Combating Anti-Black Racism

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The class will offer students an opportunity to learn about the histories and ideologies that underpin anti-black racism and the modes of resistance and theories of justice that have developed in response to and alongside these theories and histories. The African American experience spans four hundred years from the colonization of the US and the installation of trans-Atlantic slavery to the present day. Throughout the expansive history, African Americans have consistently created modes of self-fashioning even in the midst of institutionalized anti-black racism. African Americans developed rituals, traditions, music, art, dance, literature, and spiritual practices; kinship structures and communities; and political and social theories and practices that negotiate the contradiction at the core of US democracy. This course will both explore the history of anti-black racism and black innovation. Providing a historical overview from 1619 to the present, the course will cover the periods of enslavement, Reconstruction, the New Negro era, the Cold War, Civil Rights, Black Power, and contemporary period. In addition, the course will explore key topics including but not limited to: racial capitalism, health disparities, black internationalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and race and technology