• Nutrition Research and Practice
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• v.4 no.6
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• pp.528-534
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• 2010

This study explores the influence of health behaviors and individual attributes on adolescent overweight and obesity using data from Wave II (Add Health). Structural equation model/ path analysis using maximum likelihood estimation was utilized to analyze the relationships of health behaviors and attributes with obesity. Results of the model reveal that the causal paths (adolescents' attributes and health behaviors) for overweight and obesity were different for African American and Caucasian adolescents. Generally, African Americans were more susceptible to overweight and obesity than Caucasians. Although increasing levels of vigorous physical activities lowers the risk for obesity among African American and Caucasian adolescents alike, low family SES and being sedentary were associated with overweight and obesity among Caucasians. No significant associations were found among African Americans. Increased hours of sleep at night relate positively with obesity among African Americans. These findings suggest important elements in the consideration of race in developing effective intervention and prevention approaches for curbing the obesity epidemic among U.S. adolescents.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.36
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• pp.211-240
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• 2014

This is a cross-sectional study designed to analyze the correlation between the structural and social variables and the pattern of contraction and deletion of the copula verb in the speech of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers in Athens in Georgia, USA using a questionnaire. The results show that the frequency of copula contraction is higher than that of deletion in all factor groups including the age of the speakers where this study found that younger speakers tend to have higher frequency of contraction and deletion of the copula than older speakers. This study analyzes this as a function of the fact that younger speakers of AAVE are conscious of the linguistic and social differences between AAVE speakers and speakers of Standard American English (SAE) and they consciously make choices regarding which norm to use at which contexts to satisfy their communicative and socio-cultural needs. This sort of conscious social behavior is not likely to disappear with age rather it might increase as a correlate of the perceived physical, socio-cultural and psychological distance between AAVE speakers and speakers of other varieties. This study shows that such perceived linguistic, socio-cultural and psychological distance has negative effects on pedagogy and I proffer the remedy.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2024

Purpose: The purpose of this systematic review is to explore end-of-life (EOL) care planning and the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) among people who identify as Black or African American. Methods: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) were used to guide and inform this systematic review process. The following academic electronic databases with publications that reflected the interdisciplinary fields related to the research objective were searched: APA PsycINFO, CINHAL, PubMed, Scopus, and Social Work Abstracts. Results: After the authors conducted the search, 14 articles (from 13 studies) ultimately met the criteria for inclusion. The results substantiated significant concerns highlighted in previous literature regarding SES and its relation to EOL planning, but also revealed an absence of original work and interventions to increase engagement in EOL planning among Black and African American populations. Conclusion: Black individuals deserve an equitable EOL experience. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers need to move towards advocacy and action to meet this important need.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.104-108
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• 2016

African-American music heavily influences a variety of musical genres, including folk music, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk music. The music derived from traditional African music with its unique syncopated rhythm using a five-note pentatonic scale, and has developed through significant influences from gospel music. African-American music has also evolved through historical social movements, such as eliminating the racial discrimination, and has been influenced by the personalities of different cities in the United States. Modern music features fusion with elements of Western music. One of the most influential and respected artists of the 20th century was Stevie Wonder, who was known as "Father of African-American music." He was an accomplished artist, winning numerous awards despite being disabled. He has become one of the most famous and respected artists worldwide. This study of Stevie Wonder's life, music, and spiritual strength, aims to highlight his significant achievements and contributions to pop music. This is a study based on an analysis of the work of Stevie Wonder and describes how elements of African-American music influences current Korean pop music and musicians.

• International Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.37-58
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• 2000

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) were used to examine factors related to adolescent behavior problems, smoking, and delinquency. This study focuses particularly on the factors in an adolescent s immediate environment such as family, school, peers, and neighborhood (i.e. the microsystems) for the identification, prevention, and early intervention of adolescent behavior problems, smoking, and delinquent behavior. Both African American and Caucasian American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 for whom data were available in the NLSY were included in this study (N=788). Results indicate that delinquent peer pressure and negative attitudes toward school are important determinants of behavior problems, smoking, and delinquency of American adolescents. Differences between African American and Caucasian American adolescents are highlighted.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.15
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• pp.31-49
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• 2013

This paper delves into the recent 'paintings' of African-American artist David Hammons, which combine rubbish-like plastic wraps with the abstract-expressionist style paintings. In straddling between rubbish and art object, his works tend to blur the boundary drawn between two opposite categories in value, art and garbage, provoking the sophisticated taste of Upper-East-side white community in Manhattan, New York. Choosing the venue of his exhibition at a commercial gallery, Hammons's creative efforts is also a critique of what can be seen as the dominance of abstract expressionism and white elitism in American art history. The artist is known for his use of unconventional materials in art making such as black hair, barbecue bones, and elephant droppings, ones that are often associated with African-American experiences in all different levels. Since his debut in the art scene in the 1970s, Hammons has pursued the view of art-making as a medium for provoking contentious issues of racial relations in the States. On the other hand, the reception of Hammons's work as African-American art can be potentially quite limiting, overlooking as it does multi-faceted meanings of his art practice. His unconventional approach to art often took him outside art galleries and museums, where he was seen using a variety of common materials for site-specific installations and performances. Staged in different parts of Manhattan, these acts of art making traverse seemingly opposite communities and cultures, often blurring their boundaries. Hammons's artistic practice can label him what Abdul Jan Mohamed calls "specular border intellectual", revealing as it does the symbiosis of binary oppositions that is basic to the experience of communnal living.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.107-127
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• 2008

