EURJ Volume 12

EURJ

Emory Undergraduate Research Journal

Volume XII

Spring 2016

A Letter from the Directors of Undergraduate Research Programs The College of Arts and Sciences at Emory has a long history of supporting undergraduate exploration, creativity, and experiential learning. As the new co-directors of the recently restructured Undergraduate Research Programs, we are excited to support the university’s mission to foster an engaged community of undergraduate researchers. In our role as directors, we are committed to facilitating opportunities for students to explore their interests and passions through scholarly inquiry and experiential research.

As the faculty advisors of EURJ, we see our mission to promote and sustain a diverse and nuanced community researchers realized in the student profiles, articles, and features. This volume demonstrates the vibrancy of research occurring in the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences. In showcasing both the actual process of research and broadening the narrative of what research is and who conducts it, this issue of EURJ seeks to highlight a broader community of undergraduate researchers.

The editors have captured the zeitgeist of movement that the contributors to this volume of EURJ, energized by current events on a local, national and international scale, have drawn upon in their exploration and construction of knowledge. Through research, undergraduates are forming connections. The ways in which Emory undergraduate students’ access and contribute to the academic landscape, as seen in this journal, are numerous and varied as they pursue curiosity both in the classroom and beyond.

Along with the reimagining of EURJ, Emory is witnessing a bubbling of spaces of undergraduate intellectual dialogue such as the Researchers of Emory blog. These spaces in unison highlight and help to sustain a community of students engaged, drawn to inquiry, and fueled by the desire to discover, connect, and transform.

We are proud of the hard work of the editorial team and the contributors. We hope this issue sparks your curiosity, fuels conversation, and broadens your understanding of research at Emory.

Folashade Alao, PhD Associate Director, EmoryUndergraduate Research

Gillian Hue, PhD Associate Director, Emory Undergraduate Research

Editorial Board

Editor-in-Chief Anqi Gao Senior Associate Editor Tiffany Ding Humanities Editors Ekaterina Koposova Angela Zaladonis Natural Sciences Editors Shelly Saini Kevin Ding Ian George Martin-Louis Riu Social Sciences Editors Joan Shang Kenny Igarza Stellina Lee Matthew Ribel Jessica White

Treasurer Tiffany Ding

Design and Layout Yeo Won Ahn Allison Irwin Shweta Sahu Website Editors Madeline Drace Bahar Jalalian Photographer Julia Munslow Copy Editors Joshua Buksbaum Madeline Drace Jessica Lam Special Features Joshua Buksbaum Anqi Gao Martin-Louis Riu Publicity Quentin Truncale

Photo by Anqi Gao

A Letter from the Editors To our readers, We are pleased to present to you Volume 12 of the Emory Undergraduate Research Journal (EURJ). This year’s edition continues with our tradition of providing an interdisciplinary platform for undergraduates to showcase their research in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Our journal seeks to highlight the intellectual vitality of the undergraduate students and recognize their scholarly work in a manner that fosters discussion. The articles in this issue provide a small glimpse into the variety and breadth of the research opportunities and topics undertaken by students. As we continue our traditions, however, we also present to you some changes for the Spring 2016 issue.

First, you may have noticed a cover design different from that of previous years. Our design team took steps to create a new visual look for the journal that underscores and celebrates the multitude of topics covered in this issue. You can also look forward to a visually revamped website that offers more interactive and frequent posts in the near future.

This year, we also received a large number of submissions in the humanities and social sciences. Many of these papers exhibited a common theme of “identity”, whether it was self-identity such as in the case of “Stories We Tell About Ourselves”, media portrayal such as in the case of “The Wealthy High-flyers: Media’s Framing of Chinese International Students in the U.S., 2009-2015”, or stereotyped identities perpetuated by the criminal justice system as discussed in “Justice Exposed; How Historical Racial Bias in the Criminal Justice System has Crippled African Americans and Tarnished America’s Image.” We hope that as you read through this issue, these papers challenge you to think about what the term “identity” means to you, and how different media, social, and political platforms strengthen or detract from your definitions.

In addition to research papers, this issue includes additional feature articles and interviews profiling the ongoing work and scholarly pursuits of various faculty and student researchers on campus. These articles provide further insight into the multi-step process that goes into conducting research as well as the exciting discoveries being made each day at our academic institution. You will find a series of interviews with students from different disciplines detailing the motivations that encouraged them to pursue their respective lines of research and how that research has influenced them on scholarly and personal levels. We encourage you to delve into the historical analysis of the Kono mask, explore the digital mappings of Senufo art, and discover the inner workings of organic chemistry. By providing a forum that recognizes the intellectual curiosity and innovative spirit of our students, we hope to foster student participation in undergraduate research.

Photo by Anqi Gao

This year, we started our first collaboration with the Emory Woodruff Undergraduate Research Award program, an annual award that recognizes the work of three outstanding undergraduate researchers and one honorable mention student. These original research papers demonstrated high levels of research skill and included substantial use of the Woodruff Library’s resources. In addition to publishing research papers submitted directly to EURJ, we feature the abstracts and research statements of the three winners and honorable mention recipient of this award in this issue. In the near future, we will include full-length texts of their papers on the EURJ website for all to access. We thank Jennifer Elder, who oversees the award program, for collaborating with us over the past year to make this feature possible. We also want to congratulate and thank the winners and honorable mention recipient of the Woodruff Undergraduate Research Award for sharing their research and stories with us.

We would like to express our gratitude to all of the the people whose work and support have made this journal possible. In particular, we would like to recognize our faculty advisors and directors of the Undergraduate Research Programs, Dr. Folashade Alao and Dr. Gillian Hue, who have provided us with the resources and insight to ensure the success of the journal. We greatly appreciate and thank all of the authors who submitted their research papers for review as well as their mentors. Finally, we would like to give a huge thank you to our editorial staff, whose tireless efforts and ideas have made this journal possible.

On behalf of the entire 2015-2016 EURJ staff, we would like to thank you for reading the journal and we hope you enjoy the exceptional work that our Emory undergraduate students have accomplished.

Anqi Gao Editor-in-Chief

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Tiffany Ding Senior Associate Editor

Get involved with EURJ

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CONTACT E-mail eurjstaff@gmail.com with any questions or comments about EURJ. E-mail f.alao@emory.edu or ghue@ emory.edu for questions or comments about undergraduate research.

JOIN Apply for a position on our staff as a section editor, photographer, treasurer, special features writer, design and layout editor, or publicity officer for the upcoming year.

SUBMIT Send in your research paper to EURJ for publication in the Spring 2017 issue. E-mail us for information regarding submission guidelines and deadlines.

Table of Contents 6

Photo by Lily

Piety and Protest: The Sacred and Secular Functions of African-American Spirituals

13

The “Wealthy High-flyers”: Media’s Framing of Chinese International Students in the U.S., 2009-2015

24

A Genealogy of Fetal Personhood

31

Kono Mask Comes to the Carlos

32

Justice Exposed: How Historical Racial Bias in the Criminal Justice System has Crippled African Americans and Tarnished America’s Image

47

Youth Generations for the Chinese Feminist Movement in the Twenty-First Century: Political Opportunity, Increasing International Allies, and State Relationships

53

A Look into the Digital Mapping of Senufo Art

54

Student Spotlight

56

Stories We Tell About Ourselves and Our Parents and How They Shape Our Identity

66

Woodruff Undergraduate Research Award Winners

Piety and Protest: The Sacred and Secular Functions of African-Amer Ryan Sutherland

What are these songs, and What do they mean? I know little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase, but I know of something of men, and knowing them, I know that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world. ~ W.E.B. DuBois

rican Spirituals Photo by Brian Jackson

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Enslaved Africans in the New World utilized music of religious devotion such as prayer or preaching (Bebey as an emotional outlet to lament their circumstances, protest 1975, 8). Furthermore, the lyrical significance of spirituals, oppression and demand liberation. In addition, music per- both explicit and clairvoyant, directly corresponded with the mitted the preservation of their cultural heritage through societal context that inspired its production. Music provided the retention of African musical idioms. Spanning the enslaved Africans or previously enslaved African-Americans course of slavery up to the Civil Rights movement and into the opportunity to vocalize and share their thoughts with the present day, African-American sacred songs have served their companions outwardly; conversely, it served as a diverdifferent functions according to varying social pressures and sion, allowing them to escape inwardly into their psyche in are inextricably linked to societal circumstance. This essay order to rationalize reality and ponder their hopes for liberawill provide a brief discussion of the dissemination of Afri- tion (from slavery, oppression, etc.) (Katz 1969, 12). Music can cultural traditions and aesthetics that accompanied and created a psychological space untethered to the misfortunes were influenced by the importation of African musics. The of the present, and assisted indentured and freed slaves to primary purpose of this investigation, however, is to exam- achieve a heightened emotional state, similar in function ine the sacred and secular functions of African-American to African ritual music that induced ecstasy or trance (i.e.

Spirituals and how social pressures have influenced these a spiritual form of escapism) (Courlander 1970, 42; Odum functions. Overall, although other functions exist, this en- 1909, 14). For the slave, and arguably within the Africanquiry will specifically address how African-American Spiri- American Black Church of today, music was inseparable tuals have served as mediums of explicit and covert com- from most expressions of religious devotion.

Bespeaking the importance of this musical folk linmunication; as a means of cultural identification, expression eage, James Johnson, cited within The Book of American and unification; and to protest social oppression.

The religion and culture of a society is frequently Negro Poetry, argues that “the ‘Spirituals,’ or slave songs... embodied in its music. This generalization holds true when [represent the] greatest body of folk [song] that America has considering African-American Spirituals. Uprooted from produced (Locke 1969, 1).” As Dena Epstein acknowledged, their homelands, disenfranchised, and forcibly sold into however, antebellum “racist polemics proclaimed the total lack of culture in Africa servitude, African slaves used (Epstein 1977, 7).” This music as a vehicle to express widespread philosophical their emotions, evince their sentiment, when extendreligious devotion and reed to include indentured tain their cultural heritage Africans, discredited the in the New World. As Wyatt slaves’ inherent musical T. Walker claimed, Africanabilities and denied their American “music and the ingenuity as the source of companion ceremony that these sacred songs (White accompanied it have been 1983, 251). This opinion the key to… the preservaparalleled the pseudotion … of [African] tradition scientific concept of Social (Walker 1979, 28-29),” and to The Old Plantation, c. 1790. Abby Rockefeller Folk Art Museum Darwinism, which argued the formation of a collective that Whites were more African-American identity.

Slave song provided a context for spiritual encouragement “evolved” than Blacks. Thus, the view that individuals of Afand intellectual cultivation, for social cohesion and collec- rican decent could produce anything that artistically rivaled tive resilience against oppression, and, in reference to the the products of Whites was considering genetically implautitle of this essay, as a means of voicing protest (Courlander sible. In fact, the fictive assumption that the White “psalmsinging plantation owner or his piano-playing wife… [were] 1970, 25; Lerma 1970, 2)).

The pivotal importance of music within African- the true [i.e. only] source of this music (Katz 1969, vii)” perAmerican religious ritual can perhaps best be articulated sisted well into the 20th century. While enslaved Africans by another generalization: African-American religious ex- certainly appropriated some musical elements from Chrisperience in the “Black Church”— Christian congregations tian hymnody and Western common practice music, the historically comprised predominately of African-American presence of Africanized musical elements such as antiphony, parishioners—is fundamentally musical, with music being polyphony, encouraged audience participation, improvisano less important in ritual practice than other expressions tion, physical movement, overarching polyrhythms and the

pentatonic scale appearing within African-American folksongs provides convincing evidence supporting the claim that slaves maintain predominant authorship and ownership of this musical idiom (Bebey 1975, 8).

Citing the impact of slave song on American culture, W.E.B. DuBois made the assertion that “the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but …[also represents] the singular spiritual heritage of the nation (Katz 1969, xx).” This sentiment is echoed by Alain Locke, a prominent African American scholar of philosophy and musicology, who contended that “Negro music is the closest approach America has to folk music, and so Negro music is almost as important for the musical culture of America as it is for the spiritual life of the Negro (Locke 1969, 1; Courlander 1970, 35).” Primitive slave songs directly contributed toward the development of the “African-American” hyphenated ethnocultural subgroup and were the predecessors to the “Spiritual.” In his crucial text The American Negro: His History and Literature, Locke provided a compelling argument claiming that the music of enslaved Africans established the foundation for many authentically “American” musical styles. Corroborated by a multitude of scholars, Locke argued that the slave moan, the corn ditty and the ring shout led to the development of slave spirituals and work songs; these styles directly impacted the birth of contemporary gospel, jazz, rock and blues. A preponderance of scholarly evidence exists that supports these claims, outlining the importance of African-derived musical elements in contributing toward the development of American art and culture (Sanger 1990, 177).

Early slave “Spirituals” closely resembled the songs of the West African Griot, who orally preserved the religious, cultural, and historical convictions of his respective African tribe. The Griot’s songs served to accompany or describe African calendrical rituals, rites of passage, and folk legends; in addition, his repertoire also included vocalizations of praise and grief (Courlander 1970, 35). These songs were communicated uninterrupted from generation to generation through the West African Griot lineage and most certainly were remembered amongst slaves in the New World following their forced diaspora. Contradicting the widespread and racist belief that African music was barbarous and unrefined, John Rublowsky asserts that West African music was, in fact, quite “sophisticated and highly developed, with unique concepts of sound and melody, rhythm and the use of the voice (Walker 1979, 49),” elements which inspired and were retained within African-American Spirituals. Discussing these retained elements within this music, James Weldon Johnson asserts “the Spirituals possess[ed] the fundamental characteristics of African music [with a]…

striking rhythmic quality… and similarity to African songs in form and intervallic structure (Katz 1969, xxxvii).” While the slave trade certainly assailed the cultural heritage of the captive Africans it so greedily imported to the New World, it failed to completely eradicate the slaves’ indigenous mythological and historical folk memory that was preserved, at least partially, within their music.

The Slave Act of 1740 of South Carolina explicitly banned slaves from “using or keeping… drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which [could be used to] call together or give sign or notice … [i.e. slave communication] of their wicked designs or purposes (Epstein 1977, 59).” Additionally, laws such as those passed in 1794 by the General Assembly of North Carolina, which forbade slaves from congregating for the “purpose of drinking and dancing,” or more recently in 1849 in Louisiana, which disallowed slaves from participating in “drumming or dancing after sundown,” were not uncommon in antebellum America and articulated the predominant fear that traditional drumming and dancing, due to their association with African spiritual expression, would incite slave rebellions (Epstein 1977, 60). Furthermore, the widespread practice of segregating slaves sharing common geographical origins or languages was another frequently used method of suppression and was thought to more easily facilitate slave acculturation into American society (Walker 1979, 29). Yet instead of heralding the destruction of the slave’s retained African musical heritage, these tactics directly contributed to its preservation. Ortiz Walton makes the astute argument that music became the universal language of the Negro, persisting despite the slave owner’s attempt to discourage slave communication (Lerma 1970, 2). The rhythmic and melodic elements characteristic of the African musical idiom were innovatively preserved through alternative means: rhythmic hand clapping, or “patting juba,” served as a substitute for the drum; stylized melismatic groaning functioned to outline remembered African melodies; and rhythmic feet stomping replaced (and was inspired by) the more ostensibly evocative gesticulations found in African dance (Bebey 1975, 25).

Shortly after their arrival in the New World, African slaves and their decedents adopted and reinterpreted Christian scripture and parable to function in accordance with their individual and collective spiritual needs. Slaves developed unique forms of worship and distinctly functional musical practices that paralleled the emergence of evangelical movements such as the Second Great Awakening that swept through slave communities during the early 19th century.

The appropriation of Christian symbolism, psalmody and hymnody, as well as the adoption of the English language served to catalyze the formation of the African-American

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Furthermore, Christianity and the English language assisted to stylistically define African-American religio-musical practice. In fact, as Wyatt Tee Walker stated, “without the cohesive and integrative character of the musical tradition of the Black religious experience, the Black Church might not have become a real entity [and] could not have provided the operations base in the struggle for personal and political freedom in the Black community (Walker 1979, 17).” This primary focus on functionality, characteristic of the songs of the African Griot, has been directly retained within African-American folksongs—African-American

Photo by Three Lions

folksongs normally accompany religious, work, social, ceremonial, or recreational activities, and fulfill a variety of purposes besides or in addition to entertainment (similar in nature to the music of the Griot). The idea that functionality is more important than aesthetics has remained integral to African-American sacred music and is perhaps best depicted through the seemingly simple melodies of the Spiritual (“Negro Song,” 2014).

The Spiritual served several sacred and secular utilitarian purposes for both the slave and the master. For the slave, the soteriological quality of the Spiritual referenced a personal and shared hope for a better future both in the physical and spiritual sense (Katz 1969, 15). In many cases, these songs were both literally and figuratively significant, functioning to express religious devotion while also communicating covert information. For example, the Spiritual “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” contains the lyric, “Didn’t my lord deliver Daniel, then why not every man?” explicitly referencing chapter six of the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. More subtly, this Spiritual protests the discrimina-

tion faced by the African slave and appeals to God for deliverance and freedom for all men (i.e. “why not every man?”).

While the ring shout and other obvious derivatives of African ritual were explicitly outlawed, many slave owners encouraged slaves to sing Spirituals, believing these songs increased slave efficiency and productivity during unified action and had the potential to convert enslaved Africans to Christianity (White 1983, 251). Some slave owners even mandated that slaves sing Spirituals continuously, a practice instated to identify the immediate location of slaves working on vast plantations in order to make it more difficult for large groups of slaves to run away without attracting attention. Since the Spiritual was the only approved medium for the slaves to express themselves musically, it soon evolved to become a tool for subversion and as a medium of enacting social change.

The lyrical content of these Spirituals often explicitly or clairvoyantly referenced the context that inspired their production. In this regard, Francis Bebey asserted that slaves “translate[d] everyday experiences into living sound (Bebey 1975, 115)” that embodied the generalized and individualized slave experience. Composed or improvised Spirituals differ from traditional hymns and psalms because, while Spirituals make reference to the Gospel, the scripture is secondary to the experience of the singer within these songs (of grief, triumph, etc.). Spirituals frequently featured lyrical allusions to religious symbolism and parables located within the Old and New Testament of the Christian Bible, but these stories were reinterpreted to protest oppression and to call for immediate salvation (i.e. freedom from slavery) in addition to divine salvation. Patriotism also served as a guise for covert messaging—American hymns about “freedom” and “independence,” usually written prior to or during the American Revolutionary War, had a redoubled emphasis for the slave. According to Col. T.W. Higginson, “the negroes had been put in jail [for singing the verse] ‘We’ll soon be free’… [which was] too dangerous an assertion (Locke 1969, 12).” Furthermore, he mentioned that other lyrics were just as revolutionary: “‘De lord will call us home,’ was evidently thought to be a symbolical verse; for, as a little drummer boy explained it to [him]… ‘Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees (Higginson G.H. Allen, internet) (Locke 1969, 12).’” Biblical or patriotic exclamations such as “My Home,” “Free Country,” “Sweet Canaan” and “The Promised Land” often referred to the states north of the Ohio River where slavery had been abolished. Moreover, in many traditional spirituals such as “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” the Ohio River is covertly referred to as “The River Jordan,” the river that the wayfaring Israelites crossed to enter Canaan in Biblical records. These covert messages were only understood

by Christian slaves who had been informed of their mean-

ing. On the other hand, slave owners were not aware of the an uninformed listener would easily understand that the ulterior messages present in this music and only understood lyrics for both of these songs reference spiritual deliverance Spirituals to express religious devotion. and crossing into the afterlife, the covert messaging of these

Citing the didactic quality of slave Spirituals and pieces cannot be deduced without prior instruction (White their importance in orally preserving slave history, James 1983, 251).

