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Abstract: How do college-educated African American women understand and cope with financial distress? Grounded theoretical methods were used to explore (1) how this demographic group defines the sources of its financial distress and (2) the strategies that the group uses to cope with the challenges of its circumstances. Overall, the findings suggest that, regardless of the source of their financial problems, African American women turn to multiple sources for support. Traditional sources noted in previous literature, such as family and faith-based activities, were prominent in the narratives of respondents. However, these were insufficient to move these women beyond financial hardship and the accompanying emotional distress. As a consequence and as final resorts, grounded theoretical findings suggest that financial counseling, management, and professional therapy assisted these women to some economic stability.
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Abstract: This article examines how the discourse and imagery of West African female dance coalesced with notions of power, desire, disgust, and superiority in Western travel narratives from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The authors of these publications wrote extensively of the cultures they encountered in West Africa, noting indigenous performances and customs—especially dance. Informed by their own cultural and social norms, these writers transformed African dance performances into pornographic scenes for consumption and sexual enticement for a mainly white male audience. African dance became evidence of the overt sexuality of blackness, helping create racial stereotypes of the black "other," and provided validation for the sexual abuse of black women in the Atlantic slave system. There is an association between performance and blackness that influenced negative racial conceptions of blacks in the North American slavery system. Travel narratives presented the identity of black femininity as malleable and capable of being shaped according to the desired purpose of the gazer. This sociocultural construct reassured these travelers of their sexual power and at the same time denied any sexuality of women other than the white male desires. These women were thus depicted as sexual predators who lacked traditional feminine qualities, therefore placing them outside the traditional female sphere reserved for white womanhood. Using these travel narratives and tying together dance culture in both Europe and Africa, this article examines how the white male gaze sexualized African dance, contributed to the construction of race and gender, and affected the experiences of black women in the Atlantic world.
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Abstract: The essay is an examination of the gender dynamics in the Illinois Black Panther Party. Scholarship on the Black Panther Party has identified sexism, misogyny, and gender discrimination as critical issues within the organization. This article argues that, although those problems existed, gender dynamics were not uniform across chapters. Rather, each chapter was distinct with regard to region and concerns immediate to distinct localities. For this reason, I assert, it is critical that researchers examine each chapter on its own to determine its respective gender policy and practice. This paper focuses on the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and finds that it was more progressive and consistent in its gender dynamics than most other Panther affiliates and Civil Rights/black power organizations.
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Abstract: Elma Lewis was an artist, educator, and bridge leadership activist. Her lifelong commitment to institution building linked earlier, foundational, community "uplift" efforts of the 1930s and 1940s to broader, sustained struggles for educational equality, economic justice, and community control during the 1960s and 1970s. The cultural programs and institutions that she founded were integral to the articulation of black community consciousness that developed in postwar Boston and, ultimately, formed the "cultural base" upon which increased calls for "community control" and sustained organizing and mobilizing efforts were launched during the late 1960s and early 1970s—most notably, those around the long struggle for educational equality. On the whole, her work was part of a broader tradition of black women's activism that contributed to ongoing community-building efforts central to the postwar black freedom movement in Boston and the nation.
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