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At the conclusion of this course, the student should be able to:
1. Discuss key figures, moments, and periods in African-American cultures and the global black diaspora.
2. Explain the development of African-American culture as the product of black labor and creativity despite white supremacy, racial violence, and structural inequities.
3. Analyze the influence of African-American culture in the United States and the world.
4. Evaluate the degree to which the African-American quest for equality and civil rights are intertwined with the struggle of other ethnic groups as well as those whose ties are not based on race such as the working poor to queer liberation activists to refugees.
5. Identify strategies and avenues for multiracial coalition building and solidarity.
Ethnic Studies Objectives:
1. Analyze and articulate concepts such as race and racism, racialization, ethnicity, equity, ethno-centrism, eurocentrism, white supremacy, self-determination, liberation, decolonization, sovereignty, imperialism, settler colonialism, and anti-racism as analyzed in African American Studies.
2. Apply theory and knowledge produced by African American communities to describe the critical events, histories, cultures, intellectual traditions, contributions, lived-experiences and social struggles of those groups with a particular emphasis on agency and group-affirmation.
3. Critically analyze the intersection of race and racism as they relate to class, gender, sexuality, religion, spirituality, national origin, immigration status, ability, tribal citizenship, sovereignty, language, and/or age in African American communities.
4. Critically review how struggle, resistance, racial and social justice, solidarity, and liberation, as experienced and enacted by African Americans are relevant to current and structural issues such as communal, national, international, and transnational politics as, for example, in immigration, reparations, settler-colonialism, multiculturalism, language policies.
5. Describe and actively engage with anti-racist and anti-colonial issues and the practices and movements in African American communities to build a just and equitable society.
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I. Diaspora: Roots and Routes
A. Community and survival in African-American cultures
B. Black Bodies and Black Lives
C. Afrofuturism
D. Black Atlanticism
II. The Black Atlantic
A. Nation and Community
B. The Great Atlantic Slave Trade and Western modernity
C. The Carceral State: The prison pipeline and mass incarceration
D. Police States, Surveillance and Brutality: From the War on Drugs to the War on Terror
E. The Global South and the "new" South
III. America
A. White Supremacy
B. Figures and symbols of white supremacy
C. Miscegenation, sexual danger and racial impurity
D. Du Bois' "color line" and "double consciousness"
E. Anti-Blackness, Colorism and Racism
F. Black Liberation
G. Black Nationalism in America
H. The Black Arts Movement
I. Black Organizing and Community Building: Black Panther community programs in the 1970s
J. The Long Civil Rights Movement and Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC)
K. Intersectionality
IV. Blood
A. Blood, Kin and Chosen Connections
B. Color-blind
C. What is "Black"?
D. Who is African-American?
E. Essentialism, Biology and Eugenics
F. Multiraciality and Afrocentrism
V. Technology
A. Genetic ancestry
B. Human exhibitions
C. Medical experiments
D. Cultural ancestry
E. The Racial Biases of Artificial Intelligence
F. Access to technological equipment from phones to high speed internet
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