Miller McKim, a prominent Presbyterian minister and

Following emancipation, the plaintive melodies of one of the founders of the Anti-Slavery Movement, menthe American slave, both real and imagined, were exploited, tioned that these folksongs “tell the whole story of these rearranged (i.e. made palatable for White audiences), and [African-American] people’s life and character (Katz 1969, popularized by the black-faced Minstrel shows of the late 3).” McKim’s impassioned observation asserted that Spiri19th century (Courlander 1970, 5). In addition, Black mutuals successfully encapsulated and communicated the sical groups such as the nationally renowned Fisk Jubilee many frustrations and hopes of this oppressed people. ConSingers of Fisk University, an a cappella group comprised of ducting research on the slave Spiritual, McKim frequently recently emancipated slaves, assisted to define the authendocumented refrains such as “Heaven is my Home,” “Rest tic stylistic characteristics of African-American folksongs. at Last,” and “God will Deliver,” appeals for divine deliverOriginally marketed as “Ethiopian Folk Songs” or “Jubilees,” ance from oppression and the desire for eternal salvation, these slave “Spirituals” instantly garnered international acbut these songs achieved more than simply lamenting circlaim and this widespread appeal invited academic inquicumstances or supplicating God for redemption (Odum ry. The ethnographer’s insatiable appetite for this musical 1909, 5). In many instances, Spirituals outlined detailed “otherness” and his desire to capture the “true voice of the strategies and conferred oral instrucSouthern plantation” led to tions regarding escape routes and the the publication of pivotal exact locations of “safe houses” along texts, such as the 136-song the Underground Railroad, a network anthology Slave Songs of the of abolitionists and sympathizers who United States (1867), that assisted slaves to escape to freedom. preserved this art form and Popular spirituals such as “Wade added to the corpus of acain the Water,” “Follow the Drinkdemic scholarship on this ing Gourd,” and “The River Ends subject. Consequently, conBetween Two Hills,” all contain cosumerism and the burgeonvert didactic messages. For instance, ing field of ethnomusicology “Wade in the Water” instructed slaves assisted to simultaneously how to avoid being tracked by purspublicize and preserve the ing bloodhounds by wading into a slave Spiritual. nearby stream to disguise their scent;

Experiencing readditionally, the secular song “Follow surgence during the Civil the Drinking Gourd” taught slaves a Rights Movement, Spirituals method of locating Polaris, or “The such as “We shall overcome,” The Books of American Negro Spirituals (2 volumes in 1), p. 85 of vol. 1 North Star,” by first finding the “han“This Little Light of Mine,” dle” of the Big Dipper (i.e. The Drinking Gourd)—this “hanand “Oh Freedom” highlighted the struggles of Africandle” points directly toward Polaris and freedom in the North Americans to achieve emancipation from discrimination (“Negro Song,” 2014). Perhaps more evident, Spirituals like and clearly documented the impact of the Spiritual on the “The Gospel Train” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” make formulation of a collective African-American identity (“Neobvious lyrical references to the Underground Railroad— gro Song,” 2014). Certainly, while the Plantation System and even their titles include the terms “Chariot” and “Train,” the slave trade almost extinguished the cultural heritage of which directly refer to the Abolitionists’ wagons that would enslaved Africans, the slaves’ native folk memory ensured carry slaves northward to freedom. In “Gospel Train” and that their indigenous musical idioms were preserved with“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” respectively, the lyrics “She is in their music. The Spiritual provided a setting to express coming… get onboard… there’s room for plenty more” and religious devotion and to foster intellectual enhancement, “I looked over Jordan and what did I see/Coming for to cargroup cohesiveness, and collective resistance against subjury me home/A band of angels coming after me,” reflect the gation. In addition, slaves used the Spiritual as a medium to double meaning found in the lyrics of many spirituals: while vent harbored emotionality, lament their present and past

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eurj 12 hardships, channel their feelings of individual and collective joy, and to foster a sense of hope for the future. As this investigation attempted to elucidate, African-American Spirituals have served as mediums of overt and covert communication, as a means of cultural amalgamation and identification, and to protest ethnic persecution. Although the functions of the African-American Spiritual have evolved in accordance with changing social pressures, the sacred and secular impact of this music is still observable today.

Photo by BBC

References Bebey, Francis. African Music, A People’s Art. New York: Law

rence Hill Books, 1975.

Courlander, Harold. Negro Folk Music. New York, USA: Colum

bia UP, 1970. Print.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to

the Civil War. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1977. Print.

Katz, Bernard. The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in

the United States. New York: Arno, 1969. Print.

Lerma, Dominique-René De. Black Music in Our Culture; Cur

ricular Ideas on the Subjects, Materials and Problems.

Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1970. Print.

Locke, Alain. The American Negro: His History And Literature.

Ed. Martin Robison Delany. New York: Arno and The

New York times, 1969. Print “Negro Song Between 1865 and 1925.” The Official Site of Negro

Spirituals and Antique Gospel Music. Web. 22 Apr. 2014. <http://www.negrospirituals.com/>.

Odum, Howard Washington. Religious Folk-Songs of the South

ern Negroes. Worchester, MA: 1909. Print.

Sanger, Kerran L. “Slave Resistance and Rhetorical Self‐definition:

Spirituals as a Strategy.” Western Journal of Communica

tion 59.3 (1995): 177-92. Print.

Walker, Wyatt Tee. “Somebody’s Calling My Name”: Black Sacred

Music and Social Change. Valley Forge, PA: Judson,

1979. Print White, John. “Veiled Testimony: Negro Spirituals and the Slave

Experience.” Journal of American Studies 17.02 (1983):

251. Print.

Ryan Sutherland is a senior majoring in Music Performance (ethnomusicology) and Biology. His honors thesis focuses on the influence of the Indonesian gamelan on the stylistic development of contemporary Western music, the establishment of the field of applied ethnomusicology, and the creation and popularization of the “world music” genre and its offshoots among global audiences. While conducting ethnomusicological field research in Bali, Indonesia during the summer of 2015, he studied Central Javanese Gamelan and Balinese Gamelan with Pak I Made Lasmawan and traditional Balinese dance with Bu Ketut Marni. He attended the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2014 national conference in Pittsburgh, PA, where he connected with international gamelan scholars and performers.

He has performed both as both a musician and dancer at Emory University, Wake Forest University, Northern Illinois University, and the Indonesian Consulate of Chicago.

Furthermore, he has lectured in MUS 200 “Music, Culture and Society” and MUS 204W “Music Cultures of the World” offered by the Emory Music Department, and was a recipient of the 2014 Emory Undergraduate Research Award. In his spare time, he enjoys writing poetry, sailing, and making music.

The “Wealthy High-flyers”: Media’s Framing of Chinese International Students in the U.S., 2009-2015 Xueqing Wang

Picture by Irochka

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Abstract In recent years, the presence of Chinese students on American college campus is sharply increasing. As they come from cultural backgrounds that are completely remote from the U.S., few studies have engaged with how Chinese students performed as well as how they were perceived. This study provides a detailed qualitative analysis of how Chinese students studying in the U.S. are represented on major media from 2009 to 2015. The content analysis and coding mechanics were employed to analyze newspaper articles from the New York Times. As a result, this study identified and discussed frames employed by newspaper media to portray Chinese students studying in the U.S. Results showed that representation of Chinese students falls into predominately negative stereotypes, that they are geographically from East Coast urban areas, that they are incompetent when placed in the American context despite their wealthy family, and that they lack innovation and critical inquiry in general.

Introduction

Globalization has fundamentally changes the way people think and act. As nations and global citizens imagine the world as one entity, knowledge has never been so easily retrived from one side to the other side of the globe. As such, one key global value grows even stronger in the most commonly shared belief systems: that education is one of the salient factor of upward social mobility (Ishida, Muller, Ridge, 1995).

In search of ultimate, as young adults pursue individual upward mobility in their own societies, education migration becomes a significant stream within the global flow of talent (Hazen & Alberts, 2005). Recently, there is a tremendous expansion of international presence on American college campuses that the number of international students studying in the U.S. nearly tripled since 2009, and China has become the biggest source of international students since 2010 (Institute of International Education, 2009).

Mainly, this huge influx of international students into the U.S. attributes to declining transportation costs and improving technologies (OECD, 2010), which is exactly under the impact of globalization. More importantly, the main motivation of pursue of foreign education is often due to the lack of quality high education in home country (Bhandari & Blumenthal, 2011). This supposition particularly holds true among those who come from China. In a survey distributed to who are preparing for foreign educations in year 2011, 59% of them point out the attraction comes from the overall better quality of the education (MYCOS, 2011). Additionally, 56% of them reported that their ultimate purpose of

pursuing the foreign education is to improve the individual competitiveness (MYCOS, 2011).

In 2010, the number of Chinese students studying in the U.S. outnumbered that from India. In the same year, there were 150 thousands Chinese international students studying in the U.S., constituted 22% of the whole international students population in the U.S (Institute of International Education, 2011). The social trends happening in China since the past three decades is far more interesting than these astonishing statistics.

Evolving social trends and attitudes towards higher education in China have evolved over the past three decades of extraordinary economic growth. Since Deng Xiaopingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy of opening China in the 1970s, China has undergone drastic economic development. Consequently, there was a significant increase in individual disposable income, which largely contributed to the expansion of Chinese middle class.

Among those Chinese students who are currently studying in the U.S., 84% finance tuition from family supports (MYCOS, 2011). And according to the survey, approximately 80% of Chinese international students have parents working as management in corporations or as specialists (doctor, engineering, etc). Therefore the economic development as well as disposable income largely creates the economic premises of education migration.

Given the statistics of how large this group of students is, one question remains to ask: How are those Chinese international students doing in the U.S, a completely foreign country which holds different culture and ideology? There is very rich literature on higher education studying experiences of international students as well as their problems. Yet there is few literature stressed on the media representation of this particular group, Chinese international students in the U.S. And few studies have substantially engaged with media framing of this group as an analytical framework.

In this study, I specifically probe into frames employed by newspaper media to portray Chinese students studying in the U.S.

Literature Review

Framing is basically â&#x20AC;&#x153;such a way of communicating as to promote a particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral evaluation, and /or treatment recommendationâ&#x20AC;? (Entman, 1993). From a sociological standpoint, framing concerns with the way how culture, sources, communicator, and interest intersect with each other, as well as how they affects the way people perceive the world (Reese, 2011, p17). Frames are mostly viewed as schema, a process of reconstructing social meanings through all available verbal and visual symbolic (Reese, 2001).

Frames have important presence in media, especially for journalists and in the news. Specifically, in media content, frame reveals itself in terms of word choice, metaphors, exemplars, descriptions, arguments and visual images (Van Gorp, 2007). Journalists shape news content when assembling a story and do so by employing familiar frames of reference. This way, they can help readers make meaning of their content. In describing the process of framing, Entman (1993) identifies four locations of the frame in the communication process: the communicator, the text, the receiver and the culture. Journalists function as communicators who make either conscious or unconscious framing judgments based on value systems. The readers of the newspapers, on the other hand, are the receivers whose thinking is guided by frames created by the communicators.

Given that the frame creation process originates with journalists’ own value systems, frame often involves high levels of subjectivity deeply rooted in the value system of a particular society. The reason some frames might be more prevalent than others in specific culture is because journalists are susceptible to perceptual biases and are more likely to focus on information, events, or statements that match their own cognitive frame (Scheufele, 2006). In addition, some frames are likely to have a natural advantage over other types of frames because they appeal to ideas the receiver is already familiar with (Reese, 2001). Such, culturally embedded frames are appealing for journalists because they are ready for use.

Framing has an important function in meaning construction by selectively presenting what is salient. This function, however, implies a significant clue in doing framing analysis: to decompose a constructed social meaning by projecting a precise trajectory of how influence imbedded in information was transmitted and reinforced through deliveries (Entman, 1993). Reese (2001) recommends an interpretive and qualitative approach to do framing analysis, which greatly emphasizes the cultural and political content of news frames and how they draw upon a shared store of social meaning. Literature on frame analysis and framing theory all point out the significance of the larger social context, upon where framing packages are constructed.

In the history of the United States, two ideologies were constructed around Asian immigrants: The American Orientalism and the stereotype of Yellow Peril. The essence of American Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, (Said, 1979, p. 42,), an ideal of separating the East and West by emphasizing racial difference and white supremacy (Simour, 2010). Specifically, the Orient is defined as Non-Western, a broad “other” (Amin-Khan, 2012). American Orientalism believes that the civilized Westerners should finally control

the East. The Yellow Peril stereotype reveals the fear of the Americans that the Asian immigrants would bring trouble to their new nation. It originated from American’s fear of threat from rising powers in Asia in 19th centuries, especially China’s potential economic and military powers, as well as the huge influx of Asian immigrants in late 19th and early 20th centuries (Kawai, 2005).

Although these two ideologies were formed in history, they certainly are still powerful in the 21st century.

American Orientalism plays a vital part in monitoring China’s strategic global ambitions. New Orientalists perceive China’s recent economic and military expansions as threats (Amin-Khan, 2012). In addition, orientalism has an influential presence in shaping international interactions. A study analyzing flyers of foreign exchange programs in the U.S. shows that Westerners, especially Americans, evaluate foreign, complex culture based on prejudices and stereotypes generated from Orientalism (Mukherjee and Chowdhury, 2012). In addition, orientalism is a common frame employed

by American media to cover stories in China, in which China is portrayed as anti-thesis of everything that is American (Hauser, 2001). Liss analyzes media representation of China on four American mainstream media, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angels Times and the Wall Street Journal (Liss, 2003) and demonstrates that except for the Wall Street Journal which focuses on economic issues, China is portrayed as a nation that “challenges those principles and values that compose the American way of life” and that “with irrational and confrontational diplomacy” (Liss, 2003). That is to say, though historical, orientalism is still actively shaping American’s perceptions as well as American media’s coverage. Coverage of Chinese students may influence audience perception of them.

Methods

To examine American mainstream media’s framing of Chinese students studying in the United States, I conducted a systematic content analysis of 44 articles drawn from New York Times in one time frame: 2009-2015, to capture changes of frame. I first selected all articles featuring Chinese international students in the New York Times by searching on LexisNexis Academic Universe. The key words used at this step were “Chinese International Students.” The three keywords above instantly rendered over 1000 relevant articles from 2009-2015.

However, not every article that contained the keyword is considered relevant to this study. I pulled out articles that were published between 2009 and 2015. Then, I skimmed and scanned these articles one by one to decide each one’s relevance to this study. The only criteria were to

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eurj 16 make sure the article featured in Chinese students studying in the U.S. After steps above, there were only 36 articles in total were qualified.

I adopted an inductive approach to explore major themes, issues, and coding categories during the initial coding stage, where I read all the articles generally for the second time. Specifically, I developed a spreadsheet to record the date of each article was created, the title, and word count.

At the same time, background summary and characteristics of Chinese student in the U.S. were also included. I found several major themes during each time period, including recurring topics such as the biggest international student body, fraudulent behaviors and being financially strong.

In the second coding stage, where I read the articles for the third time, I imported articles into MaxQDA through which I thoroughly coded each article. Before the coding categories and specific codes were finalized (see the Appendix), they were constantly revised to capture the research question during the coding process. Once the detailed coding scheme had been established, I firstly conducted a quantitative analysis using MaxQDA. I then performed qualitative content analysis to further illustrate the media’s framing approaches.

Measures and Coding Rules

Given the complexity of the coding process, I created parental codes as clusters of subcodes. The purpose was to group subcodes in an organized and concise way, and then to demonstrate the concurrent pattern of frames. In total, I identified 7 parental codes and 25 subcodes among 34 articles from 2009-2015 (See Appendix). In the analysis, those 7 parental codes are treated as general categories.

The 7 categories are as follows: (1) Fraudulent Behavior; (2) Declining interest among Chinese students; (3) Economics; (4) Smartness; (5) American Dream; (6) Huge International Student Body and (7) Education. There is no category labeled as “others” since all articles in this time frame falls into existing categories.

Under each category, or parental code, are subcodes. Subcodes feature characteristics of Chinese international students in very specific aspects. For example, under the parental code “American Dream”, there are 5 subcodes, with each of them addressing corresponding aspects of Chinese students in the U.S. chasing American Dreams. In some articles, Chinese international students are portrayed as totally synthesized to American culture and thus are highly possible to achieve their American Dreams. Under current coding rules, this article should be coded as “Americanized (Blend in/comfortable with new culture)”. However, in this study, one frame was coded for multiple times in one par-

ticular article, since most articles have different frames and categories. One frame is coded at most once in a particular article.

Results

After the content analysis the 34 articles on New York Times from 2009 to 2015 rendered some very interesting results. Figure 1 shows the frequency of categories being featured in all 34 articles. As shown in Figure 1, “American Dream”, “Huge International Student Body” and “Chinese Education” are the top 3 frequently discussed topics on New York Times. In other words, when asked to write articles about Chinese students in the U.S., journalists from New York Times most likely to approach this group of international students from their goals in the U.S., their considerable presence in American campuses, and their heritage from former Chinese education.

Figure 2 takes a closer look at change in category frequencies over 6 years. Figure 2 presents a breakdown of topics discussed in each year as well as changes of category frequencies from 2009 to 2015. As clearly shown in Figure 2, year 2009 has the least media coverage on Chinese students studying in the U.S., revealing that Chinese student body was not receiving much attention in 2009. Furthermore, with limited coverage, year 2009 only addresses topics of “economics” and “huge international student body”, meaning that in 2009 Chinese student body is framed with macro-issues rather than individualized descriptions. Therefore, the image of this group is more general than specific. On the other hand, Figure 2 also introduces that media attention rises drastically since 2010, and continues to keep a high level of coverage in general till 2015.

Given the general trend is that media attention towards Chinese students studying in U.S. increasing significantly since 2010, it is also notable that the categories that New York Times addresses are growing diversified, too. Figure 2 also displays the changes of categories over the 6 years time span. In 2009, only two categories were discussed. In year 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, about 5 categories were featured. And in year 2015, 7 categories were addressed. At the same time, categories addressed since 2010 are growingly individualized rather than general and not specific. For instance, year 2015 includes all 7 classified categories; other than the two mentioned in 2009, Chinese students are framed with more individualized features, such as “smartness”, “declining interest in US education”, and their “American dream”.

Figure 3 also demonstrates the trend of individualization of frames in the New York Times. There is a significant decrease in the number of articles using an “economic

frame” when discussing Chinese students. Even the category “huge international student body” increases through 2010-2014, there is big drop in year 2015. However, categories with individual components keep increasing. The category “Education”, a general category which discusses how students choose to study overseas react, incorporate and resist with impact of Chinese education system, has a strong increase, showing New York Times’ continuing interest in discussing survival of Chinese students under the American education system. Other categories that feature strong individual traits are “American Dream” and “Smartness”. Both of them increase during the 6 years time span, meaning New York Times is more interested in personal choice and intellectual capability of Chinese students studying in the U.S.

Middle Class, Urban East Coast, Financially Strong

Moving from general categories under which Chinese students studying in the U.S. are framed, I would like to dig into specific framing packages journalists employ as well as the images of Chinese students that are finally presented to news audiences. In this section, I will present several quotes from the 34 articles selected from New York Times to better illustrate the framing process.

The “economics” frame highlights the way in which a lots of news coverage attributes the increasing number of students from China to the booming Chinese economy.

For example, in this quote, Chinese students are framed as “middle-class”, and their family as “having firm belief in education”. “’’The number of students from China is booming, because of that booming Chinese economy,’’ said Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the institute. ‘’But India, which also has a booming economy, is only up 1.6 percent. I think one factor is the great number of Chinese families with disposable income, two working parents and only one child, and a determination to invest their money to make sure that child receives the best education possible.’’” [China Surges Past India as Top Home of Foreign Students;]

This second quote comes from the same category, “Economics” and frames Chinese students as “financially strong”, and from “urban areas”. “David B. Austell, director of the office for international students and scholars at New York University, said the Chinese undergraduates come primarily from urban areas on China’s east coast. Because they are not eligible for the same student aid as Americans, and usually pay full tuition, he said, their growing presence is an indicator of just how many Chinese families are financially strong. -- TAMAR LEWIN” [Number of Chinese Students in U.S. Colleges Soars;]

Interestingly, articles that employ an economics frame never portray or describe a particular Chinese student as example. Rather, these articles describe Chinese students as a whole entity, often somewhat homogenous. As discussed in the last section, this image of Chinese students as being monolithic has descending over years. Media, especially the New York Times, has shifted its attention to a more individualized and personal image of Chinese students.