Critics are inclined to interpret J.M. Coetzee's novels in South African contexts, which Coetzee's own background seems to support. One has to bear in mind, however, that Coetzee tends to "see the South African situation as only one manifestation of a wider historical situation to do with colonialism, late colonialism, neo-colonialism." In other words, putting too much emphasis on South African contexts may diminish or undermine significance of Coetzee's multi-layered novels. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to highlight what Coetzee has to say about American colonialism/imperialism and to emphasize importance of "postcolonial rhetoric of simultaneity" which is repeatedly shown in his fictional works. It gives a meticulous attention to and analyzes "Vietnam Project," the first novella of Dusklands, Coetzee's very first novel, which depicts and characterizes "what Chomsky in the context of Vietnam [War] called 'the backroom boys.'" "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," "When a Woman Grows Older," and Diary of a Bad Year are occasionally brought into discussion as well. This kind of study seems timely and pertinent especially when we take into account the rampant American imperialism which has devastated and almost traumatized the world.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.3
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• pp.433-451
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• 2018

In Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward places herself within the modern African American literary tradition and lays out the unending "historical traumas" of blacks and cultural haunting in her narrative. She brings to the fore the story of a young black boy and demonstrates the difficulty of living while a black man in the American rural South. Living or dead, black males remain spectral as their frustrated black bodies are endlessly rejected and disembodied. It's through Ward's close attention to the notions of black masculinity and retrieval of (black) humanity that the black South is remembered, recuperated, and historicized. Shrewdly enough, Ward expands it further into the tradition of American literature. Instead of singularizing African American identity and its historical traumas, she renders them the part of American history and universalizing the single black story as the story of the American South. Filling in the gaps that Faulkner and other white writers have left in their novels, Ward writes stories about the unspeakable, the invisible, the excluded to deconstruct white narratives and rebuild the American history; and reasserts African roots and history, spirituality, black raciality and locality within the American tradition. I examine the symbolic significance of Jojo's claim of black masculinity within the socio-political contexts of contemporary America. I also look closely at Ward's portrayal of Jojo's black family genealogy on account of its traumatic experiences of incarceration in notorious Parchman Farm. Locating Jojo as the inspiration of linking the past and the present, the unburied and the living, I contend that Ward creates "home" for blacks in an atemporal oceanic space where the past and the present are able to meet simultaneously. I argue that the oceanic space is an alternative space of affect that functions against the space of white rationality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.301-322
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• 2008

Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; Or, the Hidden Self was published in the Colored American Magazine during 1902-03. As a literary experimentalist and a political protester, Hopkins uses her fiction as a medium to overcome and ameliorate the violently racialized surroundings of the turn-of-the-century America. Having been faced with racist rhetorics and theories growing on biological differences between races, Hopkins must have felt an overwhelming urgency to challenge the heritage of slavery in American history. In order to speak out her political agenda in such a milieu, she needed a new setting as well as new narrative materials for the new era. She had to move the setting from America to Africa, the ancient utopian Ethiopia; her interest in the ancient African civilization reflects both a popular African-American vision of Africa and the movement of "black nationalism" of the time. She also needed materials from nineteenthcentury sciences, the newly evolving theories of psychology and mysticism (spiritualism/mesmerism), to explore the meaning of "the hidden self" which unfolds the complex nature of Hopkin's position on race, "blood," and African-American racial subjectivity. Hopkins in the novel explores not the color line but the bloodline. Tracing the horrific legacy of incest in the history of slavery, she attempts to redefine the true racial identity of African-Americans in America and to reconstruct their past, both family and race history. At the very center of her major tropes in the novel-such as "of one blood," "the hidden self," and incest-exists female body. Black female body, though it represents the violent site of sexual body (rape and incest) in slavery, ultimately becomes a vehicle to convey and preserve the truth of racial memory/past/history for African-Americans. As a conveyor of the past, black women not just connect the past and the present but also reawaken AfricanAmericans with the legacy of the African 'pure' bloodline. Hopkins's vision here necessitates the reevaluation of black women's role in family and history, heralding the 20th-century black feminine writing. With the major tropes, Hopkins clearly suggests that the blood of (African-)Americans is unrecognizably intermixed. Although the novel ends with ambivalence and without resolution on what Africa signifies, those tropes certainly offer her a vehicle for criticizing as well as for challenging the racial reality of America.

• The Journal of Korean Academy of Prosthodontics
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.185-192
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• 2008

Purpose: This study was designed to investigate the fitness of adjustable dental impression trays on the Caucasian and African American. Material and methods: The size and shape of these trays were designed from the results of the dental arch size of Korean adults. Tray samples were made by CAD-CAM working. Sixty Caucasian (male:30, female:30) and sixty African American (male:30, female:30) were selected for taking irreversible hydrocolloid impression using these trays. The author measured the width and length of impression material on the several measuring points. Results: 1. Uniform impression material width was achieved by controling the width of the tray using stops and beveled guides. 2. In the maxillary tray on the Caucasian, the impression material thickness was measured to be rather great showing thickness of the midpalatal part 13.0 mm. 3. In the maxillary tray on the African American, the impression material thickness was measured to be rather great showing thickness of the midpalatal part 12.0 mm, posterior palatal part 11.0 mm and the labial frenum width was 11.0 mm. 4. In the maxillary tray on the African American, the impression material width of posterior border (0.8 mm) was measured to be small. 5. In the mandibular tray on the Caucasian, the impression material width was measured (2.7-6.7 mm) and posterior border width (2.1 mm) was measured small. The impression material length was measured (2.8-6.7 mm). 6. In the mandibular tray on the African American, the impression material width was measured to be rather great showing width of the labial frenum 9.2 mm and the width of posterior border was measured too small (0.3 mm). Conclusion: This adjustable dental tray shows good accuracy to Korean because it was designed by the analysis of the dental arch size of Korean adult model. With this result, it can be applied to Caucasian and African American, we can take more easy and accurate dental impressions.