Papers

How do Ghanaian immigrants experience race in the United States, and to what extent are they racialized as Black?  This paper aims to animate this central question through interviews with "sociocuturally peculiar" Ghanaian Americans. In doing so, it also seeks to address other critical and related questions: What experiences do Ghanaians undergo that signify or initiate their racialization in the United States? What experiences or conditions motivate and demotivate Ghanaians to self-identify with blackness and Black Americans?

"Color Me Superior" grapples with global skin color hierarchy and its manifestation within the African diaspora. This piece borrows from a host of South Asian scholars and Isabel Wilkerson's bestselling publication to conceptualize colorism as a caste system. Case studies on African Americans and the majority-Black populations of Ghana and Jamaica illuminate how color-caste is internalized, reproduced, and grossly consequential for the communities it disadvantages most. 

Conventional images used in the international humanitarian and development aid industries, this piece argues, may erode perceptions of communal competency among beneficiary groups. Using Kony 2012 as a starting point, "Seeing You Save Me" explores the role of photography in reproducing White savior narratives.

Self-dehumanization remains an infrequent focus within dehumanization research, and studies conducted on dehumanization of the self are often limited in scope. This proposal seeks to broaden the body of psychological research by exploring racial self-dehumanization among Black people in the United States. Existing and expanding studies in this field support the hypothesis that Black people in the U.S. hold dehumanizing biases against members of their own racial group, a probable indicator of self-dehumanization. 

Description: Coming Soon!

This small-scale, mixed methods study looks at sentiments of transnational racial unification across the African diaspora. Survey and interview data collected from Black-identified millennials in two major U.S. cities indicate a present yet limited perception that Black people in the United States and those on the African continent have interconnected social and political destines.

This paper takes a critical look at how religion and urban development intersect in Ghana. Historical and contemporary analyses of the function of churches in the country's city spaces lay the foundation for an interrogation of their sometimes deleterious role in Ghana's urbanization schema. The review concludes with recommendations on how to more efficiently regulate and incorporate Christian organizations within the National Urban Policy framework.

This undergraduate Honors College thesis explores the often overlooked role of race in the IMF. Rather than claiming that racism is a primary driver of the Fund's policy decisions, this piece explores the degrees to which racial bias impacts its leadership and loan policies.

Socioeconomic disparities between sub-Saharan African immigrants and native-born Blacks in the United States offer fertile ground for new social research. This proposal seeks to explore the legitimacy of anecdotal socioeconomic advantages afforded to African immigrants and uncover what factors may account for differences between these two Black groups.