Incapable of Succeeding U.S. Education

From 2009 to 2015, each year there are articles focusing on Chinese students’ inability to succeed the U.S. educational systems (see Appendix B). In those articles, Chinese students studying in the U.S. are framed as having little English proficiency, being willing to stay in their comfort zone, and not willing to participate in class discussions. In those articles, universities accept Chinese students through “conditional offers” and make them promise to improve their English proficiency. Chuck Xu and Edison Ding are names appeared in another article: their English has not been improved after one year’s training in the university, and they even struggled to carry basic conversation with the reporter. Students are also portrayed as reserved and resisted American culture and liked to stick with each other: “ Many tend to keep quiet during class discussions and prefer cooking with other Chinese in their dorms rather than socializing in bars or at parties with local students.”. Rejections of blending in American culture, as well as preference of their comfort zone, articles with these frames successfully construct a negative image of Chinese students in the U.S. incapable of completing U.S. education.

Ambitious, Hard-Working, and Determined

On the other hand, Chinese students are also portrayed as being determined, ambitious, and willing to take on challenge and step outside of their comfort zone. This frame is a counter-frame of being incompetent and resistant to change. Following this image, Chinese students typically have detailed plans for their future, and are determined to realize their dreams. Mr. Fan was one of those ambitious students mentioned in articles. Even though he was conditionally admitted, he has his plan of practicing finance after graduation. He takes a one on one step to gradually improve himself. “He chose to attend college more than 7,000 miles from home, Mr. Fan said, because ‘’the Americans, their education is very good.’’ Mr. Fan knows what is good for him, and willing to make efforts. [Culture Shock].

Mr. Fan was not the only representation of deter-

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Figure 1: Categories by Frequency from 2009-2015

Figure 2: Proportion of Parental Frames Featured in Each Year

Figure 3: Proportion of Parental Frames Featured in Each Year

mined Chinese students. Ms. Lu is another exemplar of good planning and hard working: “Ms. Lu, whose résumé lists a succession of academic achievements and internships with financial firms, appeared to be among the many hoping that an American degree would pave the way to a prestigious job in finance or business. “[Grad Student With Eye On Career in Finance Is Mourned in China]. Through listing her accomplishments, this article establishes an image of a hard-working, determined Chinese young woman who has detailed future plans.

Wealthy Child

One of the most salient frames on Chinese international students, this frame portray the group as children from wealthy family in China, who are indifferent to paying “expensive” private school tuitions. This frame is willing to attach status associated with the image of wealthy child.

For example, Chinese students are portrayed as living lavish lifestyles: “When she [Yaji Shi] is not heading to track practice or doing her homework, she is combing Bergdorf Goodman for Louis Vuitton limited edition handbags and relishing in the $295 tasting menu at the celebrated Columbus Circle restaurant Per Se.”.

Another aspect of being wealthy is being stylish.

In these articles on New York Times, Chinese international students have a reputation of being highly stylish. “Many were stylishly attired in distressed jeans and bright-colored sneakers; half tapped away silently on smartphones while the rest engaged in boisterous conversations. Eavesdropping on those conversations, however, would have been difficult for an observer not fluent in Mandarin. That’s because, with the exception of one lost-looking soul from Colombia, all the students were from China.” With the contrast of one lost-looking student from Colombia, the image of being stylish is instantly established.

An interesting finding is that the image of being wealthy is very closely related to the image of being hard working (See Appendix C), which means every time a wealthy frame is established, there is high possibility that a hard working frame would be mentioned, too.

Test Score is Everything

In general, articles on New York Times like to stress how Chinese education system has influenced Chinese students studying in the U.S. And the Chinese education system is framed as “producing students only rely on rote learning and have little willingness or ability to tackle unfamiliar situations” (Round Up). And Chinese students under this system are “trained to focus only on test scores” (China’ s Education Gap). In those articles, those who are studying in the U.S. have no difference: they put huge emphasis

on standardized scores to increase their chance of getting into American universities. “Mr. Wei said he was relying on a good score from the October test to help offset a score from June that ‘’wasn’t so good.’’ He said people were rushing now to book slots to take the test in December, in case administrators declared the October scores invalid. “ Mr. Wei is portrayed as a typical Chinese students who take the SAT exam again and again, just to get a slightly better score.

Furthermore, according to the article, Chinese students continue to adopt the Chinese way of learning, memorizing repetitively, even after they enter the American universities.

“Patricia J. Parker, assistant director of admissions at Iowa State, which enrolls more than 1,200 Chinese undergraduates, says students have proudly told her about memorizing thousands of vocabulary words, studying scripted responses to verbal questions and learning shortcuts that help them guess correct answers.” Such a description reveals that Chinese students studying in the U.S. are framed as nerdy, lack of innovative inquiry, and rather put too much emphasis on test scores to measure performance.

Discussion and Conclusion

The huge influx of Chinese international students started in 2009, and the number of Chinese students continue to increase for the next 6 years. Their presence on American campuses is phenomenal, because their choices of education are greatly supported by the significant economic development of China as well as the international interactions between super power nations along with the trend of globalization. Yet, as Edward Said mentioned in his book Orientalism, this world is a clash of civilizations (1979). Different cultural and social contexts have conflicts when they try to communicate. As Chinese students enter American universities, two cultures, Chinese and American are producing conflicts and misunderstandings.

Media outlets are cultural objects susceptible to the large social contexts. Therefore the clash of cultures is fully reflected on media coverage. The media representation of Chinese international students, specifically on the New York Times from 2009 to 2015, falls into several stereotypes, that Chinese students are geographically from East Coast urban areas, that they are incompetent when placed in the American context despite their wealthy, well-connected families, that they lack innovation and critical inquiry. Yet there is still one counter-frame, which portrays Chinese students as ambitious, determined, and hard working.

The frames are predominately negative. Partially this overall negative representation of Chinese students studying in the U.S. is due to American Orientalism. As discussed earlier, Orientalism emphasizes white supremacy, separating non-American as inferior others. Furthermore, Orientalism is deeply rooted in American history, a cultur-

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eurj 20 ally embedded idea that is easily available to journalists. This reasoning might be one explanation of the overall negative frame of Chinese students studying in the U.S.

This study also finds that there is high correlation between the “wealthy” frame and the “hard working” frame, meaning that Chinese students are likely to portrayed as wealthy children who are ambitious about their future. The linkage of these two frames might come from the core value held by most middle class Americans that one needs to work hard to maintain their social status. The belief that attributes individual efforts to one’s social status is widely known in the U.S. as the American Dream. Again, this capture of larger social context falls into Griswold’s theory of Culture Diamond (2008). Media outlet is a cultural object manifested by the larger social context.

Nonetheless, despite findings and identification of frames, this study has certain limitations. First of all, the sample size is too limited. Due to time constraint, this study only focused on 34 articles on New York Times. There is potential prejudice when only one mainstream media is analyzed. A comprehensive approach might be to include mainstream media like Washington Post, Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. Secondly, this study focuses on relatively short time span due to time constraint. Media framing of Chinese students will be greatly different in 1980s and 1990s due to political and ideological reasons. Given that there is less political component in 2009-2015, this study should have featured deeper discussion in theories of racial framing. Moving beyond this study, future research could focus on media representation of Chinese students in other countries, as education migration increasingly becomes a better choice for global citizens in the 21st century.

Photo by Monkey Business

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Xueqing Wang is a junior majoring in Sociology and Economics. She conducted her research with Dr. Sonal Nalkur, and her main research interests include Chinese Studies, Contemporary Chinese Societies, Education, Identity, and Social Stratification. According to Xueqing, the most interesting experience she has had at Emory is participation in the RISE program within the Sociology Department.

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Appendix A

Code System

Code system Fraudulent behavior Undermine integrity of students all around the world Declining interest among Chinese Students Debate of value of American education Lack of local connection Less successful than counterparts who stay in China Competitiveness among Chinese applicants Economics Smartness Young and powerful new generation of China STEM major Valuable asset American Dream Potential incapability of succeeding U.S. education Less upward mobility in U.S. Americanized (handle & blend in & comfortable w/t American culture) Hard-working Want of employment opportunities Huge intâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;l student body Ambitious, well-planned, determined Wealthy family (financially strong) Getting younger Potential market for business Dream of foreign education Education Best alternative as study abroad Good performance on standardized test Huge emphasis on standardized scores Personal transformation Successful icon Notorious Chinese education system Lack of innovation and critical inquiry

#

197 11 1 2 1 1 2 4 10 0 2 5 6 0 14 1 15 6 6 23 13 19 5 10 6 0 3 4 5 3 1 16 2

Appendix B

Appendix C

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A Genea Fetal

Photo by fresnel6

alogy of Personhood

by Misha Stekl

Photo by igor

In early 2011, the routine proceedings of the Ohio state legislature were interrupted when a most peculiar witness was called to the stand: a nine-week-old, in-utero fetus.

During a vote on an anti-abortion bill, a pro-life organization brought a pregnant woman before the committee and projected an ultrasound image of her uterus onto a screen, calling the unborn fetus “the youngest [witness] to ever come before the House Health Committee” (Keinath). What is notable about this event is not only that the fetus, made visible by medical technologies, was explicitly recognized as a person, but that the mother’s personhood was erased by the legal proceedings; only her fetus was officially scheduled as a legislative witness. Though this particular anecdote may seem eccentric, it is exemplary of a premise that has defined conservative rhetoric on abortion for almost two centuries: that unborn fetuses are full citizens whose legal rights rival those of their mothers. So entrenched is this belief that in Alabama, for instance, fetuses have been assigned lawyers (Gandy). In Indiana, women who take abortion-inducing drugs have been prosecuted for murder (Valenti). Indeed, there is “a tendency to conceive of the fetus as an entire person, and a litigious little person at that, with a warrior attitude and a long list of complaints that can be asserted against the Madonna in question” (Williams 29).

In this essay, I will analyze the fetus’ alleged personhood with some help from 20th-century French philoso-

pher Michel Foucault. Contra the dominant narrative which regards fetal personhood as some God-given Truth, I will seek to demonstrate that this concept has been constructed by religious, scientific, and political discourses. That is, the Christian doctrine that life begins at conception attached itself to interpretations of fetal imaging technologies, which in turn came to inform civil rights discourse and anti-abortion legislation. Foucault’s genealogical approach to history will enable us to better understand this process, as its aim is to expose the contingency of supposedly eternal historical phenomena. By examining the socially constructed and relatively recent nature of the fetus-as-person, this essay will gesture toward the possibility of a pro-abortion politics that sidesteps the fetus-mother polemic which has traditionally dominated the abortion debate.

First, I will briefly examine Foucault’s notion of genealogy, which is an anti-essentialist method of historical inquiry. In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault juxtaposes genealogy with more classical means of historical investigation. He posits that history has conventionally been understood as the search for the singular origin or even the essence of a phenomenon. When examining a contemporary concept, historical scholars will aim to demonstrate that the modern understanding of said concept has been a Truth throughout all of history, even if it has only been re-

vealed recently. It is important to note here that the revelation of a pre-existing, natural Truth precludes the possibility of its being constructed over time. Most significantly, this essentialist understanding of history works hand-in-hand with power, as it implies that resistance to power structures is futile. Such historical essentialism is exemplified by current discourse on fetal personhood: there is a tendency to think that the fetus has always been a person, and that recent medical innovations have done nothing more than reveal this essential Truth. Genealogy is an alternative view of history; it does not seek out universal Truths or their origins. Rather, genealogy uses history to dispel the belief that each concept has a singular origin or essence; it teases out the multiple contradictory conditions that produced said concept – the “details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 80).

While essentialist narratives depend on the continuity of a given concept’s history, genealogy attends to historical discontinuities and thereby points to the construction of concepts – “the secret that they have no essence” (78). The consequence is that concepts which once seemed permanent and inescapable are rendered historically contingent and even alterable.

Genealogy can thus be invaluable in resisting power, for it pokes holes in popular discourses that would make power structures appear inevitable. My genealogy will treat fetal personhood as one such popular discourse; following Foucault, I will demonstrate that the fetus-as-person has no natural or universal essence, but is constructed by power relations and can, perhaps, be done away with. At stake in this genealogy is a reframing of the abortion debate wherein the fetus no longer assumes an identity that is always in opposition to its mother; instead, the fetus-as-person becomes one among many possible views of the fetus.

Since claims to fetal personhood are frequently linked to Christian discourse in Western modernity, it seems appropriate to open this genealogy by inspecting the historical relationship between Christianity and the fetus.

If one were to approach this history through the classical, essentialist lens that Foucault critiques, one might look to Christian history to prove that the fetus has always been a person. For instance, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops once claimed, “It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning, founded on … her Lord’s own witness … that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil” (Fay). In this way, modern Christian orga-

nizations rely on a continuous historical narrative according to which life begins, and has always begun, at conception.

But much to the chagrin of pro-life advocates, this doctrine has a much longer and more discontinuous history. For the majority of the last two millennia, Christian teachings on abortion could be summarized by the following statement from Roman Catholic canon law: “He is not a murderer who brings about abortion before the soul is in the body” (Flinn 4). This dictum is significant in that it unequivocally refutes fetal personhood: for if abortion does not constitute murder so long as it takes place before the fetus has a soul, then the aborted fetus could not have been a person. Thus, it becomes immediately clear that the Church was not always wedded to the belief that all unborn fetuses are fully human.

Of course, this reasoning raises the question of when they believed that “the soul [enters] the body” (Fay). If we are to pursue a Foucauldian genealogy, there are also a number of other questions that must be addressed: What modes of power informed this notion of ensoulment? What modes of power effected the shift from ensoulment to life-at-conception? How did this move in turn act upon power?

The religious idea of ensoulment evolved from Aristotelean teachings. In History of Animals, Aristotle wrote that the human soul is distinguished from the animal soul by its rational capacity. Fetuses are not human at conception because they lack this rational soul; according to Aristotle, fetuses only receive souls after 40 days if they are male, and after 80 if female (Aristotle 183). Clearly, this curious observation was not rooted in any scientific basis; it was merely a philosophical construct that was thought up by Aristotle and grew out of the then prevailing belief that fetuses were simply part of their mothers’ bodies. The incorporation of this Aristotelean construct into Christianity occurred in a manner that Foucault might consider an early precursor to modern disciplinary power: Christianity developed within the “network of relations” of Greco-Roman society and as such was conditioned by its norms (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 23).

One such norm was Greco-Roman society’s general reverence for Aristotelean philosophy; hence, Greco-Roman figures like St. Jerome and St. Augustine helped weave Aristotelean ensoulment into Christian doctrine in the 400s (Blanchard 11). It is important to note that ensoulment was an unstable foundation for allowing early abortions, since the time at which the fetus becomes human could be arbitrarily changed. And indeed, changed it was. Surprisingly,

“...genealogy uses history to dispel the belief that each concept has a singular origin or essence.”

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eurj 28 however, the Church initially pushed the time of ensoulment back – from roughly 450-1450 AD, Church officials taught that the fetus only became fully human when it first began to move, at the time of quickening (about 116 days after conception) (Blanchard 11). This doctrine is significant in that it established knowability as the condition for fetal personhood – through in-utero movements, the fetus was made known and therefore human. The same knowability would later become a precursor to medical theories on the fetus.

This line of Church history was briefly interrupted in 1588, when Pope Sixtus V inexplicably declared abortion to be homicide’s equivalent. In a papal bull entitled “Effraenatam,” he asserted that abortion kills “not only the bodies but also the souls … of the little ones” (“Effraenatam in English”). In this manner, he overturned the Aristotelean notion of delayed ensoulment, gesturing instead toward a doctrine of immediate ensoulment under which all fetuses have souls from their very conceptions. Rather suddenly, the fetus became a person – but why? This puzzling discontinuity in Church history, exposed by genealogy, could be examined in light of the moral conservatism of Sixtus V’s papacy – he made it his mission to fight moral “lawlessness” (Ott). The history of Christian condemnation of abortion can thus be linked to the historical accident of a particularly conservative 16th-century pope. For while Sixtus V’s decree was overturned only three years later by Pope Gregory XIV, his anti-choice discourse lived on in the statements of later anti-abortion popes. In 1854, Pope Pius IX definitively abandoned the belief in delayed ensoulment, arguing that fetuses possess human souls “without distinction … as to [their] gestational age” (Jones 710). Pope Pius IX’s statement represents a second historical discontinuity: it is nigh impossible to rationalize his sudden turn to immediate ensoulment, aside from pointing back to Pope Sixtus V’s ultraconservative precedent. One is reminded of Foucault’s view that history is like a spiral: it is not precisely that it repeats itself, but that the present is impacted by the past in a spiraling way, where phenomena resurface in slightly altered forms (Huffer). In this way, Pope Pius IX revisited Pope Sixtus V’s curious rhetoric that all fetuses have souls. This spiraling, anomaly-replete history hints at the historical and anthropogenic, rather than eternal and heavenly, nature of fetal personhood.

But it would be inaccurate to pinpoint Christianity – or even religion writ large – as the sole birthplace of modern pro-life discourse. To return to Foucault’s view of history, no concept can be reduced to one unified beginning; rather, it is perpetually being reproduced and rewritten as it is deployed to new ends (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 80). In this fashion, the concept of fetal person-

hood became linked to medical and political activism.

In medicine, religious discourse latched onto to fetal imaging. Since ultrasound technologies could visualize the fetus from day one, pro-life advocates were able to point to fetuses’ developing bodies as evidence of their “personhood.” For example, some states required women to view fetal ultrasounds prior to abortions, with the hope that viewing these images would lead them to personify the fetus and cancel the abortion (“Requirements for Ultrasound”). There existed a concomitant relationship between religious discourses of fetal personhood and medical imaging technologies, wherein each informed the other. That is, the visualized fetuses were interpellated as human because of the pre-existing conviction in fetal personhood, and this conviction

“By making the fetus knowable, medicinal discourses participated in the construction of the fetus’ identity as a person.”

Photo by homonstock

was in turn strengthened by so interpreting the images. It is also interesting to note that there is something in these appeals to fetal imaging that calls to mind the emphasis on movement in the earlier doctrine of delayed ensoulment. It has already been established that the identification of quickening as the time of ensoulment relied on the premise that subjects become humanized by making themselves known.

Previously, fetal movements in the womb had made the fetus visible; now, medicine could make the fetus known immediately following its conception. Two conclusions may be drawn from this historical parallel. First, the spiraling nature of history is again evident here insofar as medical imaging technologies resurrected the emphasis on knowing and humanizing the fetus, albeit through visualization rather than movement.

Second, both instances are indicative of what Foucault would term “disciplinary power.” For Foucault, modern power operates by creating and policing “proper” roles for each subject. Successful policing requires first that each subject be made knowable (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195). By making the fetus knowable, medicinal discourses participated in the construction of the fetus’ identity as a person.

Finally, this entanglement of religious and medical discourse reached into the realm of politics. It did not do so in any unified manner, however; rather, fetal personhood was advanced by a multitude of actors who shared a commitment to the fetusas-person because it served their separate and sometimes conflicting interests. For instance, one of the foremost early opponents of abortion was the American Medical Association, which stated in 1859 that the fetus was a “living being” (Githens and McBride 106). But their true commitments lay elsewhere: they feared that abortion-inducing drugs would reduce the need for medical professionals (Blanchard 12).

Similarly, nativist organizations like the Know Nothing Party adopted the rhetoric of fetal personhood as a cover for white supremacy – they feared that abortions by white women could contribute to the decline of the white race (Blanchard 14). These organizations’ disparate interests were thus written into the political narrative of fetal personhood. Moreover, this coalition of “medical professionals, moralists, [and] xenophobics,” which also includes countless pro-life organizations outside the scope of this paper, betrays the misogyny underlying fetal personhood – activists were willing to sacrifice women’s rights to achieve their agendas (Blanchard 15). For as fetuses gained legal standing due to these activists’ efforts, women lost theirs: in the name of fetal personhood, women have been forced to carry the offspring of rapes and even jailed for taking abortioninducing drugs (Blanchard 15). Two real subjections – the fetus-as-citizen and the women-as-less-than-citizen – were then born from the fiction of fetal personhood.

By examining religious discourse on the fetus as well as its medical and political ramifications, this paper has traced the construction of the fetus-as-person. I have highlighted inconsistencies and anomalies in Church history as “accidents that accompany [the] beginning” of fetal personhood (Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 80). The invention of ensoulPhoto by Andrey Popov ment by Aristotle and inexplicably conservative popes, for instance, shakes up the notion that fetal personhood originates in some immortal decree. I have also examined the contributions of medicine and politics to fetal personhood, illustrating the multiple beginnings of this concept and its formulation by power. The stakes of this genealogy concern nothing less than a reframing of the abortion debate: by revealing the fictitious nature of fetal personhood, pro-choice activists could deconstruct prevalent pro-life myths.

