicultural education programs for immigrant students and families mostly from Haiti, Brazil and El Salvador. This paper uses the findings of importance of multicultural education to map out possible ideas for public schools in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where a substantial Latino immigrant population resides but lacks a support system for immigrant students and families to attain quality educational opportunity and experience.
Cherry Lim
Senior Special Project
Genocide in Our High Schools: A Guide to a More Inclusive Education
Advisors: Jean Wu & Steve Cohen
For many people of color, their stories and narratives are rarely found in the average United States classroom, which can be an isolating experience. The dominant narrative – that is, a White centered and therefore, restrictive story – further engrains itself in the American consciousness through our education system if we do not attempt to interrupt it. To include the histories of people of color is incredibly important as it includes all students in the picture and paints a complete picture of the history of the United States and world. I have created this study guide so it can be used as a resource for high school history teachers to diversify their curriculum. It is one example of many counternarratives that we can place in our curriculum. I specifically chose Khmer Rogue as it spoke to my own experience as a Cambodian American, but also it speaks to the Asian American experience. Using When the War Was Over, a narrative history of Khmer Rouge, and other articles and first hand accounts, this guide outlines a unit of study and directs teachers through the Khmer Rouge genocide to teach the modern world and promote critical thinking, as well as include stories of people of color.
Jose Mena, Jr.
Honors Thesis
Trash Talk: Analyzing Coded Racial Narratives in Sports Media
Advisors: Christina Sharpe & Sarah Sobieraj
African American professional athletes live in a world in which their activities and behaviors are constantly monitored and reported by sportswriters. A unique dynamic is created when a population of African American athletes is described, represented, and judged by a body of American sportswriters that is over ninety percent white. The language that is often used to describe those athletes is often riddled with coded racial narrative that suggests that Blacks are inferior. Often times, African athletes who commit crimes or engage in troublesome behavior are looked at as unruly children who are products of damaged, unstable, environments. This sort of rhetoric ties in with the stereotyping of people, families, and communities of color. It is important to point and critique sports media for portraying negative stereotypes because of how misinformed, damaging, and destructive these portrayals are. By analyzing the cases of Barry Bonds, Tiger Woods, and Dez Bryant I can illustrate how sportswriters can use sports to produce covertly racist material. In this thesis I discuss how sports media as an institution of power promotes social inequality. In each of the cases I use a critical race theory base to demonstrate how coded racial narrative found in news articles, sports blogs, and books allows for racialized commentary. I find that the portrayal of African American athletes by sportswriters damages not only the reputation of those athletes but also perpetuates stereotypes of African Americans, does tangible damage to the careers of the affected athletes, creates an environment where covert racism is acceptable, and serves as another form of institutional racism.
Molly Moulton
Senior Special Project
Family Cap Policy and the Black Female Body:
Racial Implications of a “Race-Neutral” Policy
Advisors: Linda Sprague Martinez & Alissa Spielberg
In the United States, policymakers have, for centuries, made decisions regarding the bodies of Black women, stripping them of their autonomy and reproductive rights. My Senior Special Project explores how current public policy, specifically family cap policy, continues to limit the reproductive freedom of low-income Black women without regard for their overall health and well-being. Family Cap, a state-level policy in which women who become pregnant with another child while already receiving aid do not receive additional benefits once the child is born, is a social policy founded in false stereotypes of America’s Black low-income population. By examining policy and existing research, I conclude that while proponents of family cap policy claim its race-neutrality, the policy disproportionately impacts Black women, attempting to control poverty in the U.S. by reducing the reproduction of Black bodies. Ultimately, more comprehensive research exploring the effect of family cap on a woman’s well being, mental health, physical health and reproductive freedom is necessary to construct successful welfare policy reform in the U.S., focused not on reproduction, but on job creation, skills training, education, universal healthcare and childcare.
Benjamin Phelps
Honors Thesis
“No one wins. One side just loses more slowly:”
Schooling, Standardization, and Inequality through the Lens of The Wire
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Sarah Sobieraj
High-stakes standardized tests, which became widespread after the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2001, have come under criticism for their biases and virtual takeover of many school curricula. However, those tests are just one piece of the broader push for school standardization, which has been not only ineffective but has also exacerbated existing social inequalities in its one-size-fits-all approach. My thesis uses existing research to examine how the push for “higher standards” and more accountability in schools has, in fact, resulted in diminished learning, unfair expectations for students and teachers, and a disproportional burden on students of Color. I then use examples from the television series The Wire to illustrate the ways in which standards-based reform methods are producing and reproducing social inequality. Although it is a fictionalized representation, The Wire, with its narrative freedoms, is perhaps more capable than a non-fiction work of depicting the myriad ways in which school standardization results in unbalanced power dynamics and restricts student engagement. Ultimately, through the research and the depictions in The Wire, I conclude that standards-based reform is a strategy that aligns with the American ideal of school as “the great equalizer,” but actually serves to heighten the role of schools in the creation of racial, socioeconomic, and other societal inequities.
Lindsey Rosenbluth
Senior Special Project
An IDEA: Examining Disproportionately Low Levels of Special Education and LEP Enrollment in Boston’s Charter Schools
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Julie Dobrow
In February 2011, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved plans for sixteen new charter schools. These new schools, which will open across the state in the next two years, will join the over 5,000 charter schools that have opened nationwide since 1992. Although many parents, teachers and leaders in education reform are currently looking to charters as the answer to the American public school system’s woes, I call into question significant gaps in the charter school model. Despite claims of enrolling the toughest to educate students—read: urban poor students of color—charters do not appear to serve certain populations. In Boston, Massachusetts in particular, charter schools enroll a disproportionately low number of Limited English Proficient (LEP) and special education students when compared with statistics for Boston’s traditional public schools. These disproportionate enrollment levels may be caused in part by Massachusetts’ lottery-based charter admissions system. Only parents who know about and are interested in sending their child to a charter school are able to apply for coveted seats. Additionally, charters have developed reputations for “counseling out” students with special needs in order to avoid poor standardized test scores and the significant costs associated with special education and Limited English Proficiency services. I cite statistics for each of Boston’s charter schools, showing these enrollment issues as cause for concern surrounding the expansion of the charter movement in Massachusetts and the United States as a whole.
