Professor Rhonda Gray
she/her/hers
rgray@rcc.mass.edu
Roxbury Community College
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This guide is designed to help you locate research materials for your final project. If you have any trouble finding or accessing resources, please contact librarian Eva Jeffers at ejeffers1@rcc.mass.edu.
The “Images of Black Americans” course attempts to demonstrate how America’s cultural, social, economic and political realities are inextricably woven into how Blackness and Whiteness are defined. As a result, representation of African Americans in the cultural marketplace matters as it is weighted by America’s history in slavery and ongoing valuing of white supremacy. Therefore, viewing images of African Americans elicits a politics of identity whereby the historical narratives framing the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality are alive even in the present moment. For example, as many students have pointed out, one cannot view images of Cardi B without considering how they rearticulate the Jezebel stereotype that justified the rape and sexual exploitation of Black female slaves by primarily white men fueling the slave labor economy through their offspring.
The final project allows students to demonstrate how one of the cultural artifacts explored during the course ushers in historical narratives rooted to the experience of slavery to either reinforce or challenge racial stereotypes. The final project will be delivered as a PowerPoint presentation. Students must choose one stereotype associated with one cultural artifact that your project will address (although a cultural artifact may embody and/or challenge multiple stereotypes, this project will only explore how it addresses one stereotype).
Rhonda Gray is a Professor of English at Roxbury Community College in Boston, Massachusetts. She teaches courses on rhetoric and composition, literature and cultural studies reflecting research interests in Black feminism, Womanism, American history and culture, and contemplative pedagogy to support a trauma-informed classroom. Within her role as the Honors Program Coordinator (2009-2016), she facilitated the college’s inaugural accreditation of its Honors Program. In 2016, she participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Institute titled “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath” where she examined the use of minstrel representations of African Americans in US print journalism. She is the co-author of “Using BEAM to Integrate Information Literacy and Writing: A Framework with Case Studies” (Purdue University Press, 2019). Also, Rhonda was one of a dozen facilitators of a national Book Club supporting the launch of Octavia Raheem’s Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change (Shambhala Publications, 2022) that blends her work as an English Professor and as a certified yoga instructor. Her current research interests lie at the intersection of Black feminist theories on anger, Womanist activism, and embodied healing of generational trauma. Rhonda is a member of the National Women’s Studies Association and the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.