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References Aristotle. Aristotle’s History of Animals: In Ten Books. Trans.

Richard Cresswell. Ed. Johann Gottlob Schneider. Lon

don: H.G. Bohn, 1862. Print.

Blanchard, Dallas A. The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Rise

of the Religious Right: From Polite to Fiery Protest. New

York: Twayne, 1994. Print.

“Effraenatam in English.” Mariana Father Antonio Canuto. Trans.

Padre Antonio Trimakas. N.p., 22 July 2000. Web. 10

Dec. 2015.

Fay, William P. “Catholics in Political Life.” United States Confer

ence of Catholic Bishops. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Alan

Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

New York: Pantheon, 1977. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault

Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

76-100. Print.

Flinn, Frank K. Encyclopedia of Catholicism. New York: Facts On

File, 2007. Print.

Gandy, Imani. “The Absurdity of Alabama’s ‘Lawyers for Fetuses’

Law #ABLC.” Angry Black Lady Chronicles. RH Reality

Check, 16 Jan. 2015. Web. 01 Dec. 2015.

Githens, Marianne, and Dorothy E. McBride. Abortion Politics:

Public Policy in Cross-cultural Perspective. New York:

Routledge, 1996. Print.

Huffer, Lynne. “Conclusions: More Gender Trouble.” Emory Uni

versity. New Psychology Building, Atlanta, GA. 18 No

vember 2015.

Lecture.

Jones, D. A. “The Human Embryo in the Christian Tradition: A

Reconsideration.” Journal of Medical Ethics 31.12 (2005):

710-14. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.

Keinath, Marc. “Fetus to Testify before Ohio Congress.” WHIO.

Cox Media Group, 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 01 Dec. 2015.

Ott, Michael. “Pope Sixtus V.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 14.

New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 11 Dec. 2015 “Requirements for Ultrasound.” State Policies in Brief. Guttmach

er Institute, 10 Dec. 2015. Web. 10 Dec. 2015.

Valenti, Jessica. “It Isn’t Justice for Purvi Patel to Serve 20 Years in

Prison for an Abortion.” The Guardian. Guardian News

and Media Limited, 2 Apr. 2015. Web. 7 Nov. 2015.

Williams, Patricia J. “A Fetus Is Not a Person.” Abortion. Ed. Emma

Carlson Berne. Detroit: Greenhaven, 2007. 27-32. Print.

Misha Stekl is a freshman at Emory who is considering Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as potential majors. Misha’s research interests include poststructuralism, queer theory, and Czech literature, and he plans to pursue a career in academic in the future.

Kono Mask Comes to the Carlos

by Joshua Buksbaum

As the new African exhibit opens in the Carlos Museum, the restoration and conservation team is investigating the scientific characteristics of one of their most distinct pieces, the Kono mask. The Kono mask is made of wood and is nearly three feet long, and was worn on the wearer’s head during various ceremonies in Mali during the twentieth century. To the average viewer, the mask has twine tied around it, is stained with mud, and its wood is crumbling. To the conservation team, however, these are clues that spark research and help them learn more about the mask.

I was privileged to have Sarah Lindberg, an Emory Senior and key member of the conservation team, as well as her mentors, Renée Stein and Brittany Dinneen, describe their research and how it allowed them to better understand the Kono mask.

Lindberg described in depth the various research techniques she used, and what they helped them learn about the Kono mask. In coordination with the chemistry department, they performed an X-ray Fluorescence test to analyze the chemical compositions of different areas on the mask.

The chemistry department also helped them find different proteins on the surface of the mask, and the conservation team is awaiting more information from the Medical School’s mass spectrometers. The team also used CT scans Photo by Joshua Buksbaum and microscopy to analyze the mask in more detail, as well as performing an Fourier Transform Infared Spectroscopy All these tests helped the conservation team view the mask in a new light. The tests on the composition of the mask’s mud coating revealed increased levels of silicates and zirconium, indicating atypical elemental compositions of the mud. Additionally, the protein furthered the conclusion that the mask was a part of a sacrificial ritual, and that the protein was left over from sacrificial blood. Lastly, the decomposition of the Kono mask’s wood was essential to helping the team verify the authenticity of the mask.

The Carlos Museum Conservation Team is an example of how research isn’t exclusive to science, and that collaboration between the arts and the natural sciences is critical in a museum. Especially in the context of the Kono mask, where documentation is sparse, the conservation team’s work will help uncover the forgotten history of the mask and help future generations preserve and care for the mask. The Kono mask will go on display on April 9th, along with an interactive electronic placard developed by Lindberg.

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Justice Exposed:

How Historical Racial Bias in the Criminal J Crippled African Americans and Tarnished

Photo by ktsdesign

Justice System has Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Image

By Kaushik Ravipati

Photo by justasc

As the calendar turned from 2008 to 2009, seven Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers were summoned to a scene in the Fruitvale subway station in Oakland when witnesses reported a fight involving 10-12 black males.1 Upon arriving on the scene, Officer Tony Pirone attempted to escort one of the men involved in the fight, Michael Greer, who became combative and verbally aggressive. Eventually Oscar Grant, a 22-year old black male, along with four of his friends were abrasively taken off the train and lined up on the platform. Approximately at this time, numerous bystanders at the station began to record because according to one witness “What I saw I thought was wrong.”2 One of the videos shows a laser on the chest of Grant at around the same

time when the men were informed by the police that they were being arrested for resisting arrest, even though multiple witnesses attest that the police officers used excessive force in the process of removing the men from the train.3 When Grant begins to stand up due to the laser and the accusation, Pirone and Johannes Mehserle, a white BART officer, force him to the ground with Pirone placing his knee on Grant’s neck. Even as one of Grant’s friends is gesturing to the police, with his hands up, that Grant could not breathe, Mehserle mistakes Grant’s struggle to breathe as Grant reaching for his Taser and proceeds to instruct Pirone to back away and shoot Grant once in the middle of the back. Even more alarmingly, Mehserle handcuffs and searches Grant once he

Aisha Harris, “How Accurate Is Fruitvale Station?” Slate. N.p., 12 July 2013. Web. 2 May 2015.

Ibid.

3 Los Angeles Times, “Court Releases Dramatic Video of BART Shooting.” YouTube. YouTube, 24 June 2010.

Web. 02 May 2015.

1 2

has been shot before taking him to the hospital, where he the following day.

In the aftermath, amid the justified outrage, Mehserle claimed that “stress and inadequate training caused him to mistake his dark service revolver for the yellow Taser stun gun he thought he was shooting.”4 While this claim seems implausible even in a vacuum, it is even more nonsensical when placed in the proper context.

Not only had Mehserle worked for BART for two years and had been trained in the use of both lethal and non-lethal weapons, but he also personally owned two Glock handguns.5 However, even if Mehserle’s could, improbably, be believed, the question remains of why Mehserle waited till after shooting Grant in order to handcuff him and search him which is presumably what he should have done to begin with rather than restraining Grant by crushing his neck. This seemingly obvious act of over aggression against an unarmed man was not judged as harshly as expected. Even though Mehserle was suspended from the police force and convicted of murder, a jury devoid of African Americans determined charged Mehserle with merely involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison, most of which was not even served when Mehserle released on parole.6 This chilling example of a lack of accountability by law enforcement officials and the enabling of racially biased behavior by the criminal justice department is reflective of a larger problem in the United States.

Racial bias is rampant in the proceedings of the United States Criminal Justice System. While this claim may and

should be disheartening to many, the numerous facts paint a clear picture of a sobering situation. According to the UN Committee on the Elimination on Racial Discrimination, “members of racial and ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans, continue to be disproportionately arrested, incarcerated and subjected to harsher sentences, including life imprisonment without parole and the death penalty,” in the US.7 The historical explanations, the modern-day sociological implications, and possible public policy solutions must be addressed in order for shortcomings of this magnitude in the criminal justice system to be remedied. The US criminal justice system can reasonably be broken down into three distinct aspects: intake, adjudication, and corrections.8

Intake is the initial stage and refers to policing and jails, where inmates awaiting trial or sentencing are typically held.9 Unfortunately for many minority citizens, the same police force that is tasked with harboring a safe community elicits fear and despair through racial profiling. For example, while the NYPD is rightfully lauded for its courage during the 9/11 attacks, they must also be held accountable for their blatant racial profiling : 80% of NYPD stops were of African Americans and Latinos even though whites make up 50% of New York City’s population.10 In addition, on the rare occasions in which whites were stopped, only 8% were frisked, while a staggering 85% of African-Americans were subjected to this degrading violation of personal space.11 This distressing trend is not isolated to the NYPD, however, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has found that African Americans are three times more likely to be stopped by California police than whites, African Americans are 40% more likely to be searched by officers of all races in Boston, and perhaps most damning, “officers are more likely to conduct a search if the race of the motorist differs from the race of the officer.”12 The Boston Police Department has tried to explain away this final piece of evidence convicting officers of preference-based discrimination using excuses such as random neighborhood assignments and statistical discrimination, which have been vehemently disproven through rigorous statistical analysis.13 While statistics provide a disconcerting look at the larger problem, individual cases such as Zechariah Escalante, who was severely beaten and tazed by Tacoma police only for it to be determined that he was not the armed suspect that police were after, put a

Bob Egelko, “Blame in Oscar Grant BART Death May Shift.” SFGate. N.p., 7 Aug. 2013. Web. 2 May 2015.

NBC, “Second by Second Details Released in BART Shooting.” NBC Bay Area. NBC Universal, 17 June 2009. Web. 2 May 2015.

6 NewsOne Staff, “No Black Jurors Selected For Oscar Grant Murder Trial.”NewsOne. N.p., 9 June 2010. Web. 2 May 2015; Harris, “How Accurate Is Fruitvale Station?”

7 United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, “Annual Report from the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,” (United Nations, 2014), 9-10.

8 Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, “Guide to the Criminal Justice System for General Government Elected Officials”, 5.

9 Ibid 5; Bureau of Justice Statistics, What is the Difference Between Jails and Prisons?

10 Bill Quigley, “Fourteen Examples of Racism in Criminal Justice System.”

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid; Kate Antonovics, “A New Look at Racial Profiling: Evidence From the Boston Police Department,” 177.

13 Ibid, 177.

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human face on the sheer brutal numbers.14 The most harrowing part of this story, however, is that police claimed to abuse Zechariah due to insubordination and failure to comply with commands when, in fact, Zechariah suffers from hearing loss and a developmental disability.15 In fact, racial profiling by police officers is so wide spread that it has been come to be known as DWB-Driving While Black or Driving While Brown for Hispanics.16 This violation of privacy and degradation of pride is hardly acceptable in a country based on the principles of individuality and self-worth.

The next stage of the criminal justice system is adjudication, which refers to the process of prosecution, the trial, and conviction.17 This process is laced with even more racial bias, most of the time acting unbeknownst to the offender. Implicit racial bias towards African Americans has repeatedly been proven through the use of cognitive tests such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) which measures the subconscious biases that one might have regarding racial groups, gender differences, and age differences without even being aware of these prejudices.

The disturbing aspect of the results of the IAT is that judges and juries are not immune to the implicit racial bias that most Americans have against African Americans and that their judicial decisions are often biased by these implicit biases.18 In addition to juries being implicitly biased, there has been and continues to be rampant race discrimination in jury selection which consistently denies African Americans a true trial by their peers.19

Adjudication is followed by corrections, referring to prisons, which differ from jails in that they are long-term and designed for inmates who have been convicted of a crime.20 Unfortunately for African American citizens, racial disparities in imprisonment are just as stark as the rates of search using racial profiling by police. As of 2003, 1 in 3 African American men were imprisoned, while just 1 in 17 white men were imprisoned.21 The racial disparity becomes even more apparent when female incarceration rates are

analyzed, as 1 in 18 African American were imprisoned in 2003 in contrast to a comparatively miniscule 1 in 111 white women.22 Not only are African Americans locked up more frequently than whites, but according to the US Sentencing Commission, they also receive sentences that are 10% longer than their white counterparts who have committed an identical crime.23 The historical argument that has been meticulously constructed by the South to explain away this phenomenon is that African Americans and Hispanics simply commit more crimes than whites, and thus deserve the harsher sentencing that they so often receive. A quick case study, however, on drug offenses and arrests decimates

“...though African Americans and whites use drugs at identical rates in Mississippi, African Americans are three and a half times more likely to be incarcerated than whites...” this argument: African Americans make up 13% of the US population and 14% of monthly drug users, but 37% of the people who are arrested for drug offenses; though African Americans and whites use drugs at identical rates in Mississippi, African Americans are three and a half times more likely to be incarcerated than whites.24 Vincent Hudson was sentenced to life without parole for having a trace amount of cocaine that was invisible to the naked eye on his shirt, Emmanuel Cook was sentenced to 30 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for attempting to sell $50 worth of crack, and Roy Colenburg was also sentenced to 30 years in prison for

Adam Lynn, “Lawsuit: Tacoma Police Used Racial Profiling, Excessive Force against Men.” Ibid.

16 Marcia D. Davis, “Driving While Black,” 263.

17 Advisory Commission, 5.

18 Jeffrey J. Rachlinski and Sheri Lynn Johnson and Andrew J. Wistrich and Chris Guthrie, Does UnconsciousRacial Bias Affect Trial Judges?. Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 84, No. 3, 2009; Vanderbilt Public Law Research Paper No. 09-11.

19 Barbara D. Underwood, “Ending Race Discrimination in Jury Selection: Whose Right Is It, Anyway?” Columbia Law Review 92, no.4 (May 01, 1992): 725-74. Accessed April 26, 2015.

20 BJS, “Jails and Prisons.”

21 Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prevalence of Imprisonment in the U.S. Population, 1974-2001, 8.

22 Ibid 8.

23 Quigley, “Racism in Criminal Justice System.”

24 Ibid; Judith Greene, Numbers Game: The Vicious Cycle of Incarceration in Mississippi’s Criminal Justice System, 20.

14 15

presumably arranging the sale of $60 worth of cocaine.25 Comparatively, the minimum penalty for 500 grams or more of cocaine is merely five years while the penalty for just 5 grams of crack was also five years. In fact, the United States Sentencing Commission in a report to Congress has laid out the way in which disparate sentencing not only exists for crack versus cocaine, but also how lower level offenders are targeted disproportionately, with many of these minor offenders being African Americans.26 These individual cases of judicial atrocity clearly illustrate the failings of the criminal justice system and evoke realities of the brutal War on Drugs.

While it is clear that racial disparities exist within the US criminal justice system, the sources of these disparities are less well-understood due to the deep roots that they stem from. The main culprit, however, is the combination of Southern exceptionalism and white supremacy that has repeatedly found novel ways to suppress African American growth. This knowledge along with subsequent information that analyzes the sociological disadvantages that minorities face due to racial discrimination in the justice system is imperative in order to fully comprehend the reasons why public policy has not fixed this glaring issue as well to propose valid policies to amend one of the most contradictory aspects of United States history.

The United States of America is the oldest democracy in the world. For much of this history, however, the US has marginalized African Americans in almost every manner imaginable. Thomas Jefferson eloquently stated in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed with certain unalienable rights” in 1776.27 Subsequently, for the better part of a century, African American slaves in the South were essentially viewed as three-fifths of a person as a result of the dubious Three-Fifths Compromise. The Southern stance was clear: “enslaved blacks were to be counted as human beings only when it suited whites to do so…otherwise, they were just white property.”28 The ideal time for Southern whites to enforce this sickening double standard was when increased representation in Congress was at stake. Therefore, the

South essentially got the best of both worlds as they received increased representation in Congress as well retaining slaves by constructing arguments such as the one that Congressman Charles Pinckney from South Carolina used to justify slavery by drawing on ancient Greece and Rome as models and asserting that “South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves.”29 The twisted nature of the Three-Fifths Compromise illustrates the dehumanization that African American slaves were subjected to while also demonstrating the lengths to which the South would go to make sure African Americans were not considered equals to whites.

In fact, even at a time Southerners were desperate for more representative power they would not concede that African Americans were equals but instead fought for representative power while still maintaining their delusional, racist views regarding African Americans. While the North is certainly not free of blame for agreeing to accept the Three-Fifths Compromise, the brunt of the blame must fall squarely on the shoulders of the American South and its blatant racism that led to an engrained culture of racial bias in every institution in the United States.

Slavery was officially abolished when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but in reality not a single black slave was set free until the end of the Civil War almost two years later. The cost required to reach this momentous point, however, was colossal. One in every five Civil War soldiers died, and the Confederacy was especially battered as the ratio of Confederate deaths to Union deaths was three to one even though only 880,000 Confederate soldiers enlisted compared to 2.1 million Union soldiers.30 The extent to which the South was willing to uphold slavery was illustrated when wealthy plantation owner Governor Morris declared that “domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the Constitution.”31 In fact, scholars who study the “political economy of slavery” argue that slavery “gave the South a social system and a civilization with a distinct class structure, political community, economy, ideology, and set of psychological patterns and as a result, the South increasingly grew away from the rest of the nation and from the

Ibid, 19.

Diane E. Murphy, Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy. Rep. no. 1. N.p.: n.p., n.d. United States Sentencing Commission, May 2002. Web. 22 Apr. 2015.

27 Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” National Archives. July 4, 1776. Accessed March 12, 2015.

28 Joe R. Feagin, Racist America Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. Third ed. New York City, New York: Routledge, 2014, 3.

29 Paul Finkelman, “The Three-Fifths Clause, the Compromise Over Slavery and Its Lingering Effects.” The Root, February 26, 2013.

30 “The Civil War By the Numbers.” PBS. Accessed March 12, 2015.

31 Feagin, Racist America, 4.

32 Eugene D. Genovese, The political economy of slavery: Studies in the economy and society of the slave South. Wesleyan University Press, 2014.

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rapidly developing sections of the world.”32 Not only does this concept resoundingly support the idea of Southern exceptionalism, it also illustrates the extent to which slavery was engrained in the fabric of the South. Therefore, when one places themselves in the shoes of a white, wealthy Southerner in the immediate aftermath of the demoralizing Civil War, it is not incredibly difficult to infer the subsequent reaction: an intense backlash against the newly freed blacks.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, even as Abraham Lincoln and the Northerners were drafting legislation for the Reconstruction of the South and protection of newly freed slaves, Southerners were already transitioning away from the “Cotton Kingdom” of the Old South towards Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan that came to characterize the New South.33 The first step in this process was the institution of the Black Codes by members of the Old Confederacy which criminalized African Americans for offenses such as vagrancy and disrespect, and sentenced them to work on plantations or in coal mines.34 In fact, the plantation owners who held the power during slavery were replaced by the state which yielded its broad power by establishing the convict lease labor system which determined the amount of cotton that has to be picked before sending police to round up the necessary number of black workers, arrest and convict them, and send them to Parchman Prison (Angola) where they worked until the demand was met for little or no wages.35 As these blatant methods became harder to maintain, Jim Crow was invented as direct response to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments that abolished slavery, granted blacks citizenship, and prohibited the disenfranchisement of voters “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” respectively.36 The Jim Crow laws truly gained power in 1890 with the establishment of the Mississippi Plan which essentially ignored the Fifteenth Amendment when the White Man’s, Democratic, party sent armed patrols in order to prevent blacks from voting and as a result defeat the Republicans.37 These laws were overwhelmingly racist and served to reverse any progress that had been made my freed blacks since the end of the Civil War and assure that African

Americans never received equal status with whites.

The most indispensable yet ghastly of these laws was the one created by the Supreme Court decision of Plessy v.

Ferguson which upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed for segregation of public facilities.38 Plessy v. Ferguson was the catalyst that facilitated the drafting of countless laws what infringed on African American rights in all facets of life. In South Carolina, black and white textile workers could not work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze out of the same window.39 First Lieutenant Wendall Tandy, the recipient of a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Medal for service in World War II, could not sleep in the same part of the train or eat the same food as white soldiers and could not even be seen by white officers during a 60 hour train ride from Berlin to Paris.40 Richmond came up with a particularly brilliant law when the city stipulated that one could not live on a street unless most of the residents were people one could marry; blacks of course could not marry whites.41 Texas did not even bother to disguise its racial segregation, as there were six towns where blacks could not live in the state of Texas by 1914.42 Mississippi and South Carolina in essence reinstated slavery when they gave former slaves the choice of either getting a job or going to jail and arrested blacks on the charge of “not working.”43 Not only were schools and colleges segregated, black and white students used separate textbooks, and the books could not even be stored together.44 While these laws may seem petty and inconsequential in hindsight, they were vital for the establishment of a culture of degradation and humiliation for blacks and a culture of unchecked authority and supremacy for whites.

