Four Centuries of Black-White Relations in the United States

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course surveys and dissects the four "peculiar institutions" that have worked in succession to define and confine African Americans in US society and history from the colonial era to the present: chattel slavery, the Jim Crow regime of caste terrorism in the agrarian South, the urban ghetto in the Northern industrial metropolis, and the organizational nexus formed by the joining of the hyperghetto and the prison after the wave of race riots of the 1960s. We dissect each institution in turn, probing its genesis, structure, functions and contradictions, and how it operates to promote a certain definition of "blackness" and attach consequences to that definition. We draw the lessons of this long sociological journey for the current momen