Roxie Salamon-Abrams
Honors Thesis
Small Schools in a Big System: A Study of the Revival of the Small-schools Movement in New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Kathleen Weiler
This thesis examines the development of the small-schools movement from its origin as an alternative approach to mainstream education to its contemporary place in education policy in New York City. I argue that many of the core values and ideals of the small school model were lost when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Department of Education implemented a reform plan that rapidly created hundreds of new small schools over a short period of time. This thesis demonstrates how rapid scaling up of the small school model may, in fact, undermine its ideals. To illustrate this, I will analyze the small school model from both the perspective of early small school educators and the perspective of policymakers in New York City. Using original interviews and research of speeches, articles, books, policy agendas and critiques and evaluations of small schools in New York City, I aim to better understand how the small school model came to be at the center of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein’s plan for a bold transformation of the largest public school system in the nation.
Gabrielle Sloss
Honors Thesis
Bridging Theory and Practice: A Guide to Classroom Management
Advisors: Steve Cohen & Linda Beardsley
The motivation for my thesis came out of my personal experience substitute teaching at a public high school in New York City. Despite having taken many courses on education throughout my career at Tufts and having reflected about the practice of teaching, I found that I was completely unprepared to manage a classroom. Therefore, the question driving my thesis became: How do teachers manage their classrooms, and are there techniques which could be employed by any high school teacher to guide their practice? My thesis draws upon a series of interviews and classroom observations of both new and veteran teachers at Boston Arts Academy and Fenway High School, two Boston Public Pilot Schools, to put forth three principles of classroom management. The goal of this thesis is to present three neither overly theoretical nor too specific principles of classroom management: be genuine; plan, but be flexible; and create a student centered classroom; these principles could guide any high school teacher in learning how to manage his or her classroom. Although nothing can fully prepare a teacher to enter a classroom, as teaching is a life long learning process, this thesis aims to fill the gap between theory and practice regarding teacher preparation. In the current American social climate, in which teachers are under attack, I hope my thesis can shed light on the complexities of teaching and the incredible skill and courage which the profession demands.
Anna Smith
Honors Thesis
Comunidad, Cultura, y Economia: Understanding the Creation, Growth, and Survival of Somerville’s Latino Immigrant-owned Restaurants
Advisors: Deborah Pacini Hernandez & Justin Hollander
This thesis explores the economic, social, and cultural roles of Latino immigrant-owned restaurants in Somerville, Massachusetts. The narrative privileges the voices of Latino immigrant entrepreneurs and constructs a contemporary history of Somerville as an immigrant city. Using economic anthropological theories of the “embeddedness” of economy within social and cultural settings, I posit that these restaurants serve as multifaceted institutions of economic incorporation, promoters of multiple cultural identities, and centers of geographical and virtual communities. In addition, Somerville’s Latino immigrant-owned restaurants exist within a system of neighborhoods changing due to gentrification, transportation, and demographic changes that influences their capacities for growth, change, and survival.
Emily Spooner
Honors Thesis
A Note So High Nobody Can Reach It:
White Supremacy, Citizenship, and Massachusetts' Question 2
Advisors: Sabina Vaught & Jean Wu
This paper examines the ways in which larger constructions of citizenship enter into debates about schooling. Specifically, it argues that citizenship transcends its traditional legal definition, and that full citizenship includes the ability to meaningfully participate in American social and legal institutions. This definition of full citizenship, however, has been unevenly distributed on the basis of race, and has therefore led to a conflation of whiteness with citizenship that continues to have pervasive implications for educational policy. This paper uses Massachusetts’ Question 2, a 2002 ballot question that mandated English immersion for English language learners (ELLs), as a lens through which to view issues of citizenship and the racial and linguistic construction of Latinos in the United States. In examining Question 2 and the debates surrounding it, this paper suggests that this ballot initiative did not exist in isolation, but entered into a growing racialized anti-immigrant, particularly anti-Latino, sentiment. As a result, this paper uses critical race theory to examine these debates and argues that ultimately, Question 2 and the arguments surrounding it demonstrated a commitment to white supremacy and a failure to recognize the racialized nature of instruction for ELL students.
Daniel Wittels
Senior Special Project
Rejected!:
The Experience of Black Student-Athletes in Division I Producing Sport
Advisors: Steve Cohen & George Ellmore
March Madness dominates our lives every spring. And the BCS championship structure has been debated into the ground by analysts and fans alike. But what about the effects of these competitions on the athlete involved – specifically the black student-athlete. Too often, student-athletes, and black student-athletes in particular, are overlooked, as America gets lost in competition. This paper looks at the collective experience of black Division I revenue sport athletes and identifies the most prevalent issues that surround this experience. Additionally, it highlights the groups and organizations that benefit off of DI college sports in an attempt to understand why the issues that plague black student-athletes continue to go unnoticed and unchanged. Ultimately, it is clear that organizations not only abuse student-athletes in an attempt to profit, but specifically abuse black student-athletes more often than their white counterparts. Though this paper does not offer specific suggestions on how to change the current system, it strongly expresses that the system needs to be changed.