The crown jewel of Jim Crow was the strategic denial of voting rights for blacks through “literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and even whites-only Democratic Party primaries.”45 The effects of this systematic voting discrimination were profound: the number of black registered voters in Louisiana went from 130,334 in 1896 to just 1,342 in 1904.46 Similarly, in Mississippi, just 6.1% of eligible African Americans could register to vote after 1890.47

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II / Douglas A. Blackmon. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Google Books. Google, 25 Mar. 2008. Web. 2 May 2015.

35 David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. N.p.: Free, 1997. Google Books. Google, 1997. Web. 2 May 2015.

36 “Landmark Legislation: Thirteenth, Fourteenth, & Fifteenth Amendments.” United States Senate. Accessed March 17, 2015.

37 African American Registry, “The Mississippi Plan, Political Deviance.” African American Registry. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 May 2015.

38 Joseph Davis, Plessy V. Ferguson. ABC-CLIO, 2012.

39 “A Brief History of Jim Crow.” Constitutional Rights Foundation. Accessed March 17, 2015.

40 Jerold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York City, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

41 “A Brief History of Jim Crow.” Constitutional Rights Foundation.

42 Ibid.

43 Leslie V. Tischauser, Jim Crow Laws. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood, 2012.

44 “A Brief History of Jim Crow.” Constitutional Rights Foundation.

45 “White Only: Jim Crow in America.” Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Accessed March 17, 2017.

46 “A Brief History of Jim Crow.” Constitutional Rights Foundation.

47 “White Only: Jim Crow in America.” Smithsonian.

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The decreased representation in government that African Americans received due to voting laws resulted in a more vulnerable populous and in turn allowed extremist white supremacy groups to brutally enforce discriminatory laws.

The Ku Klux Klan was officially founded in December of 1865 but did not truly gain influence until 1867 when the members of the Old Confederacy who were reinstated

by Andrew Johnson created new state governments and implemented the Black Codes.48 Even with best efforts of the Radical Republicans to stop the Klan, they could not succeed due to the Supreme Court ruling that Congress did not have the authority to stop domestic terrorism in the Cruikshank decision. As a result, from 1867 to 1871, the Klan terrorized helpless blacks in the rural areas of the South and wielded power over such important matters as state government.

In fact, at least 10% of the black legislators elected during the 1867-1868 constitutional conventions became victims of violence during Reconstruction, including seven who were killed.49 Even black prisoners were subject to the Klan’s wrath, as 500 masked members attacked the Union county jail in South Carolina and lynched eight black inmates.50 Though this was the heyday of Klan violence, the Klan reemerged with a vengeance during the Great Depression and proceeded to exert its ruthless influence well into the 1960’s, lynching an estimated 3,446 blacks in the process.51 The Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow allowed white Southerners to reign supreme over blacks for another century after the passage Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. This period combined with the century of slavery before the Civil War meant that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was belatedly passed, Southerners had experienced almost 200 years of dominance over blacks and the idea of white supremacy was embedded in Southern culture. How then would the South respond to the latest challenge to their very identity and culture?

The criminal justice system has been racially biased for the entirety of US history. The examples that support this claim are overwhelming in both their quantity and degree of

injustice. Perhaps the most infamous and heinous example is the Scottsboro case where nine young black men ranging from ages twelve to nineteen were accused of raping two white girls on a freight train. Following numerous incompetent mishaps by a defense counsel that was comprised of an alcoholic and a seventy year old who likely suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and a trial that lasted one day, eight of the nine boys were sentenced to death while the twelve year old received life in prison due to a mistrial.52 The convictions were met with raucous approval by the residents of Scottsboro who had just hours before been disappointed due to

“The criminal justice system has been racially biased for the entirety of US history. ” the lack of nine old-fashioned lynchings as was custom during this time. In a similar vein, the local newspaper proclaimed the state’s case to be “so conclusive as to be almost perfect.”53 The “almost” in the reporter’s declaration turned out to be prophetic as the prosecution’s case was dismantled by competent counsel hired by the NAACP and all nine of the Scottsboro Boys were able to either escape from prison or receive parole, with the last living Scottsboro boy being pardoned 1976, 45 years after initial conviction.54 The atrocities that the boys suffered, however, cannot and should not be forgotten. In fact, this and other cases from this era bear eerie resemblance to modern cases riddled with injustice such as Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

Therefore, even though it is clear that racial bias existed in the criminal justice system throughout US history,

David Mark Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke University Press, 1981.

“Ku Klux Klan.” History. Accessed March 18, 2017.

March 18, 2015.

50 Ibid.

51 Penny Star, “KKK Lynched 3,446 Blacks in 86 Years – Abortion Claims That Many Black Babies in ‘Less Than Four Days’.” CSN News, May 15, 2013. Accessed 52 Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

53 Douglas Linder, “THE TRIALS OF “THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS”” University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. January 1, 1999. Accessed March 18, 2015.

54 Ibid.

48 49

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the problem took on a fresh face after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When the Civil Rights Act and related legislation prohibited segregation in public places Southern whites once again felt threatened by blacks just as they had after the Civil War and this time they turned to the criminal justice system for assistance. Southern Democrats pointed at rising crime rates in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and used histrionic rhetoric to link these new black civil rights with a threat on personal safety.55 The plan was once again horrifyingly ingenious, as Southern Democrats used fear to turn the general population against blacks by linking African Americans who are no longer regulated by Jim Crow with street crime in order to create the illusion that blacks are a threat to the basic right of safety on the streets. In addition, segregationists claimed that racial order is integral to the maintenance of law and order and conflated black crime with black freedom.56 This, in turn, increased incarceration

of blacks and resulted in 10% of the black populace not being able to vote due to their statuses as felons.57 The central point in the argument that the Southern Democrats put forth was that property and street crime increased drastically from 1964 to 1968 and black freedom was to blame. Even though this argument is flawed in that it does not take into the improved methods for collecting crime data during this time as well as the Baby Boomers hitting their teenage years and therefore committing more crime, these explanations did not hold the ideological clout that the racist explanation did, especially at a time when black freedom was threatening to infringe on the unique Southern culture.58

Southern exceptionalism refers to the belief that the South has “possessed a separate and unique identity…which appeared to be out of the mainstream of American experience.”59 This unique identity was initially established by the enslavement of African Americans. While there is truth the

Photo by sakhorn38

Naomi Murukawa, “The Origins of the Carceral Crisis: Racial Order as “Law and Order” in Postwar American Politics.” Accessed March 18, 2015. 2.

Ibid, 12.

57 Ibid, 4.

58 Ibid, 14.

59 James M. McPherson, “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question.” Civil War History 29, no. 3 (1983): 230-244.

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claim that the South is not only exceptional in race relations but also presidential voting behavior and economic structure, even scholars who reject the idea of Southern exceptionalism cannot deny the fact that the South did retain “the distinctive features of a racial state that sharply differentiated it from the rest of the nation.”60 Many other traditionalist scholars argue that the sole purpose of slavery from a Southern point of view was to expand its territory.61 Recent studies by revisionists, however, have conclusively proven that “slavery neither needed nor had prospects for additional territory.” This leaves two possible explanations for the existence of slavery in the South: Southern immorality and economic gain. It would be a mistake to isolate one of these explanations and claim that it conveys the whole story because both economic and moral interests played major roles in the complex system of slavery. While it is easy to reason that the economies of the North and many other societies around the world were able to thrive without the dubious benefit of slavery, this argument is also short-sighted in that it does not take into account the industrial shortcomings of the South and the need for constant crop diversification due to soil exhaustion of Southern land that made slavery essential to Southern culture.62 Although this does not mean that the South had any valid excuse for the enslavement of African Americans, it is more prudent to realize that even if economic reasons can be used to explain away slavery, the same cannot be said of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, the only way to explain these phenomena is to realize that a century of slavery had stitched racism into the fabric of the South and this is the reason why every African American civil rights victory was followed by a vitriolic and often successful attempt by the South to undermine these rights.

The racial bias present in the criminal justice system today is the culmination of Southern exceptionalism and white supremacy that have discovered new ways to suppress African Americans. The sole difference between the past two centuries prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the time period since lies not in the content of the message but in the language: since “it is no longer permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt…rather than rely on race, we use our crimi-

nal justice system to label the people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices that we supposedly left behind.”63

Although analyzing roots of a complex problem is quite instructive, realizing the ill-effects of the issue at hand is necessary to develop a solution. While it is clear that African Americans are consistently incarcerated at higher rates, the effects that disproportionate mass incarceration has on the lifestyles of minorities are not as well understood. The adverse consequences of incarceration extends beyond just the amount of time served and falls like dominoes into education, employment, social interaction, and quality of life.

The lifelong cumulative probability of “doing time” in a state or federal penitentiary is 4% for whites, 16% for Latinos, and 29% for blacks.64 Even more alarmingly, nearly one-third of black men in their twenties are either behind bars, on probation, or on parole.65 The incarceration of youth results in the obvious issue of the denial of cultural capital for future generations. The denial of education to inmates originated in 1988 with the ban of Pell Grants for drug offenders before extending to all state and federal prisoners by 1994.66 This has resulted in overall literacy being consistently lower in prisoners as compared to the general population.67 In an age where a college education is essentially a prerequisite for employment and literacy is a necessity of life, this trend is gravely concerning for minorities. In fact, blacks with criminal records are three times less likely than blacks without criminal records and a little more than three times less likely than whites with criminal records to be considered for jobs.68 As employment opportunities decline it becomes increasingly difficult for minorities in mainly urban areas to make a living by depending solely on legal avenues of income. In fact, the earnings loss associated with imprisonment ranges from 10 to 30% and detained teenagers receive lower wages for up to two decades after release.69 This phenomenon is known as strain theory and is characterized by deviant acts that are committed in response to a gap between personal goals and realistic means of achieving the goals. One of the greatest promises that is constantly made in the US is the American Dream and the belief that this country offers any individual an equal oppor-

Joseph A. Aistrup, “Southern Political Exceptionalism? Presidential Voting in the South and Non-South*.” Social Science Quarterly 91, no. 4 (2010): 906-27; Alex Lichtenstein, “The Other Civil Rights Movement and the Problem of Southern Exceptionalism.” Journal Of The Historical Society 11, no. 3 (September 2011): 351-376.

Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost.

61 Eugene D. Genovese, The political economy of slavery: Studies in the economy and society of the slave South. Wesleyan University Press, 2014.

62 Ibid, 8.

63 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.

64 Michael H. Tonry, Why Punish? How Much?: A Reader on Punishment. Minnesota: Oxford University Press, 2011.

65 Dorothy Roberts, “The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities.” Stanford Law Review 56, no. 5 (2004): 1271-305. Accessed March 19, 2015. JSTOR. 66 Tonry, Why Punish? How Much?: A Reader on Punishment.

67 Paul Barton, “Locked Up and Locked Out: An Educational Perspective on the U.S. Prison Population.” Educational Testing Service, 2006. Accessed March 9, 2015.

68 Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record.” American journal of sociology 108, no. 5 (2003): 937-975. Accessed March 19, 2015.

69 Bruce Western, “The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality.” American Sociological Review 67, no. 4 (2002): 526. Accessed March 20, 2015. JSTOR. 60

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tunity to succeed with hard work and dedication. With this promise comes certain goals and expectations for lifestyles, but when the means to achieve these opportunities are constantly denied, it is quite conceivable that criminal behavior is the contingency plan. Although there is no excuse for criminal behavior it is once again essential to understand the reasons behind deviant behavior in order to curb criminality.

Numerous sociological studies have shown that African Americans still consistently face discrimination in public places and social settings.70 In the face of prejudice, there are usually two types of responses: assimilation or hostility.71 Unfortunately, the nature of response hinges on socioeconomic status as the black underclass becomes frustrated with their inability to advance to the status that the white middle class occupies, while the black middle class actively seeks to assimilate Photo by Junial Enterprises with their white counterparts.72As a result of this divergence, the minority lower class becomes isolated into a subculture that thrives in mostly impoverished urban areas. These subcultures are the culprits for increased crime rates, as differential association theory illustrates that people become deviant through their associations with others. Therefore, when subcultures become isolated, new generations cannot develop and foster novel relationships, making it almost impossible to follow a different path than the generation prior. The most preva-

lent aspect of these subcultures is “the code of the street” which refers to a set of rules that “prescribe both a proper comportment and a proper way to respond if challenged.”73 The code is most widespread in inner-city ghettos that predominantly house minority populations and are often economically depressed, lack jobs, offer limited if any public services, and most importantly lack police influence. Due to the general mistrust of authority, the members of these communities feel that they must take responsibility for their own personal safety and earn the respect of the community as a whole. As a result, the crime rates in these communities have risen even in the face of increasing incarceration that has resulted in the United States is five to ten times more likely to imprison citizens than any other country in the world.74 Unfortunately, the difficulties do not end with economic problems.

Racial bias in the criminal justice system also adversely impacts the social and cultural aspects of life for minorities. In fact, numerous studies have found that increases in incarceration levels in urban areas weakens family formation, labor force attachments, and patterns of social interaction among residents of the affected communities.75 In addition, prisoners are systematically excluded from social redistribution and public aid programs by legislation such as the Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 than banishes ex-convicts from receiving Medicaid, public housing, and

Joe R. Feagin and Melvin P. Sikes, Living with racism: The Black middle-class experience. Beacon Press, 1994.

Karyn R. Lacy, “Black spaces, black places: Strategic assimilation and identity construction in middle-class suburbia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27, no. 6 (2004): 908930.

72 Ibid.

73 Elijah Anderson, Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. WW Norton & Company, 2000.

74 Todd R. Clear, Imprisoning Communities : How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse. Studies in Crime and Public Policy. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

75 James P. Lynch, and William J. Sabol, “Assessing The Effects Of Mass Incarceration On Informal Social Control In Communities.” Criminology Public Policy 3, no. 2 (2006): 267-94. Accessed March 21, 2015. Wiley Online Library.

76 Tonry, Why Punish? How Much?: A Reader on Punishment.

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other related forms of assistance.76

Perhaps the most damning social effect, however, is on children and the way in which different types of childrearing by different social classes gives some children disproportionate advantages later in life. Middle class parents engage in “concerted cultivation by attempting to foster children’s talents through organized leisure activities and extensive reasoning” while working class parents engage in “accomplishment of natural growth by providing the conditions under which children can grow but leaving leisure activities to children themselves.”77 The working class parents often rely on directives over reasoning and have a general mistrust towards authority due to their own negative experiences. This combination results in the children of working class parents being unusually passive in social interactions, trusting authority without proper questioning, and then being distrustful of authority later in life similar to their parents.78 While race does not play as big a role as social class in this phenomenon, it is clear that minorities are consistently positioned lower on the social ladder in the United States.79 This, in turn, leads to distinct social disadvantages for minority children that are passed on for generations in the future.

The social and economic processes outlined above are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to describe one without mentioning the other. For example, the mistrust towards authority that is fostered in minority children at a young age is often the driving force for urban communities adapting the “code of the street” which in turn increases crime drastically. In addition, the deficiency of cultural capital in minority children also results in lower wages and employment later in life.80 Due to increased crime rates and decreased production in urban areas mostly compromised of minorities, the members of these communities are labelled as deviant by police and society as a whole. This not only increases incarceration of minorities by police due to these labels, it also serves to increase crime due to individuals living up to their deviant labels in a process known as self-fulfilling prophecy.81 This is best displayed by a thought exercise where a person is constantly deemed as being lazy; after a while the person starts to live up to the expectation

of being lazy. Therefore, labelling results in over policing of crime in impoverished communities which, in turn, leads to more vigorous labelling. Racial bias in the criminal justice system generates a circle of crime and degradation for minorities with little hope of derailing the vicious patterns under the current system.

The prevailing question in the face of the presently bleak landscape is: how can we use public policy to remedy racial bias in the criminal justice system? In order to offer effective solutions, however, failed attempts from the past must be analyzed. Initially, it is clear that public policy has not succeeded in fixing the issue at hand since the prison population has increased in every year since 1973 regardless of whether crime rates were increasing or decreasing.82 Moreover, it is obvious that increased incarceration not only demolishes neighborhoods and communities, it is not even effective in curbing crime. While this may be counterintuitive due to popular belief that there will be less criminals on the streets to commit crimes, it has been found that not only are inmates are replaced on the streets by other criminals, but inmates “damaged from their prison stay” are more likely to commit a crime and reenter the criminal justice system in the absence of a necessary support system.83 As witnessed above, however, the reality that inmates, especially minorities, are faced with is little chance of employment, education, or a means of living. Why is it the case then that legislation such as the War on Drugs is continuously passed supporting increased punishments while ignoring education and employment opportunities for minority inmates and even more importantly, minority citizens when there seem to be no social benefits?

The most obvious answer is that it is more economically prudent for the government to imprison citizens than to provide them with education or employment. This explanation, however, does not hold up in light of the fact that it takes about $167,731 to take care of an inmate, while it costs on average $60,400 for a public university education and $126,000 for a private university education.84 In fact, in just 40 states it is estimated that the aggregate cost of prisons was $39 billion and the cost of criminal justice supervision for just African American males was a staggering $6 billion a

Annette Lareau, “Invisible inequality: Social class and childrearing in black families and white families.” American sociological review (2002): 747-776.

Ibid.

79 S. Karlsen and J. Y. Nazroo, “Relation Between Racial Discrimination, Social Class, And Health Among Ethnic Minority Groups.” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 4 (2002): 624-31. Accessed March 21, 2015.

80 Lareau, “Invisible inequality: Social class and childrearing in black families and white families.”

81 Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison.” (1973): 69-97.

82 Clear, Imprisoning Communities : How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

83 Ibid 6.

84 Mark Santora, “City’s Annual Cost Per Inmate Is $168,000, Study Finds.” New York Times, August 23, 2013. Accessed March 25, 2015; “How Much Will You Need to Send Your Child to College in 2030?” US News, July 25, 2012. Accessed March 25, 2015.

85 Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, “Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later.” The Sentencing Project, October 1, 1995.

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year as of 1995.85 In addition, studies have repeatedly shown that all forms of education drastically decreases the rates of recidivism among former prisoners and yields significant social benefits.86

A more plausible if not abhorrent reason is political gain. Laws that are tough on crime and promise longer prison sentences for criminals are often wildly popular among constituents and offer legislators “free political capital.”87 Even more appealing for politicians, the enormous fiscal impact of these laws is never as immediate as their political benefits. Thus, politicians have already won reelection before the fiscal impact of sentence enhancements is felt by taxpayers five years later.88

Another even more unsavory factor in increasing public policy that promotes incarceration is the influence of private prison building companies on Congress. As of 2010, 16.4 percent of federal and 6.8 percent of state populations were held in private prisons which represented 120 percent and 33 percent increases for federal and state prison populations respectively since 2000.89 In addition, private prison companies receive all of their funding of an estimated $72 billion from the government which means that there is a clear conflict of interest for Congress.90 On the one hand, Congress is responsible for producing criminal justice reforms that would benefit the public as whole, but on the other powerful companies such as Corrections Corporations of America (CCA) and GEO cannot function in the absence of increasing incarceration rates.91 As in most situations the big companies win out in their support for harsh laws such as “three-strikes,” “truth in sentencing,” and stricter immigration enforcement laws which drive up incarceration rates.

CCA and GEO impact politicians in ways such as campaign contributions, lobbying on the Hill, perhaps most powerfully by forming personal relationships that everyday people who advocate for decreased incarceration have no hope of forming. This ultimately leaves everyone except the high management of private companies and reelected legislators with the support of super PAC money being unhappy and disadvantaged.92 This brings forth the most ubiquitous challenge to criminal justice reform; the fact that there is usually zero political capital to be gained for politicians who back prison reform. The reason for this is the lack of major lob-

bying groups such as the ones possessed by CCA and GEO, which is the primary method through which political views are transmitted to Congress.93 Once again, the situation seems to be disheartening and twisted: politicians refuse to adopt prison reform even though the public supports it because of a lack of political gain due to the overwhelming power of large companies and lobbying groups. There are solutions, however, that have started to be implemented and could still be employed in order to clean up the mess that is the criminal justice system.

