For Thursday, 29 September

Prep

  • A Call for Unity’ (12 April 1963). The letter from eight moderate white Alabama clergymen that prompted King’s jailhouse retort a few days later.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963). keywords: massive resistance; nonviolent resistance; Satyagraha.  

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2020), Ch. 3 (‘Politics’): ‘The Civil Rights Movement’; ‘Backlash’

For Wednesday, 28 September

Prep

  • Review Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Manifest Destiny’; ‘Immigration from Asia and Europe’; Racial Discourses of Modernity’; ‘America’s Racial Profile Today’; ‘We, the Past’. keywords:colonialism; eugenics; manifest destiny (2016:70); modernity.

We barely touched on the chapter during our class discussion yesterday. So let’s make sure we dig into it this time. We’ll focus on the section entitled ‘Racial Discourses of Modernity’. 

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • A Call for Unity’ (12 April 1963). The letter from eight moderate white Alabama clergymen that prompted King’s jailhouse retort a few days later.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963). keywords: massive resistance; nonviolent resistance; Satyagraha.  

For Wednesday, 21 September

Prep

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Manifest Destiny’; ‘Immigration from Asia and Europe’; Racial Discourses of Modernity’; ‘America’s Racial Profile Today’; ‘We, the Past’. keywords:colonialism; eugenics; manifest destiny (2016:70); modernity.

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • A Call for Unity’ (12 April 1963). The letter from eight moderate white Alabama clergymen that prompted King’s jailhouse retort a few days later.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (1963). keywords: massive resistance; nonviolent resistance; Satyagraha.  

For Monday, 19 September

Prep

  • Michael A. Caulfield, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers (2017), Part I (‘Four Strategies and a Habit’); Part II (‘Look for Previous Work’), Sections 1 (‘How to Use Previous Work’), 2 (‘Fact-Checking Sites’), 3 (‘Wikipedia’); Part III, Section 1 (‘Going Upstream to Find the Source’); Part IV (‘Reading Laterally’), Sections 1 (‘What Reading Laterally Means’), 17 (‘Evaluating a Website or Publication’s Authority’)
  • William Jelani Cobb, ‘Is Willie Lynch’s Letter Real?’, Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University (May 2004)

Despite appearances, this is all pretty light reading: Cobb is replying to  a letter, and Caulfield’s chapters are typically only two or three pages in length. 

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Manifest Destiny’; ‘Immigration from Asia and Europe’; Racial Discourses of Modernity’; ‘America’s Racial Profile Today’; ‘We, the Past’. keywords:colonialism; eugenics; manifest destiny (2016:70); modernity.

For Wednesday, 14 September

Prep

  • Review Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2020), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Modernity Rising’; ‘Colonization of the Americas’; ‘The Invention of Whiteness and Blackness’; ‘Africans Enslaved’

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Manifest Destiny’; ‘Immigration from Asia and Europe’; Racial Discourses of Modernity’; ‘America’s Racial Profile Today’; ‘We, the Past’. keywords:colonialism; eugenics; manifest destiny (2016:70); modernity.

For Monday, 12 September

Prep

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2020), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Modernity Rising’; ‘Colonization of the Americas’; ‘The Invention of Whiteness and Blackness’; ‘Africans Enslaved’.

One of the central themes for this chapter is the way in which the racial categories we use today – ‘whites’, ‘blacks’, ‘Indians’, Asian-Americans – forced markedly disparate ethnic groups into the same cramped shoeboxes.

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Introductions, cont’d: New Peoples
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Manifest Destiny’; ‘Immigration from Asia and Europe’; Racial Discourses of Modernity’; ‘America’s Racial Profile Today’; ‘We, the Past’. keywords:colonialism; eugenics; manifest destiny (2016:70); modernity.

For Wednesday, 7 September

Prep

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2020), Ch. 1 (‘Race in the Twenty-First Century’): ‘A Cancer’; ‘American Racism in the Twenty-First Century’; ‘A Biological Reality?’; ‘Whiteness’; ‘Race Is a Social Reality’; ‘Ethnicity and Nationality’; Thinking Like a Sociologist’

In Class

  • Attendance
  • Q&A: TBA
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2020), Ch. 2 (‘The Invention of Race’): ‘Modernity Rising’; ‘Colonization of the Americas’; ‘The Invention of Whiteness and Blackness’; ‘Africans Enslaved’. One of the central themes for this chapter is the way in which the racial categories we use today – ‘whites’, ‘blacks’, ‘Indians’, Asian-Americans – forced markedly disparate ethnic groups into the same cramped shoeboxes.

For Wednesday, 11 May

Prep

Zoom Session

  • Attendance
  • Q&A
  • Review of the Midterm
    • Review of ASA Style
  • Review for the Final Exam
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • Desmond and Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 11 (‘Toward Racial Democracy’): ‘What Are the Goals?’; ‘How Do We Bring About Change?’; ‘We Who Believe in Freedom’. keywords: is/ought distinction.

For Wednesday, 4 May

Prep

  • Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer (2016), Ch. 8 (‘Aesthetics’): ‘The Racialization of Art Worlds’; ‘Cultural Appropriation’; ‘The Sociology of Art, the Art of Sociology’. keywords: antiracist appropriation; cultural appropriation (pp. 308-314); highbrow and lowbrow culture (pp. 305-308); racist appropriation; white gaze, the.
  • Video: ‘Inside Japan’s Chicano Subculture’ (20 February 2019). keywords: cultural appropriation; subculture.

Zoom Session

  • Attendance
  • Q&A
  • Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time

  • TBA