Showing 1 - 10 of 11 Items

Date: 2019-01-01

Creator: Anne Fraser Gregory

Access: Open access

The landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954, and its subsequent implementation, offer an essential question: Are segregated schools inherently evil, and is integration the only solution to unequal education? The statistics that illustrate the effects of segregated schooling are indeed staggering. According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office study, the number of schools segregated along racial and economic lines doubled between 2000 and 2013. In New York City, the achievement gap between Black and white students has continued to grow. In 2018, the National Assessment of Achievement Progress reported that 48 percent of white fourth-graders were proficient in math, while only 16 percent of black students met the standard. With a gap of 32 percentage points—growing 5 points since 2015—Black children in New York are consistently behind their white peers in academics. Sixty years ago, New York's Black and Latino parents parents grappled with this same issue as they fought to desegregate the city’s schools. This Honors Project will discuss segregated schooling in New York City during the 1950s and 60s, and the actors who fought to disrupt the system. Throughout this work, I will attempt to illustrate the power of community in New York City, for both good and evil, for equality and bigotry. Parents—Black, white, and Puerto Rican—function as key players in this story, as they continually fought local and state Boards to access the education they believed to be rightfully theirs and their children’s. I will also assert the notion that segregation was not solely a Southern issue: the similarities between the fight for school integration in both North and South are striking, and highlight the far reaches of prejudice in the nation both then and now. Most importantly, I argue that unequal education may not be solved by integration alone, and that believing in integration as the only viable option perpetuates the incorrect notion that children of color require proximity to white students in order to be academically successful.

Date: 2011-03-01

Creator: Tess Chakkalakal

Access: Open access

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Eskedar Girmash

Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community

Date: 2015-09-01

Creator: Tess Chakkalakal

Access: Open access

Date: 2017-05-01

Creator: Abby Elizabeth Motycka

Access: Open access

What was the impact of Brown v. Board of Education on the United States and how did pro-segregationists in the South respond? In order to answer this question, I argue three key arguments over the course of three chronological chapters. In chapter one, I argue that segregationists from southern states responded to Brown by fighting to preserve segregation in order to protect a racial hierarchy they believed was essential. This racial hierarchy is magnified in the southern capital of Little Rock, Arkansas, which I argue in chapter two exposed segregationists’ political defiance and poor organization around racial integration of public schools. After a year of integration, analyzed in chapter three, I conclude my chapters by arguing the first year slowed down the segregationist organizations, but did not persuade them that racial integration would improve the “southern way of life.”

Date: 2013-05-01

Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein

Access: Open access

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Date: 2021-01-01

Access: Open access

My honors thesis argues that at Bowdoin College, failure to provide Culturally Relevant Teaching in art studio courses dismisses the representation of Blackness in the Visual Arts Department. Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT) recognizes the importance of all students' cultural experiences in different aspects of learning. It allows for equitable access to education for students of diverse backgrounds. CRT is crucial to reconstructing Art Education to represent diverse student bodies. My position as a Black-Indigenous artist enables me to reflect on the intersection of these frameworks and to build upon them in order to highlight the need for pedagogical practice in studio art courses, that doesn’t center technical training derived from the Western canon of art production in Bowdoin’s Visual Arts Department. My research lives on a digital format, where you will engage with the history of Art at Bowdoin from 1794 to the present, oral histories from Black identifying alumni who have navigated the department, theoretical frameworks, and an auto ethnography that breaks down my self-taught pedagogical practice in response to the representational gaps in the curriculum. As you navigate this site, I ask you to follow the written instructions and engage with the interactive material. I will virtually guide you through this project chronologically, and through the lens in which I have experienced personally and through observation.

Date: 2019-05-01

Creator: Samuel Robert Kenney

Access: Open access

Much of the discourse surrounding African immigration to Maine has centered on the provision of public services that facilitate community development and integration. This project investigates different types of leadership strategies employed by African individuals in Maine that advance community objectives. When African immigrant leaders are empowered to affect public policy, they re-frame traditional conceptions of aid-dependency and vulnerability commonly applied to African immigrants in media and popular culture. Through leadership in nonprofit and civic spheres, African immigrant community leaders translate grassroots connectivity with informal networks into meaningful influence in the realm of public policy. This project focuses on the evolution of community leadership in Maine’s Somali community, the network of immigrant-serving organizations that provide specialized public services across the state, and the capacity of one organization in particular, the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition (MIRC) to ensure accurate representation of policy initiatives to civic officials for individuals unable to participate in the electoral process. This project evaluates the political utility of ‘lived experience’ as a component of diversity in the realm of public policy.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Ayana Opong-Nyantekyi

Access: Open access

Colombia has the second largest African descendant population in all South America due to the transatlantic slave trade that stripped millions from their homeland and brought them to present day Colombia. While African descendants have been a part of the region’s history for over five centuries, it was not until 1993 with the establishment of Law 70 that the Colombian government acknowledged the culture and rights of African descendants. This thesis analyzes the historical, social, and political underpinnings of Law 70, its implementation, and aftereffects. I argue that Law 70 acknowledges a lived identity of rural African descended Colombians as the mechanism for Black communities to obtain rights. The thesis addresses the deep connection between ethnicity and territory, and how Law 70 recognizes that, for rural African descendants, ancestry, culture, and territory, cannot be separated. Law 70 codified a legal transition from a racial to an ethnic frame, which was necessary for African descendants to live their difference and be recognized by the nation.

Date: 2014-05-01

Creator: Hanna Leigh Wurgaft

Access: Open access

This paper challenges the effectiveness of the federal Disproportionate Minority Contact mandate. It first traces the legislative history of the mandate, from the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Act of 1974, to the establishment of the Disproportionate Minority Confinement mandate of 1988, to the final shift to Disproportionate Minority Contact in 2002. It then describes and analyzes implementation of the mandate in the New England states, showing uneven data collection and limited compliance with the mandate. The next chapter explores factors outside the jurisdiction of the DMC mandate that create and perpetuate racial disparities in juvenile justice, including concentrated poverty, police tactics driven in part by federal initiatives, and school disciplinary policies. Ultimately, this paper reports that racial disparities in arrests of juveniles have increased significantly- not declined- during the life of the mandate. It then discusses the limits of federal legislation in remedying racial disparities in juvenile justice.