The incarceration rates in many states are actually in decline and imprisonment rates seem to be stagnating albeit at world record levels. One of the main reasons given for this phenomenon is that crime rate has dropped, which has resulted in a logical decrease in incarceration rates.94 While this may be true it seems to have a less susceptible impact than the unsustainable financial costs of increasing incarceration on state budgets, a Supreme Court order to relieve overcrowding, and the gradual realization that increased incarceration increases budgets in an inefficient manner without helping public safety to a great extent.95 This shift towards a system that “emphasizes opportunity rather than punishment as the guiding theme of our vision for public safety,” has been a result of broad acceptance of the need for reform and reentry programming.96 However, in order to dent the oppression of the criminal justice system even slightly more substantiative measures to get minorities out of jail need to be implemented. The most obvious solution is to place minor offenders in community based rehabilitation programs such as church groups rather than in prison or on probation. This solution is particularly prudent due to experimental research showing that unconscious stereotypes of police officers’ beliefs about minorities and deserved punishments suggested that taking part in a faith based program compared to probation results in less punitive sentencing outcomes.97 While the concept of rehabilitation programs and even reentry programs has merit and should be pursued, the rate at which they curb the growth of incarceration is marginal at best and minorities are much less likely to even be placed in rehabilitation programs than whites only further widening the racial gap.98

One solution that has solid basis is to increase edu-

Stephen Machin, Olivier Marie, and Sunčica Vujić, “The Crime Reducing Effect of Education*.” The Economic Journal 121, no. 552 (2011): 463-484; James S. Vacca, “Educated prisoners are less likely to return to prison.” Journal of Correctional Education (2004): 297-305.

87 Clear, Imprisoning Communities : How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

88 Ibid 11.

89 “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies,” Justice Policy Institute (June 2011).

90 Ibid.

91 Matthew Clarke, “Private Prison Companies Use Political Influence to Increase Incarceration.” Prison Legal News, November 15, 2012. Accessed March 25, 2015.

92 Ibid.

93 Clear, Imprisoning Communities : How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

94 What’s Behind Falling Incarceration Rates, Directed by Michael Martin. Performed by Nicole Porter and Vikrant Reddy. NPR. July 13, 2013. Accessed May 2, 2015.

95 What’s Behind Falling Incarceration Rates. Directed by Michael Martin; Erica Goode, “US Prison Populations Decline, Reflecting New Approach To Crime.” New York Times, July 25, 2013. Accessed May 2, 2015.

96 Marc Mauer, and Kate Epstein, eds, “To Build a Better Criminal Justice System.” The Sentencing Project, 2012. Accessed March 25, 2015.

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“The most obvious solution is to place minor offenders in community based rehabilitation programs such as church groups rather than in prison or on probation. ” cational and vocational programs for newly released prisoners and even inmates still in prison in order to prepare them to make a decent living through legal means. While this plan would initially cost money to install, based on the positive effects of education on crime rate the economic and social payoff of having fewer prisoners would be worthwhile. A similar solution would be to offer inmates mental health and drug abuse rehabilitations. This is because 20% of inmates have been diagnosed with a mental health problem while 50% meet the criteria for drug abuse and dependence.99 Not only would trained help be compassionate, it would also help decrease prison populations by treating inmates in need of care.

The central theme to the elimination of racial disparity seems to be fixing institutions that are direct ancestors of slavery and Jim Crow but operate under the protection of due process and color blindness; one of these institutions is police terror.100 Police terror is a particularly important issue to address because it has been found that the racial disparity ratio at key decision points in the criminal justice system is highest in the arrest phase.101 In order to fix recurring issues regarding racial disparity police departments must be proactive and implement cultural competency training that works to introduce and expose officers to the cultural characteristics of the minority communities that they will be monitoring so that they might better understand and sympathize with the members of the community. Even with this early exposure, however, there will always be instances when

an officer’s racial bias runs so deep that no amount of early exposure can help. In this case, there needs to be a system that keeps track of early signs of racial disparity that could potentially lead to violent encounters.102 The key factor in this early intervention system is that there needs to be an outside source that monitors and presents the department with suggestions. This is because of the code of silence that prevails between members of any police departments and inhibits investigations intended to identify a culprit.

The next part of the criminal justice system that needs to be resolved is disparate sentencing. The War on Drugs has irrevocably targeted African Americans and crippled black communities. Drug policies increased the proportion of African American arrests for drug offenses increased from 24% in 1980 to 39% in 1993, while drastically increasing the number of African American women incarcerated for drug offenses by a staggering 828%.103 Criminal justice policies that exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities affect minorities in an unfair manner and lead to many of the problems previously discussed. In order to avoid said problems policies and laws with disparate racial impact need to be revised.

There have already been steps taken to revise laws, as the city of Seattle passed the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Program which gives “police officers the option of transferring individuals arrested on drug and prostitution charges to social services rather than sending them deeper into the criminal justice system.”104 The Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) of 2010 has made the weight disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine friendlier towards African Americans, while the NYPD has effectively stopped the “stop and frisk” program that was a hallmark of the NYPD for years.105 Additionally, progress is even being made at the police level, as more minority police officers are being recruited and officers are being made more responsible for their actions due to body cameras and civilian review boards.106 Finally, laws such as The Racial Justice Act in North Carolina has resulted in progress being made in the courts as prosecutors and jurors are being reviewed for potential implicit racial bias.107

The criminal justice system is broken as result of the long and racist history of the United States of America.

African American rights have denied at every turn starting

“Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System A Manual for Practitioners and Policymakers.” The Sentencing Project, 2008. Accessed March 26, 2015.

Clear, Imprisoning Communities : How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.

99 “Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System” 100 Dorothy E. Roberts, “Constructing a Criminal Justice System Free of Racial Bias: An Abolitionist Framework.” Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 39 (2007): 261.

101 “Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System” 102 Ibid.

103 Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling, “Young Black Americans and the Criminal Justice System: Five Years Later.”

104 Nazgol Ghandnoosh, “Black Lives Matter: Eliminating Racial Inequity in the Criminal Justice System.” The Sentencing Project, 2015. Accessed March 26, 2015.

105 Ibid 21.

106 Ibid 23.

107 Ibid 24.

97 98

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Photo by freshidea

from slavery going through Jim Crow to the modern-day racially biased criminal justice system. Increased incarceration of African Americans has had no observable benefits to the public as a whole and has crippled the black community both socially and economically in largely urban areas.

In fact, increased incarceration results in the affirmation of previously held stereotypes towards African Americans which in turn only encourages increased crime and desolation. This is no doubt a difficult problem to solve due to its multifaceted nature, but the efforts that have been put forth prior to the past few years have been lackluster at best and deplorable at their worst. The benefits of decreased incarceration of minorities range from increased economic ef-

ficiency to more rich and complex social relationships. Recent years have bought about a swing in the right direction from the era of selfish political and economic interests and proven that public policy can be effective. If there is to be any hope of a complete fix to the problem of racial bias in the criminal justice system, there needs to be an ideological shift in the way that the nation as a whole perceives African Americans, which in turn might encourage politicians to create more effective public policy. While this may be an ambitious and perhaps unrealistic proposition, it is hard to believe that a country that has accomplished so much is incapable of imparting the respect that every human being deserves onto a person due to the pigmentation of their

Kaushik Ravipati is a junior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He is currently doing behavioral neuroscience research related to Alzheimerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s with Dr. Joseph Manns and immunology research in Dr. Ignacio Sanzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lab. When not in lab, he participates as a committee member on the Student Hardship Fund. In addition to neuroscience and immunology, his research interests include civil rights, inequality, and history.

Youth Generations for the Chinese Feminist Movement in the Twenty-First Century: Political Opportunity, Increasing International Allies, and State Relationships

Yimeng (Zoe) Li Photo by xixinxing

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Introduction

Part 1: One Child Policy

In the year of 2012, there were six consecutive performance art activities against gender discriminations initiated by young feminist activists, which was supported by the human rights NGO called Yi Renping Centre (Lin Shuang 2015, 23). Despite the small size, it was the first year when youth feminists had come into public arenas such as Beijing and Guangzhou and engaged in direct protests (Lin Shuang 2015, 24, Wu Danyang 2015, 40). Later in the year of 2015, the same group of feminist activists initiated the protest against domestic abuse before the day of International Women’s Day. Five of them were detained by local police in Beijing; Yirenping center was “barged by 20 men dressed in police uniforms, taking its financial documents and computers.” (Washington Post 2015, Mar 26th). I seek to use this empirical case as the starting point of test out the structure political opportunities for Chinese youth feminist movement development.

The emergence of the feminist movement is one of many aspects in Chinese civil society where citizens are equipped with more economical resources and educational tools than before to challenge the existing social norms. In fact, gender discriminations are so wide spread in China today that many insidious assumptions, such as “women are born as incapable, marginalized, and subordinate” are still strongly held. Yet, Chinese women today are still without any legislative or institutional protection due to the marginalized status within the Party Agenda. It was under this light that young females within the civil society started to awake and embrace the feminist theories, and fight back the insidious discriminations.

In this paper, I want to explore particular societal conditions that facilitate their fight-back and their awakening process toward gender discriminations. Some of these conditions are the indirect result of special historical context such as One Child Policy. Others are the products of along

Photo by Marek

Introduced in 1978, the One Child Policy was initially enacted to reduce the Chinese population growth rate.

The party leaders were fearful of the prospect that such a high population growth rate would not be able to co-exist with the long-term goal of economic development. Within urban cities of China, the coercive policy has been implemented primarily through strict interpretation, leading to a relatively equal gender ratio. Some households in rural areas, however, where a strong preference for boys is held, have performed abortions of infant girls or have simply refused to obey such laws. Despite its drawbacks, the One Child Policy has indirectly empowered urban women in China by: 1) giving young females access to educational resources and financial supports; 2) lifting expectations for girls from both the family and from themselves.

For daughters of a single child family, this policy helped eliminate the potential sibling competitions for parental attention and financial resources (Sudbeck Kristine 2012, 50). Thus, this generation of females was raised with much greater acceparental interaction, parental financial supports and educational resources. Moreover,DSDFS generations of the One Child Policy have devoted much of their energy to outscoring others within the standardized test system or competing in the fierce selection process of school. Active and continuous engagement in competitive enviornments have helped foster higher achieving women.

Still today, it is very common to see urban parents distribute one third of their income into their single child’s education and for the child to partake in various extracurricular activities such as piano, advanced mathematical courses, or PE in order to increase their child’s competiveness (Tsai and Rich 2002, 79). Due to such heavy investment and attention, many of the outperformers have been girls due to such heavy investment and attention. In 2001, the number of girls who held senior high school certificates outnumbered boys (Wei, Li, and Sun, 2015). Yet despite the fact that various young women were regarded as just as competent as their male peers, they felt a sense of injustice upon in their encounters of gender discrimination. For many high achieving women, companies directly reject them due to their gender. The double standard for achievement by women and men has become more unacceptable and suffocating.

Jane Li, who initially was a psychological consultant at Peking University, left her job and sought a new career as an entrepreneur. She later founded “Jian Dan Xin Li,” one of the rising psychological consultant platforms within China after gaining a first round investment from Tim Draper of Silicon Valley. She described her career transition from a college consultant to female entrepreneur in the following manner:

“The reason that I chose working at a university was

because my parents thought it was steady and decent. My life here was surrounded by dealing with trifling things, and I don’t feel like I was able to learn and make a change. I gradually realized that people had had different expectations for men and women, and that was baffling for me…Throughout my life till college, I was being told to go one step further and to release my potential… I thought life would be more.

That’s when I feel the urge to escape” (Jane Li, 2013).

Due to focused educational pursuits from an early age, many young women in China held high expectations for themselves and were encouraged to think about their own interests. Such momentum to pursue their ambitions did not stop after their entry into the labor market. Scanning through the reflections of many young Chinese women reveal other inspiring female youths like Jane Li, who were also trying to grasp at whatever they could to change their “presumed” trajectory. The generous financial and emotional investment parents conferred to their only daughters, a consequence of the One Child Policy, allowed young women to achieve more in the early stages of life. Thus, it has become much more of a struggle for females of One Child generations to accept the values long praised by traditional Chinese society: “finding a better job is no better than find-

Photo by xtock

ing a good husband;” “stability is more important than anything else.” As the struggles began, so did the social awakening.

Part 2: Increasing and diversifying accesses of feminist ideas

Compared with the One Child Policy, which serves as an indirect historical factor for female empowerment, increasing access to feminist practices and theories has more directly empowered young females. These theories and practices have not only given young females the analytical tools and vocabularies needed to uncover the patriarchal society that Chinese schools and media failed to explain, but

also created a special sphere for them to find like-minded people and initiate change.

The exposure to feminist practices and theories comes mainly through studying abroad or entering college. In fact, many feminist activists trace their philosophy back to when they first encountered the western feminism theories in college. The experience of reading books by Virginia Woolf or Simone de Beauvoir, for example, is often described as “making sense and consoling,” conveying messages that their societies were not able to tell them. It would seem that the process of reading and reflection is the first step of empowerment. Xiao Meili, one of the Feminist Five, reflected her experience of reading The Second Sex as “like a nearsighted person with new glasses, I began to see clearly, and many of the things that puzzled me growing up were explained by feminism” (Xiao Meili, New York Times, 2015).

A similar experience also occurred to Nancy Tang, a feminist advocate following the detention of the Feminist Five.

Nancy finished her college degree at Amherst College in the United States, declaring, “I had obtained the vocabulary and framework to analyze why some of my earlier experiences in China felt wrong. It’s because they were wrong, and the manifestations of gender injustice. I could see it in how teachers would openly comment that boys were ‘superior’ to girls at math and science, how my loving father would express his unconscious preference for a son by intending ‘if only you were a boy’ as a compliment…” (Nancy Tang, Foreign Policy, 2016 June 24th).

The pattern of realization through feminist theory and self-reflection during the college years reveals the cruel reality many young females are faced with in mainland China. Gender discriminations are so rampant that they have penetrated many societal levels, and the general public has long remained silent about prevalent sexual assaults within the workplace or the entrenched sexism at school. Females subconsciously internalize gender stereotypes conveyed by schoolteachers, parents, and images from mass media.

Those who realized the severity of the issues often found it difficult to voice them due to political apathy and potential political implications perceived by the government (Louise E, 2012).

What differentiates some current youth feminist activists from those of the previous generations is that they choose to initiate their campaigns in forms of direct actions in the public arena rather than being “accommodationists.”

“We cannot afford to go about our campaign quietly,” wrote Xiao Meili (Xiao Meili, 2015). There are several reasons behind this change. The first is due to a strengthened feminist activists’ network among scholars, activists, and students, which has bolstered their confidence for initiating change.

Most of the direct actions are circulated around through-

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eurj 50 out this network. In fact, after the detention of the Feminist Five, Wang Zheng, the main scholar on Chinese feminism, delivered a speech condemning the Chinese government and rallying support for these activists at Brookings Institutions (Brookings Institutions, 2015 April 4th). In an article

by Nancy Tang published in Foreign Policy, she stated that she was one of the keen advocates of translating activist articles (Foreign Policy, June 26th 2014).

Another catalyst is the creation of “apolitical” tactics to achieve greater success (Wang Zheng, 2000). Due to the fear of being labeled as “separatist” by the government, these youth feminist rely on performing arts rather than public protest to channel their demands (Cao Yaxue, 2015).

Their collective action has been used to great success. It has not only been covered by various mainstream media, but it also earned a spot as one of the topics within the National People’s Congress Conference. Later, various urban-management commissions from Beijing to Guangzhou ordered more female restroom facilities within the cities.

However, these successes also manifested the exact boundaries that the Communist Party set for civil rights actions. Cao Yaxue characterized it as “promoting female rights is within the iron cage” (Cao Yaxue, 2015). In other words, demands needed to be mundane enough in order to be apolitical. Activists needed to consider the potential of being regarded as “separatists” who were “forming a political party” in conjunction with their own demands of being victims.

Part 3: The Internet Due to the limited physical public space, the internet has served as the arena for disseminating the feminist ideas among the general public. As Chang Lam argued in his scholarly work, Netizens do not directly influence the political process in China, but also the unorganized chaos and salient agitated debates, which successfully interfere with the process of political decision making due to the limited citizen engagement in the public (Chang L, 2015).

Various public debates occurred on Weibo and Zhihu (a similar forum as Quora), in 2015 centered around gender equality. More than one thousand questions about gender were asked on Zhihu. For the question “in what ways have you experienced of gender discriminations,” there were more than one hundred thousand views and more than one hundred answers. The top three highest voted answers cen-

tered around personal experience of being told by teachers or relatives that “girls were not as competent as boys” and direct exclusion of females from college majors such as marine geology (Zhihu, 2014).

Moreover, there were several agitating public discussions that demonstrated the general attitudes among urban women towards the sexism that penetrated many levels.

For example, the term “Straight Man Cancer” refers to the “chauvinist, judgmental behavior and language that propels sexist double standards or belittles women”, and was used on a widespread basis after a sexist microblog was tweeted by the famous scholar Zhou Guoping (Tang N, Diplomat, 2015). In Zhou’s tweet, he claimed that “no matter how talented [women] are or what achievements they reach, if [a woman] refuses to, or doesn’t know how to be a gentle lover, a caring wife, a loving mother, the sense of beauty she gives me will be greatly reduced” (Tang N. Diplomat, 2015). Later in the afternoon, more than 6000 comments followed his posts, and Chinese female Netizens diagnosed him as “Straight Men Cancer”, attacking him for being a chauvinist and backlashing on gender issues.

The debate quickly attracted various media allies. The next day, Zhou had deleted both of his tweets due to increasing pressure; however, the online circulations on gender stereotypes had begun. The online debates had reflected that a great numPhoto by drik ber of youth females within China were no longer willing to tolerate in silence the long held gender stereotypes. The agitations among female Netizens spurred by the public figure’s tweets were not coincidental. It manifested the youth females’ increasing autonomy within the last 20 years and the empowerment development. The Internet is the arena for women to fight the gender inequality. The constant discussions within the last three years, whether centered around leftover women, gender stereotypes of Spring Festival Galas, the One Child Policy, or Straightmen Cancer, etc., have exposed the feminist awakening and the incremental gender awareness among the publics.

Part 4: International Allies After the detention of the Feminist Five, there was hardly any local media coverage on the topic Despite scattered discussions on internet forums, the general public within China was not even aware of this incident due to the effective firewall censorship surrounding the internet. However,

the event rallied significant international support. Various Feminist scholars, transnational activists, and Political leaders petitioned for the release of the detained activists. The global feminism community responded “fast and [strongly]” to this incident (Cao Yayue, 2015). Feminist activists from The US, India, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan started to campaign in front of external Chinese embassies.

Photo by Brian Boucher

Online, the hashtag “free the five” began circulating within global feminist communities. Later on, Hillary Clinton retweeted “Xi hosting a meeting on women’s rights at the U.N. while persecuting feminists? Shameless” (CNN, 2015 Sep 29th). On April 13th, Feminists Five were released on bail. Wang Zheng commented that “this is the first time that a group of detained social activists have been released all at once” (Wang Zheng, 2015). In early December, Li Tingting, one of the Feminist Five, was selected as a “Global Thinker”

by Foreign Policies due to her courage within interrogation at the police station (Foreign Policy, 2015, Dec 1st).

Although one cannot ascribe the release of the Feminist Five to the international support, it did show increasing ties of international allies within the Chinese Feminist Movement. This transnational feminism gradually found its place after the 4th Women Conference in Beijing, when the Chinese government had specifically tolerated the promotions of women’s organizations. Since then, NGOs target-

Photo by Kagenmi

ing women’s needs and various kinds of seminars on women studies and workshops have proliferated (Wang Zheng 2002). Leading up to 2000, many Chinese feminist scholars had gradually realized that the prospect of developing the Chinese Feminist Movement could not be separated from transnational feminism. Ai Xiaoming, a renowned feminist scholar and activist, was thrilled by the prevalence of The Vagina Monologues on American university campuses. She gained much inspiration during her visits within American universities, such as their reactions of sexual assault, or the female students’ knowledge about one’s own body (Ai Xiaoming, 2000). Returning back to China, she and other feminist scholars introduced the play within Sun Yat-Sen University in Guang Zhou. Within 5 years, theatre clubs from Beijing to Shanghai had celebrated their own V-Day in various places ranging from top universities, local cafes, or independent theatres.

