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\"A surprising and fascinating look at how Black culture has been leveraged by corporate America, this book addresses some of today's most pressing public debates around allyship and diversity. Open the brochure for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and you'll see logos for corporations like American Express. Visit the website for the Apollo Theater and you'll notice acknowledgments to corporations like Coca Cola and Citibank. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, owe their very existence to large corporate donations from companies like General Motors. And while we can easily make sense of the need for such funding to keep cultural spaces afloat, less obvious are the reasons that corporations give to them. In Black Culture, Inc. Patricia A. Banks interrogates the notion that such giving is completely altruistic, and argues for a deeper understanding of the hidden trans

This bookexamines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

In Hollywood, we hear, it's all about the money. It's a ready explanation for why so few black films get made-no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff. But what if the money itself is color-coded? What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns? This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case. In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films.How does history come into it? Hollywood's reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films. So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century. Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral. Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions asBamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry'sDiary of a Mad Black Woman,Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history.By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations-and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.

For African American folklorists working at the end of the nineteenth century, however, Black folklore represented not just an item to be collected or performed for white audiences, but contested ground-a site in the battle over political representation, a source of historical memory, a space for aesthetic and literary inspiration, and a testament to Black humanity. [...]when Frank D. Banks' voice entered the Journal of American Folklore alongside others that cast him perpetually as folk, he took up and claimed authority for representing, analyzing, and interpreting African American folklore. Shirley Moody-Turner is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University. Baker refers, for instance, to the \"tight spaces\" that African American authors and cultural workers were forced to negotiate as they tried to navigate the racialized demands of the white mainstream literary marketplace with the diverse social and political agendas of a heterogeneous Black middle class (2001:15, 26).

This conceptual literature review examines how participation in urban high school band programs influences the cognitive development of Black students, emphasizing the neurological mechanisms activated through musical training. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from neuroscience, music education, and culturally responsive pedagogy, the paper develops a conceptual argument that band programs function as cognitively enriching, culturally sustaining, and equity-oriented educational spaces. Grounded in Critical Race Theory, the review situates the decline of arts programs in urban schools within broader patterns of structural inequity that disproportionately limit Black students' access to culturally meaningful and neurologically beneficial learning opportunities. Findings highlight that when band programs employ culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, they enhance neuroplasticity, executive function, identity development, and academic resilience. This conceptual paper underscores the need for policy and practice to recognize urban band programs as essential contributors to holistic development and educational equity for Black students.

Discourses of achievement often overlook the interdependence of classroom contexts, students' identities, and academic performance. This narrative analysis explores how high-achieving students of color construct identitiesin-practice in a diverse urban middle school. By documenting explicit moments in which students construct identities-in-practice such as being \"loud,\" which are positioned as incompatible with \"being smart,\" I argue that high-achieving lower income students of color are disproportionately regulated by achievement discourses that position White middle-class norms as neutral. This article documents tensions between what it takes to achieve academically and students' raced, classed, and gendered identities in order to reframe educational equity based on a theoretical framing of identities and academic achievement as interrelated and highly contextual.

The Housing Choice Voucher program is currently the largest federally funded housing assistance program. Although the program aims to provide housing assistance, it also could affect children’s educational outcomes by stabilizing their families, enabling them to move to better homes, neighborhoods, and schools, and increasing their disposable incomes. Using data from New York City, the nation’s largest school district, we examine whether—and to what extent—housing vouchers improve educational outcomes for students whose families receive them. We match over 88,000 school-age voucher recipients to longitudinal public school records and estimate the impact of vouchers on academic performance through a comparison of students’ performance on standardized tests after voucher receipt to their pre-voucher performance. We exploit the conditionally random timing of voucher receipt to estimate a causal model. Results indicate that students in voucher households perform 0.05 standard deviations better in both English Language Arts and Mathematics in the years after they receive a voucher. We see significant racial differences in impacts, with small or no gains for black students but significant gains for Hispanic, Asian, and white students. Impacts appear to be driven largely by reduced rent burdens, increased disposable income, or a greater sense of residential security.

Academic preparation is critical to increase Black representation in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, but so, too, are such interrelated factors as providing mentoring and role models in sufficient numbers, adequately funding school and community support services, and analyzing the intentional and unintentional consequences of a range of policies and practices. To address these issues, the Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop on September 2 and 3, 2020. Titled \"Educational Pathways for Blacks in Science, Engineering, and Medicine: Exploring Barriers and Possible Interventions,\" the workshop provided a platform to explore challenges and opportunities, beginning in the earliest years of life through K-12 schooling, undergraduate and postgraduate education, and into the workforce. Presenters throughout the workshop provided perspectives from research and from their own experiences to discuss the need for systemic solutions inside and outside of formal education institutions. This publication summarizes the presentation and discussion of the workshop.

In his essay, \"The Newly Black Americans: African Immigrants and Black America,\" Louis Chude-Sokei suggests that the contemporary African immigrant novel has tended to frame diaspora linkages and fraternity, specifically the historical kinship and social interactions of African immigrants and black America, as problematic at best. In this discussion, I offer a contrarian view of one such narrative, Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale (2000). Limning the story's critically unharnessed musical economy, I fine-tune earlier under-recordings of what I believe are Oguine's extensive investments in cultural logic, racial discourse, and intra-racial dialogue. I argue that, through his encryptions of black world music, most notably the deep interconnections of highlife and jazz, Oguine directs attention to the at-times unstated, misstated, yet tangibly sound (as in musical, fluid, strong, and positive) linkages of black world music and, with that, the unbroken ties and relatabilities of African America and Nigeria/Africa.