The History of Racism in the United States
Purpose: To demonstrate what you’ve learned from our first book-length reading and the extent to which it’s expanded your conceptual framework for understanding race.
Outcomes:
Analyze how individual and structural factors contribute to racial inequity in the United States
Evaluate your own position of marginalization or privilege within the complex social framework of the United States.
Construct a coherently organized thesis-driven essay with a clear sense of purpose.
Analyze the impact of race and socialization on expressions of social position in the United States.
Demonstrate perspective-taking and self-reflection appropriate to context.
Task: Choose one of the follow prompts and write a 4-5 page essay in response.
The text we’ve read provides great deal of historical perspective on racial politics in the United States. Describe the processes of articulation, containment, rearticulation and rollback and then examine one example of rearticulation and rollback from after the civil rights movement that previously influenced the way you understood the history of racism in the United States. Explain how it impacted your thinking and behavior.
A sizeable portion of the text is dedicated to the meaning of Race – the Ethnicity, Class, and Nation paradigms, the ocular dimension of race, and the way representation has successfully changed, at least in part, the meaning of different racial categories. Explain how the concepts of Racialization and Racial Formation refute the past paradigms, and what these theories help us understand, then examine at least one example of racialization in action and explain the political context.
What can we learn from the social movements of the past? In thinking about the mass protests of 2020, what strategies still seem to work, and which ones don’t? Explain what’s changed that needs to be accounted for: what terms and slogans have been rearticulated? What technologies (whether LRAD sound cannons or smart phones and the tension between our ability to post video on social media and the State’s ability to spy on whoever it choses).
(Bonus option): Put real critical pressure on the idea of race as master category. Must there be a master category? Does this add anything substantial to the conversation? Is it even fair to women? How does it square with the rest of their assessment of women’s rights in the United States?
Criteria for Success:
Demonstrates meta-cognitive critical thinking skills through deep reflection.
Clearly connects individual experiences to structural, cultural, and political contexts.
Completes a final product that is relatively free of typos and grammar errors.
Integrates at least two assigned readings with proper in-text MLA or APA citation conventions and includes a works cited page.
I have a copy of the book needed to write the essay on