The increasing cooperation between transnational feminism and local feminism indicates that transnational feminism provides the framework and norms that urban women can leverage to promote women’s rights. Those who possess the most access to such leverage are females who have a strong educational background, are born within large cities, and who have had the chance of being exposed to western feminism. For example, the organizers of “Lean In Beijing”, a program to advocate for the development of professional businesswomen, established the program out of the frustrations and dissent for being called “Leftover” women (Lean In Beijing 2009). In fact, one of the co-founders of Lean In Beijing is Li Enyou, who is also the executive director of Yale Center Beijing. Due to such connections, Lean In Beijing has been able to invite special speakers such as CEO of fortune 500 companies or ambassadors from various countries to hold the entrepreneurship forum with African businesswomen. However, as one of the master students at Harvard Kennedy School Yanqi Shen writes in her recent column about her sentiment regarding Lean In, “I don’t think attending events like Lean In, holding up a bottle of champagne in my hands and smiling with those CEOs would answer my long baffled inquiries about my gender.

Nor does it console my discomfort feelings after learning my gender is subordinated along within the history” (Shen, Yanqi, Douban, 2015).

The international allies have their own limits within the context of china, one being the hostility of the Chinese government. Another is that most of the discourse and framework initiated by transnational feminism can only resonate with a small percentage of females within the country.

This concept of Western feminism is often an elusive idea to those who have not encountered it. Transnational feminism has indeed granted much leverage towards the local feminists by rallying support throughout the international

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eurj 52 community. However, if it were to fail to exert enough influence to force Chinese governmental cooperation, which was often the case, or if it, itself failed to recognize the real concerns of Chinese women, it would serve no tangible purpose.

Conclusions

This paper is hinged upon the idea that the Chinese feminist movement for youth generations was catalyzed by the One Child Policy and subsequently put into motion by the increasing access of feminist theories and practices, the opening of the public forum of the internet, and by the increasing involvement of international allies.

Due to the One Child Policy, generations of youth feminists were exposed within a special historical context in which they carried higher expectations for themselves and theiDue to the increasing access of feminist theories and practices, they were granted the tools and weapons necessary to understand the world around them and tactics to combat the now obvious injustice. The opening of the Internet as a new medium for debate and theory, along with the support of international movements have granted feminists more leverage and frameworks for voicing their concerns. The growing movement is in no way ready to end the patriarchy that surrounds Chinese society, but as its support grows and increasing pressure is placed on the Chinese government, change may come.

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ber 17, 2015, from http://leaninbeijing.com/ 8. Post 1995 Major Events on Gender Equality and Women’s

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10. Sudbeck, Kristine, “Effects of China’s One-Child Policy:

Significance for Chinese Women” (2012). Nebraska Anthropologist.Paper179. h:p://digitalcommons.unl. edu/nebanthro/179 11. Tang, N. (2015, June 24). A Chinese feminist, Made in US. Foreign Policy.

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Opportunity for Girls in Urban China. Gender & Society, 74-92.

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Movement in China. Signs, 22(01), 192-199. Retrieved

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17. Wang, Z. (2015, April 3). On Anti-Sexual Harassment Activism. Lecture presented at Women, sexuality, and

social change in China, Washington D.C.

Zoe Yimeng Li is a junior majoring in Economics. She conducted her research with Dr. Sun Chul Kim, and her main research interests include Chinese Civil Society, East Asia, and Women’s Issues. She appreciates the liberal arts education that Emory has provided, and notes that the environment allows her to explore and inquire with wonderful and unique professors.

A Look into the Digital Mapping of Senufo Art A conversation with Claire Yang and Xinyu Liu Interview by Tiffany Ding Photo illustration by Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi

What are you studying?

Claire Yang: Economics and Architectural Studies (Art History) Xinyu Liu: Psychology and Environmental Science

What is your project about?

Our project studies the term Senufo and examines the assumptions, perceptions, and historical analyses behind its classification and what it conveys about art. Art from the 21st century was often classified by their form as well as ethnic and cultural influences. Thus, Senufo art focuses on certain pieces of art from West Africa that have been shaped by the experiences of artists, missionaries, or collectors who identify with the term. Mapping Senufo is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project that aims to analyze the history of the arts and generate new information about its origins.

How did you both get interested in your project?

CY: I always had an interest in design planning, especially with my studies in Art History. Even though I had no background in Computer Science, I was quick to learn and interested in data analysis and would often rely on online sources as references.

XY: As an environmental science minor, I had taken a class in GIS, where I learned about geographic information systems and special analysis.

What were some of the challenges you had to face?

At the very beginning, we were faced with the challenge of having all types of random information and data. The difficulty lay in organizing the information that we had which included photographs, maps and drawings and piecing everything together in a database in a cohesive manner. Some of the data required us to rely on databases and other references in order to understand the variation in spellings and pronunciations. Putting together the foundation of our data and figuring out the accuracy of our information was a collaborative process. We had help from data specialists, web designers, professional geographers as well as curators who provided us with insight and an outsiders perspective into our work.

What are your future goals for this project?

Our current task has been to complete the geographical referencing of the historical maps and to figure out how the term Senufo was established over time. After completing the analysis of the data, our long term goal would require more advanced mapping technology in which we would include more networks and include non-mappable information. A vital aspect of our project is understanding which information is trustworthy and evaluating its reliability. To do this, we would need to also speak with other experts in this field.

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S tudent S Jiahui Zhang What is your project?

My project is to investigate a modular multicomponent nanoparticle platform, which allows for individualized diagnosis and customizable therapy of cancer. The nanoparticle platform consists of a well-defined block copolymer that contains: (i) multi-therapeutics to overcome multi-drug resistance of cancer cells, which is the major cause of failure in cancer chemotherapy; (ii) a ligand to achieve active tumor targeting, which could reduce non-specific tissue distribution and thus systemic toxicity of the nanoparticles; and (iii) a bimodal imaging agent consisting of a conjugated polymer to realize accurate real-time therapeutic monitoring in a minimally invasive way.

Why is it important?

Polymeric nanoparticles have been of significant interest for diagnostics and therapeutics of cancer, due to their flexibility in modification of compositions, structures and properties. Although significant progress has been made in this field, expectations for the stability of nanoparticles in the blood, preferential distribution in tumor sites and their capability of curing different types of cancers are still far beyond being met. Besides, the difficulties with exact reproduction of comparable nanoparticles caused by their inherent heterogeneity as well as the uncontrollable payload also significantly hinders the translation of nanoparticle-based techniques from bench to industry and further to bedside. Therefore, a single nanoparticle platform that can achieve precise therapeutics loading, specific tissue targeting, customizable combinational therapy, and imaging-based monitoring is desiderated.

Photo by Martin-Louis Riu

Why did you go into biomedical engineering?

I am convinced that advanced biomaterials could provide new solutions to significant medical problems, transform traditional medicine, and bring a promising future for healthcare and human life.

Why did you go into biomedical engineering?

I am convinced that advanced biomaterials could provide new solutions to significant medical problems, transform traditional medicine, and bring a promising future for healthcare and human life.

Which do you believe should win the nobel prize?

Robert Langer, who is the founder of tissue engineering in regenerative medicine. His work inspired and laid the foundation of much of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research on drug delivery and tissue engineering.

Spotlight What is your project? Why is it important?

Our research employs a microfluidic mixing device to directly monitor the kinetics of enzymatic catalysis via fluorescence.

This approach allows for direct elucidation of rates for individual processes, such as the hydride transfer performed by E. coli dihydrofolate reductase (DHFR). By better understanding how enzymes work, inspiration may be found for generation of better synthetic analogues or inhibitors to halt undesirable reactions. Our enzyme of interest, DHFR, has been implicated in nucleic acid synthesis, and is thus considered a valuable target for selective inhibition by anticancer agents.

Why did you go into chemistry?

I was fortunate to have really excellent teachers who captured my attention in science early and kept me engaged. As I grew up, I was consistently drawn to the challenge of problem solving that is crucial to chemistry, especially in a laboratory setting.

Photo by Martin-Louis Riu

Had you not gone into chemistry, what field would you have gone into?

I actually almost went to art school, so I would like to think that I could have been a professional artist. During my time in undergrad, I also really enjoyed physics and statistics, which probably would have been more realistic alternatives.

Which chemist do you believe should win the Nobel Prize?

K. Barry Sharpless has already won a prize for his chirally-catalyzed oxidations, but I think he and V. Faukin from Scripps should share a prize for the development of click chemistry; the two have developed a variety of quick, robust, and incredibly mild conditions for powerful synthetic connections.

Brooke Andrews

Stories we tell about ou our parents and how th

Photo by Africa Studio

urselves and hey shape our identity

By Julie Youkyung Kim

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Abstract Creating meaning from our experiences through telling a narrative, or narrative meaning making, is one way through which we explore and develop a sense of identity. It is not only our own personal experiences, but the experiences of others- especially our parents- that help us understand the world and ourselves. The current study examined adolescents’ narrative meaning making in narratives of personal experience and parent’s childhood experience in relation to identity. Sixty-five 13- to 16-year-old middle-class, racially diverse adolescents narrated two stories about each parent’s childhood: two stories about highly positive personal life experiences, and two stories about highly negative personal experiences. The narratives were coded for explicit connections the narrator made between the event and an aspect of the self (“self-event connection”) (e.g. “I was excited about turning thirteen because … I was becoming older and more responsible”) and between the event and an aspect of the parent’s self (“parent-event connection”) (e.g. “My dad got stitches from playing in the pool… he was very active.”). Participants then completed a measure of identity. Results revealed that girls made more self-event and parentevent connections than boys, suggesting that girls earlier engagement in identity exploration in addition to parental connection compared to boys. However, no significant correlations were found between self and parent-event connections versus identity. The results suggest that adolescents in this study are using narrative meaning-making in a rudimentary way, and are not yet sophisticated enough to use narrative meaning-making to construct a coherent sense of identity. Further research with more extensive identity measure, a more diverse age range, as well as more detailed coding scheme may be required to examine the topic with more precision.

Photo by majivecka

Definition of Terms 1. Narrative meaning-making: process of exploring and constructing meaning from an experience by telling the experience in a narrative 2. Parent-childhood narrative: narrative of a story one heard from one’s parent about one’s parent’s childhood experience 3. Self-event connection: explicit statement in which narrator makes a connection between the event and an aspect of the self (e.g. “I was excited about turning thirteen because … I was becoming older and more responsible”)

a. In the experiment, any statement that related the experience to any aspect of the self, including disposition, values and beliefs, outlooks, and growth, were coded as self-event connections.

4. Parent-event connection: explicit statement in which narrator makes a connection between the event and an aspect of the parent’s self (e.g. “My dad got stitches from playing in the pool… he was very active.”).

a. Similarly to the self-event connections, parent-event connections were coded whenever a statement related the

experience to any aspect of the narrator’s perceived sense of parent’s self, including parent’s disposition, values and

beliefs, outlooks, and growth.

Introduction

A thirteen-year old girl told the following story when asked to narrate a highly positive experience in her life:

•Okay. Well, my party wasn’t that great because my birthday’s on Thanksgiving, so everybody went out of town. But I was really excited about turning thirteen because like your life changes because you get to watch PG 13 movies and all that stuff. And I was just really happy that I was gonna be a different age and I was older than most of my friends so I got to do a lot of other things that they didn’t. And I… It was like I was being more…becoming more responsible and getting older and stuff and my parents trusted me more and I got more privileges and everything like that. So, yeah.•

As this narrative indicates, in everyday social interactions, we delight in telling stories, or narratives, about our experiences. Conversations at various social gatherings are filled with narratives of interesting and important events.

When we tell a narrative about an experience, we rarely just describe what happened. Instead, we incorporate our thoughts and feelings into the narrative and sometimes further interpret experiences . In the narrative above, the girl doesn’t just say that she had a birthday party. Instead, she expresses her excitement and explains what getting a year older meant for her, where she received more autonomy and responsibility. The process of making connections between the event and the self, and interpreting the personal meaning of one’s experience through telling a narrative, is called “narrative meaning making” (McLean, 2008; McLean, Pasupathi & Pals, 2007). Recalling, reflecting, and interpreting experiences in relation to oneself through engaging in narrative meaning making is one key way through which we explore and develop a sense of who we are (McAdams, 1993, 2001; McLean, 2005, 2008; McLean & Thorne, 2003; McLean et al., 2010; Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006; Pasupathi, Mansour, & Brubaker, 2007).

Narrative meaning making becomes an especially valuable skill during adolescence, when identity formation becomes a critical developmental task (Erikson, 1968).

During adolescence, cognitive skills essential for telling sophisticated narratives develop, such as the ability to represent oneself in abstract ways and deal with complicated life issues (McAdams & McLean, 2013) and to form a causally and thematically coherent narrative (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008). These cognitive developments allow adolescents to form increasingly complex narratives of their life experiences, and the level at which they can weave a thoughtful narrative rife with personal meanings reflects the depth of their understanding of themselves, or the strength of their

identity. Thus narratives serve as valuable media through which we can study adolescent identity development, and many studies have examined the relation between narrative meaning making and adolescent identity development.

For example, McLean and Pratt (2006) studied adolescents’ turning point narratives and found that adolescents who engage in less exploration of their identity were less likely to reflect and provide insights in their narratives, while those who included more insights in their narratives scored higher on maturity scores, suggesting that increased sophistication in narrative making relates to identity development.

Not only does our personal experiences, but also the experiences of others that influence and shape identity development. Hearing stories of others and understanding how they use their experiences to present themselves create a larger social context in which we can place our own experiences (Fivush, Bohanek, & Duke, 2008; Norris, Kuiack, & Pratt, 2004; Mar, Peskin, & Fong, Chapter Six; Pratt & Fiese, 2004). And since parents are whom we create strong emotional bonds and identify closely with since birth, they are perhaps the most important agents in shaping our identity development (Pratt & Fiese, 2004; Merrill & Fivush, submitted). For instance, almost all parents tell stories about their own childhood to their children even before their children begin to speak (Fiese, Hooker, Kotary, Schwagler, and Rimmer, 1995). And these stories about parent’s childhood are told and retold at family gatherings throughout a child’s lifetime. Through the stories that the parents share about their childhood with their child, parent-child emotional bond strengthens. Additionally, parental values and beliefs along with cultural and social lessons passes down to the child (Merrill, Submitted). Parental influence continues to be critical during adolescence.

Although adolescents experience increasing desire to seek autonomy and personal identity, most adolescents rely on parental advice in making important decisions (Allen & Land, 1999; Claes, 1998; Steinberg, 1990) and many adopt values and norms of their family (Offer & SchonertReichl, 1992). Identity formation, therefore, can be viewed as an interactive process that integrates influences and perspectives of significant people in one’s lives, especially parents, in order to weave a personal identity that is unique yet also similar to bits and pieces of significant people’s identities (Day & Tappan, 1996; Hermans, 1996; Sarbin, 1986).

Following this, Schachter and Ventura (2008) named parents “identity agents,” people who “actively interact with their children with the intention of participating in their identity formation and mediate larger social influences on identity formation.”

Taking the narrative approach to investigating parental influence on adolescent identity development is still very much in its pioneer stage and calls for a more detailed

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investigation. The study therefore aimed to use narratives as a unique lens to examine parental influence on developing adolescent identity. Both personal narratives and parentchildhood narratives are examined for whether adolescents engage in narrative meaning making in their personal and parent’s childhood narratives. If so, how both narratives differentially influence adolescent’s identity development is of interest.

Methods Participants

Narratives were collected from sixty-five 13- to 16year old (mean age = 13.57) middle class, racially diverse adolescents. Participants were recruited through local institutions such as churches and schools. Fifty-nine adolescents came from opposite gender parent homes, and were the biological child of both parents, and six adolescents came from blended two-opposite gender homes. All mothers signed fully informed, IRB-approved consent, as approved by the Emory IRB, and all adolescents also signed assent forms.

Narrative Collection

Female research assistants visited participant’s homes and engaged the adolescents in the narrative tasks.

Each adolescent provided four parent-childhood narratives (two narratives about their mother’s childhood and two narratives for their father’s childhood) and four personal narratives (two narratives about highly positive experiences and two narratives about highly negative experiences.)

Narrative Coding

All narratives were coded by a reliable coder for two measures of narrative meaning making in order to capture the extent to which the narrator related the experience to oneself or to their parent’s selves, labeled self-event connections and parent-event connections, respectively.

Self-event connections (SC), adapted from the theoretical conceptualization of McLean & Fournier (2008), were coded whenever the narrator made an explicit statement that made a connection between the experience and an aspect of one’s self. Statements that were coded as selfevent connections included those that related the experience to one’s dispositions, values, outlooks, and personal growth.

Because parent-childhood narratives were also examined, an additional category of self-event connections, the parent event connections, was added. Parent-event connections (PC) were coded whenever the narrator made an explicit statement that related parent’s childhood experience to the parent’s sense of self. Here, the parent’s sense of self, as used in this coding, referred to parent’s sense of self

as perceived by the narrator. Parent-event connections included the four categories used for self-event connections: disposition, value, outlook, and personal growth. In addition to the four categories, statements that express parent’s family’s value (e.g. “[My mom’s parent] wanted to give her the best they could, so they’d get ‘er all like the pretty dresses”) and activities that the parent makes their children do (“My mom always tells me to finish all of my meal”) were also coded as parent-event connections because they revealed a parental value.

Identity Measure

The Eriksonian Identity Scale (Tan, Kenis, Fine, & Porac, 1997) was completed by the participants, and the scores from the scale was used to assess the strength of the participant’s sense of identity. This is a short scale consisting of 12 items designed in forced-choice format, and scores indicate a more commited sense of identity.

Analysis

In order to examine gender and narrative type differences in self and parent-event connections, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was conducted. Pearson correlations were conducted between SC and identity score and between PC and identity score to examine relations between narrative meaning-making and identity in adolescents. Significance level of 0.05 was used to determine the significance of all statistical tests.

Results & Discussion

Before examining relations to identity, gender differences in narrative meaning-making were examined. In all four narrative types, female adolescents made significantly more self-event connections in their narratives than males did, as shown in Figure 1. In other words, female participants made more relations to themselves and engaged in more narrative meaning making in both personal and parent-childhood narratives. This suggests that girls may begin exploring their identity earlier than boys do, which may also be related to the girls earlier stage of puberty. Similarly, when gender differences were examined for parent-event connections, girls made significantly more parent-event connections than boys did throughout all four narrative types, as shown in Figure 2. This finding may be explained by a myriad of research showing how females, as compared to males, talk more about the themes of relationship and affiliation. Female adolescents tell personal narratives that include more social themes than males (Perry & Pauletti, 2011) and females express the value of relationships more in many different types of personal narratives than males (Grysman & Hudson, 2013). Since females value and reflect

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more on experiences involving relationships, it may be that female adolescents made more parent-event connections because they put more value in their relationship with their parents.

Another explanation may be that females hear more stories about relationships from their parents than do males. Bucker & Fivush (2000) and Fiese & Skillman (2000) found that both parents told more achievement stories to their sons whereas they told more affiliation stories to their daughters. Thus the parents in the current study may have told their daughters more stories that deal with familial relationships, which in turn influenced their daughters to tell stories with more parent-event connections.

Another finding from examining narrative type differences was that both boys and girls made significantly more self-event connections in narrating personal experience. On the other hand, both genders made more parentevent connections in their narratives of parent’s childhood experiences. This result aligns with our prediction that one makes more connections to self when talking about personal experiences and to the parent when talking about their parent’s experiences. It is interesting, however, that both boys and girls do make self-event connections in their narratives of their parent’s experiences and parent-event connections in their personal narratives. This indirectly supports the idea that adolescents use their understanding of their parent and the lessons from their parent’s experiences as guide in forming their own sense of self.

This finding resonates with the view of identity development as a “dialogical” process, which describes identity development as partly arising from the collaborative interaction between various influencing voices and perspectives of others (Day & Tappan, 1996; Hermans, 1996; Sarbin, 1986). Herman (1996) describes how humans, as social beings, are invariably influenced by voices of other people, especially those with whom one shares a close re-

lationship. For instance, when making a big life decision, adolescents may think about the things that their parents told them and use that as a guide, and when adolescents tell a narrative about a significant life event, the voices of their parent may get “ventriloquated” through what they say (Herman, 1996). During adolescence, when individuals are just starting to explore their identity, parents’ voices and perspectives that they’ve come to incorporate into themselves must have a strong influence on the way they grapple with their identity construction.

