Coordinating Instructor: Loretta Ross
eMail: lross22@smith.edu
Collaborating Instructors: Laura Katz, Ginetta Candelario, Floyd Cheung, Jen Malkowski, Javier Puente, and Jina Kim
Guest Lecturers: Alice Nash and Rachel Rubinstein
Teaching Assistant: Samuel Opoku Abora
Location: Seelye 201
Time: Fridays from 2:45-4:00 p.m.
Students may earn one credit. Staff and faculty may audit.
This course offers an interdisciplinary, historical, critical examination of race in the United States. Although scientists now agree that race does not have a genetic basis, it has obviously played a central role in the formation of legal codes (from segregation to affirmative action), definitions of citizenship, economics (from slavery to discriminatory loan arrangements), culture (music, dance, literature, fashion), and identities. Where did the concept of race come from? How has it changed over time and across space? What pressures does it continue to exert on our lives? How does it intersect with other registers of identity like class, gender, sexuality, and disability? By bringing together faculty from a variety of programs and disciplines, and by looking at a range of cultural texts, visual images, and historical events where racial distinctions and identities have been deployed, constructed and contested, we hope to give students an understanding of how and why race matters.