Although interesting gender differences were found with regards to self and parent-event connections, no significant correlations were found between self-event connection and parent-event connection and identity: for both males and females, correlations between the extent to which adolescents made self-event connections and parentevent connections in their narratives and their sense of self as measured by the Eriksonian Identity Scale did not reach significance in either personal or parent-childhood narratives.

One possibility is that the two measures, self-event and parent-event connections and identity scale, measure different aspects of identity and are thus not related in any significant way. Self-event and parent-event connections, as used in this study, captured any connections between experience and sense of self in the narratives and measured how much meaning the adolescents were making from their narratives. On the other hand, the identity scale measured the extent to which adolescents made identity commitments. narrative meaning-making and identity commitment may not be directly related concepts. However, in a similar study done on participants of a wider age range, including those who are emerging adults aged between 18 and 25, showed age-related increase in narrative meaning-making (McLean & Breen, 2009).

In another study with adolescents of age 12, 15, and 18, similar age-related increases were found for making causal links between experience and personal change, for

Photo by mickyso

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eurj 62 making connections between past and present, and for incorporating family history into personal narratives (Habermas & Paha, 2001). This offers a different interpretation of the current study’s finding, which is that adolescents in the current study may have been too young to be engaging in narrative meaning-making that is sophisticated enough to significantly contribute to their identity construction.

In others words, the lack of significant correlations between SC and PC and identity may arise from the fact that the participants in the study, who were aged between 13 and 16, were only in the beginning stage in learning the skills of narrative meaning-making, and thus no discernable contributions were made to their sense of self.

In summary, the interpretations of the findings from the current study extends previous understanding of (1) gender differences in narrative style and content, (2) parental influence on children’s identity development, and (3) developmental trends in narrative meaning-making from early adolescence to emerging adulthood. The finding that girls made more self-event connections and parent-event connections than boys suggested that girls engage in narrative meaning-making and thus identity exploration earlier and relate closer to parents. This finding also paralleled girls’ earlier entering of adolescence and females’ tendency to put more value on relationships.

The finding that girls and boys actively engaged in making PC in both their personal narratives and also in their narratives of parents’ experience, although to a lesser degree, suggested adolescents’ engagement in effort to understand their parent’s identity, and this finding indirectly supported the idea of parents being a strong and influential voice to adolescents. Lastly, finding no significant correlation between SC and PC and identity in the adolescents of this study may reflect a developmental trend in narrative meaning-making and identity construction: individuals in early adolescence may not participate in narrative meaning-making to a degree that visibly contributes to their developing sense of self.

Conclusions

Narratives are a medium through which one explores and discovers meaning in one’s experiences and develops a deeper understanding of oneself. Considering the significance of identity development in adolescence and the importance of parental role in guiding their children’s identity, the current study examined narrative meaning-making in adolescents’ narratives of their personal and parents’ experiences in order to further understand parents’ role in shaping their children’s identity formation. The findings from the study provided support for the following conclusions: (1) female adolescents engage in identity exploration

more than male adolescents of a similar age group, (2) understanding how parents’ experiences relate to their parent’s identity may influence adolescent’s effort after understanding one’s own sense of self, (3) narrative meaning making in early adolescence may not yet be sophisticated enough to have a significant influence in identity development. The study’s findings contributed to the field of adolescent identity research by further providing support for the gender and age group differences in narrative meaning making and identity development. Use of narratives and a development of new coding scheme appropriate for the study were strengths of the study’s design that allowed us to capture adolescent’s various effort after meaning making in their narratives.

On the other hand, limitations include a narrow age group and an identity scale that may have not been able to capture all complexities of adolescent identity development.

Recruiting participants with a wider age range will allow us to capture trends in identity development in more entirety.

Using a more extensive identity scale, such as one that differentiates between identity exploration and identity commitment, may help to get a clearer understanding of adolescent’s identity status. The current, as well as future, research into parental role in children’s identity development will provide valuable parenting advice as well as a more accurate ways to predict child’s psychosocial functioning through their narratives.

Acknowledgements

Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dr. Robyn Fivush, for her generous support and guidance throughout my summer research and for her passion and her thoughtful feedbacks. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the graduate students in my lab, Natalie Merrill and Matthew Graci, and the lab manager, Cypriana Gardener, for providing me with valuable research assistance, the Summer SIRE-Research Partners Program for funding this research, and my SIRE mentors, Kelly McCormick and Rachel Dudley, for their enthusiasm and mentorship.

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eurj 64 Figures

Figure 1. Average number of self-event connections in four different narratives by gender.

Female participants made more self-event connections than male participants did in all four narrative types, and both participants made more self-event connections in their personal narratives than in parent-childhood narratives. Data suggest that girls of the studyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s age group engage in more narrative meaning making than the boys of the same age group.

Figure 2. Average number of parent-event connections in four different narratives by gender. Female participants made more parent-event connections than male participants did in all four narrative types, and both participants made more parentevent connections in parent-childhood narratives than in personal narratives. Data suggest that girls of the studyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s age group relate more to their parents than the boys of the same age group.

Figure 3. Pearson correlation between self-event connections and identity. None of the correlations were significant at the 0.05 significance level.

Figure 4. Pearson correlation between parent-event connections and identity. None of the correlations were significant at the 0.05 significance level.

Julie Youkung Kim is a senior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology.

She is currently doing research with Dr. Robyn Fivush in the Family Narratives Lab in the Emory Child Study Center. On campus, she serves as the Vice President of the Emory Korean Christian Association and is a MyLife volunteer at the Emory Autism Center. Her main research interests include the role of religiosity and spirituality in well-being, ways of making meaning and discovering purpose, resilience, personal growth, and holistic health.

eurj 65

Woodruff Undergraduate “Model Minority Awakenings: Vincent Chin, Asian America’s Emmett Till”

Abstract

This paper details how the racially-motivated murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man, in 1982 ignited a new Asian American consciousness. By framing Chin’s killing in relation to the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, this paper highlights how the American justice system—which acquitted the murderers of both Till and Chin— has continuously failed people of color. I argue that after the Civil Rights Movement, racism only became more underhanded, not less pervasive. Specifically, racism inflicts wounds on separate racial groups through different but linked oppressions. Chin’s death revealed that the “model minority” myth—a construct undergirding white supremacy by coloring Asian Americans as successful yet docile—provided no defense against raPhoto from Samantha Keng cial violence. For Asian Americans, the brutality of Chin’s murder and the injustice that Samantha Keng followed galvanized fierce mobilization. Ultimately, this paper concludes that the Chin Class of 2018 case cast doubt on the narrative of progress and equality in a “post-racial” era.

History, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Research Statement

Research for my paper detailing the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man living in Detroit, began as a daunting task and evolved into an unexpectedly fulfilling process. The goal of this paper was to discuss Chin’s murder using the framework of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. In undertaking this comparative study, I argue that structural flaws continued to corrupt the American justice system in the decades following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Chin’s story also foregrounds a discussion of anti-Asian racism in its larger historical and present context. Because Till’s murder was a watershed in the development of the Civil Rights Movement, I was able to locate a wide range of documents and primary sources from the time of Till’s death to the trial and eventual acquittal of his killers. One of my most memorable experiences was a visit to Emory’s Manuscript and Rare Book Library, where I viewed a collection of lynching photography as well as a 1956 document published by the Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership. The 1956 document in particular gave me a sense of the immediate outrage in reaction to the acquittal, while the photographs worked in conjunction with secondary source texts to provide a solid understanding of the historical climate in which the Till case took place. In addition, the library research session that our class attended introduced me to the process of searching for relevant primary sources using databases such as JSTOR and ProQuest. Archival material from the Library of Congress, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library, as well as archived editions of Look and Ebony magazines, provided additional firsthand glimpses into the Till case. Information on Vincent Chin was initially harder to uncover. I reached a major breakthrough when I learned about a documentary film, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, in the Music Media Library. This documentary familiarized me with the major players in the Chin case: lawyers, activists, and community organizers who fought for the conviction of his killers. The publications of these figures proved central to my research, particularly the work of Helen Zia, a lawyer-activist who led the charge to achieve justice for Chin. One crucial primary source in my study of the Chin case was a letter his mother wrote to the Detroit Chinese Welfare Council. In his letter, Lily Chin speaks of her son’s death as an event that shattered her image of America as a land of equality and opportunity. Her words thus echo a larger theme of this project that calls into question racial progress in the post-Civil Rights Movement era.

This project taught me that research truly is a labor of love. My research process was full of surprises—such as stumbling across the letter from Vincent Chin’s mother—that showed me the importance of open-mindedness and creativity.

When I expanded my focus past academic books and began looking at films, photography, blog posts, and archival material, I was able to gain a more comprehensive understanding of my topic. I also learned how to extract relevant information from what was initially a staggering amount of source material by asking the right questions. Narrowing my focus by allowing specific, pointed questions to guide my research gave me more purpose and clarity throughout the process.

I am especially grateful for the way in which this project exposed me to Asian American authors, activists, and academics. I never learned Asian American history in school, and until coming to Emory I was unaware of the long, rich history of Asian American activism in this country. During the course of my research, I found that the works of these writers and leaders gave me, for the first time, the tools to understand and speak to the Asian American experience. This project thus had a uniquely personal resonance with me, and it continues to fuel my desire to give greater voice to Asian American stories within mainstream historical narratives.

Research Award winners “Behind the Lens of the Civil Rights Movement: The Power of Photography to Both Reveal and Conceal”

Abstract

“Behind the Lens of the Civil Right Movement: The Power of Photography For Both Revealing and Concealing History” by Hannah Conway explores the way the most iconic and familiarized photos of the Civil Rights Movement offer only a reductive reality of history by their tendency to reinforce a simplistic narrative, and subsequently deny true historic complexity. In order to substantiate this argument, the paper begins with an account from renowned civil rights photographer, Charles Moore, and goes on to analyze various photographs from 1955 to the present day, ultimately exploring the ways in which a complex history is made too simple when it is captured with a shutter. While still acknowledging the indisputable power of photography as an art form, this paper urges the reader to become a more diligent student and viewer of art by shedding light on the complex relationship between information, representation, and historical truth.

Photo from Hannah Conway

Hannah Conway

Class of 2018 American Studies, Media Studies

Research Statement

The process of writing a research paper is akin to solving a big puzzle—patience is required, but everything is interconnected and it becomes less daunting if you start with the frame. The framework of a research paper is the sources you incorporate, or sometimes stumble upon. When just beginning, you are unsure of what the final product will look like, but you maintain the faith that each individual piece will contribute to a larger whole—a synecdoche of sort. It’s simultaneously a scary and exciting process, but mostly it’s a beautiful one. It reinforces that you own voice has a place within academic. It makes history far less distant. My philosophy towards writing papers has always been one of symbiosis. The writer has to have a personal interest in the topic. Seldom has there been a time in the past 7 years when I am not carrying around my film camera. My own passion for photography informed me of the topic of my paper; surely, I thought, photography must correlate with the Civil Rights Movement in some way. And so I synthesized the two.

I began my research by doing a simple search of “photography civil rights movement” within the Emory Collections and Repositories online database and JSTOR. There are not a lot of books written on the photography of the Civil Rights Movement. But, this initial search did bring me to the work of Martin Berger, a professor of Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has done a lot to uncover the way photography affects the narrative of the movement. His books are my most heavily cited sources, and ultimately his work served as a huge catalyst for my own paper. A lot of what I learned about the research process has to do with it being a chain reaction. Like dominoes, one person’s work leads to another’s which leads to another’s. Learning to read bibliographies is crucial because everything is interconnected. In order to incorporate a more hands-on approach to my research, my professor, Dr. Carol Anderson, sent me to the Robert Langmuir African American Photograph Collection within the Rose Library. I had never utilized MARBL before, and observing a wide variety of photographs that showcased the African American experience helped me recognize themes that infiltrated throughout the photos. Some questions arose: what was being photographed? What wasn’t? What photographs were being published and by what outlet?A problem with the medium of photography is that a lot of work never receives proper credit.

Unlike mediums where artists sign the bottom of their work, most photographers don’t sign. From the onset, I knew that I wanted to give justice to the photographers who put their life on the line to document history. I wanted to include interviews of a photographer within my paper, but I didn’t know who’s to include. As I was knee-deep in my research, it became clear to me that the photos of Charles Moore ignited a sort of visceral reaction within me. This aspect of research is serendipitous— he just happened to be the photographer I was most drawn to.

The main lessons that I learned while conducting my research reflect the same sentiment that I hope readers take away from my paper. We live in a world that is rife with millions of voices and perspectives, and as time continues to warp history, we have a dangerous tendency to tell a single story and narrative. Writing a research paper and including a wide variety of sources works directly in opposition to this lone narrative.

When I wrote this paper, I was a freshman, and I thought I didn’t know what I wanted to major in. Now, as a sophomore, I recently took a leap and decided on an “American Studies” major and “Media Studies” minor, only to return to the topic of this paper and realize that it wasn’t a “leap” at all. I always knew what I wanted to study. My paper was, in a way, a tangible representation of my future as a student. It taught me to trust myself—to own up to my interests and passions.

Photo by VanderWolf Images

d

Woodruff Undergraduate Research paper title: “Döner Kebab: Symbol of German Multiculturalism in the Turkish Immigration Question”

Photo from Armstrong Li

Zixuan (Armstrong) Li

Class of 2017 History, Mathematics/Economics

Abstract

This paper studies the development of Döner Kebab as a Turkish food business in postwar Germany. Following the economic miracle, the West German recruitment program in the late 1950s and 1960s attracted guest workers. Many of them came from Turkey. The recruitment ban and economic crisis in 1973, however, forced some Turkish families to become self-employed in ethnic gastronomy jobs.

With this prosperous business, economic status of Turkish immigrants enhanced through the 1980s and 1990s, but the success of the most popular snack food in postwar Germany could not gloss over the problems of Turkish immigration. The rejection of Turkish and Muslim culture was present throughout postwar German History. This paper attempts to depict the history of Döner Kebab and to situate it into the broader history of Turkish immigration in Germany. Turkish ethnic food business is a small but significant field that requires further research.

Research Statement

The idea of my research project on Döner Kebab originated from my study abroad program in Vienna. This Turkish snack was everywhere in the city. When I took the colloquium with Doctor Astrid M. Eckert in Spring 2015, the topic of Turkish guest workers intrigued me. In the initial stage of the research, I fortuitously read an article by Maren Möhring, a German food historian, determining to write a paper on history of Döner Kebab in Germany. The topic was specific, so the challenge was to find enough sources for an in-depth research. Using various library resources and services, such as the interlibrary loan, news websites, magazine archives and academic databases, I successfully collected adequate information to build an effective research paper. After obtaining the initial ideas and consulting with Dr. Eckert and the librarian Alain St. Pierre, I started from Möhring’s publications for secondary sources. Möhring published four relevant articles, which I found available in JSTOR and Historical Abstracts. I was familiar with tools like discoverE and databases from my previous experience, so the search went smoothly. Using the ILL service, I attained some sources that were not available at Emory. A crucial strategy was to start the research early, because recalling books and requesting books through the ILL usually took a week.

A well-written history research paper requires the use of primary sources. Since I had limited knowledge of German and none of Turkish, I relied on English sources. The English version of Der Spiegel website and the archives of New York Times were two of the most useful sources for my research. The New York Time Historical was in scanned version, but was fully searchable. One of the useful articles about Turkish business in Germany came from 1975; another about spread of Döner business into former East Germany right after German reunification in 1991. These were the serendipities, since I did not expect Döner to be influential enough to appear in non-German media. They affirmed me that I had chosen an important field in contemporary German history. Articles are easy to read, but books seem intimidating. The strategy was first to go through the content, identifying relevant chapters. Nevertheless, a chapter might still contain irrelevant information and my topic made it difficult to find such chapters. I needed to search for key words in the index. For example, in one of my printed primary source, Germany in Transit, a tome of various documents of postwar German history, I searched for words like Döner and Turkey locating several sources which later became the key primary sources for my project.

In analysis and evaluation of my sources, I was concerned with the balance between German and Turkish sources.

Although most scholars I cited were German, there were two Turkish authors, Caglar and Abadan-Unat. Since my field was small, the sources usually cross-referenced and supported each other. Therefore, it was easier to build my thesis upon their work. My bibliography contained a great range of disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, economics and business. Most of my secondary sources used qualitative analysis, but quantitative study was not absent. Data from various sources supported my argument that the Turkish business and self-employment in Germany was growing robustly. After the six-week extensive research, I had read most works of active scholars on the field of Turkish gastronomy in postwar Germany. The writing was less a torture and came naturally. New research tools I tried, like ILL, made this paper possible. Another important ability was to sift through enormous sources and differentiate them between primary sources and secondary sources. In evaluation of my sources, I achieved the balance of citing works of schloars of different origins and disciplines. These efforts built up the way to a better research paper. The skills developed through this process would be my invaluable treasure for future research.

Research Award winners Research paper title: “A Casket Full of Precious Memoirs” : The Town of Washington’s Conception of its own History (Chapter 3) Honors thesis title: “Strange Histories”: A Cultural History of the Legend of Lost Confederate Gold in Washington, Georgia Abstract

The legend of lost Confederate gold in Washington, Georgia has persisted since it was stolen on the night of May 24th, 1865. The story lives on in personal diaries, town tourism materials, treasure tale folklore, treasure hunting manuals, conspiracy theories, and family memory. This thesis seeks to examine how and why the robbery is understood as a meaningful event. In the aforementioned sources, the gold robbery has been construed as a reminder of bitter defeat, a charming feature of a small Southern town, a captivating treasure tale, an artifact waiting to be found, proof of the Confederacy’s imminent return, and a source of pride for a prominent Black family. Collective memory of the gold and its disappearance is ultimately intertwined with memory of the Civil War, and the nostalgia, emotion, and identity involved in creating remembrance. The gold – both the idea of it and its physical existence – serves as proxy for a diverse array of ideas of what it means to not only preserve, but also perpetuate the history of the Civil War.

Photo from Emily Moore

Emily Moore

Class of 2016 History, French Honorable Mention

Research Statement

At the end of the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, facing certain collapse of the Confederate capital Richmond, clung to the hope of continuing the war from elsewhere in the South. On April 2nd 1865, as Richmond fell, he evacuated his family, cabinet officials, and most importantly, the gold and silver specie comprising the Confederate treasury along with the assets of six Virginia banks. The funds moved south first by rail, and later by wagon, with the threat of Federal troops close behind. Near midnight on May 24th, 1865, in the town of Washington, in Wilkes County, Georgia, twenty men on horseback robbed the wagon train parked on the Chennault plantation and escaped with a total of $179,000, which has never been recovered. The events of that evening and the preceding and following days have been embellished extensively in the intervening one hundred and fifty years. Stories about the gold’s whereabouts – ranging from plausible to paranoid – have been told and retold since its disappearance.

Despite the allure of speculation about the gold’s fate, this thesis will not attempt to provide a possible explanation for its location, nor will it attempt to actually find the gold itself. Instead, this thesis seeks to examine the ways in which the gold is discussed, and how and why the robbery is construed as a meaningful event. This thesis is a cultural history – though the facts of the robbery and the specific variations of each version of the story are important, they serve as background to the analysis of the motivations behind retelling the gold story in different contexts. By examining the diary of Eliza Andrews, a young woman at the time of the robbery, it became clear that the gold story was used by Confederate sympathizers as a way to express their frustrations and bitterness in being defeated by the Union. The town of Washington, and the treasure chest on display in its historic library, perpetuates the Lost Cause and deliberately projects a wistfully genteel remembrance of the town’s history during the war. The gold’s physical existence (and heretofore-unexplained disappearance), when retold as part of the American treasure folktale tradition, serves as inspiration to treasure hunters – metal detector hobbyists who hope to discover a gold coin or two while ‘hunting’ the woods around Washington. A conspiracy theory, developed by an Arkansas man, suggests the gold is being protected the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society active during the war, in order to fund a second coming of the Confederacy. Finally, a persistent family legend, which tells of ancestor enslaved on the Chennault plantation who kept some of the gold for himself, speaks to the role of generational storytelling in constructing pride in family identity.

This thesis not only analyzes these specific examples but also offers commentary on the formation of collective memory and its role in preserving and perpetuating the history of the Civil War.

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Photo by Hee Seok Ahn