Fall 2017: Race, Inequality and American Democracy

Fall 2017: Race, Inequality and American Democracy

DPI 391: – Race, Inequality and American Democracy

Fall 2017

Professor Khalil G. Muhammad ; 617-495-1405

Class times: Monday/Wednesday Office: Taubman 466

11:45am-1:15pm Office Hours: Tuesday, 3-5pm.

Location: Weil BL-1

Faculty Assistant: Jessica McClanahan ()

Course Overview

The United States’s global dominance has long been the envy of the world. But the role of race to native born and newcomer alike has been treated often as aberrational, an unfortunate artifact of the nation’s past. This course examines the nature of race at the heart of the American project through the lens of wealth creation, labor markets, political culture, social institutions, immigration and civic life. Although race often attaches to people of color, racial identity and ideology have been inescapable constructs for all who reside in this country. Drawing African American history, critical race theory, and whiteness studies, students will gain historical knowledge required for leadership in a 21st century, multi-racial democracy. Students who plan to work in non-profits, government agencies and policy circles will also gain new analytical tools to help lead and transform institutions for a browner America and world.

Required Books Books available at Amazon.com.

Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education (The New Press, 2017).

Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2004).

All reading assignments should be completed during the week in which they appear on the course schedule below. Read assignments in the order in which they are listed.

Course Structure:

Attendance is mandatory. Unexcused absences will affect your grade. Most classes will consist of a classroom discussion based on the readings, your short writing responses, and background material from me.

It is important to me, as your professor, to encourage you to think independently and critically about the issues we will explore. My expectation is that all students will be prepared for every class, and will be active learners, and therefore willing and able to engage in discussions at all time. Preparation is key. Our environment will be one of cooperative learning, where no question is too stupid and no topic too controversial. All relevant issues should and hopefully will be explored through our historical journey, particularly any contemporary connections you find fascinating.

The bulk of your grade will be based on short writing assignments and class participation. There will be a final project.

Smart devices and laptops are prohibited for any use other than note-taking.

Academic Accountability: See HKS Academic Integrity Website

Neither plagiarism nor cheating will be tolerated under any circumstances, including ignorance. You will be subject to failing the course and disciplinary action by the university. If you are unsure of how to properly cite a source, please discuss the matter with me. Be especially cautious when using the internet for research. Treat all on-line material like published work citing the author of the material and its internet address. No previously written work may be submitted for this course.

You will be graded for the course based on the following criteria:

50% 10 Weekly Writing Responses 350-500 words (due Mondays at 10am).

10% Autobiographical Professional Statement (to be determined)

20% Class Participation (including class activities)

20% Final Policy Memo (December 11) – Details forthcoming

Readings and Assignment Schedule

Aug 30/6: American Values

Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Speech, Rochester, NY, July 5, 1852. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html

Sarah Parker Redmond, “The Negroes in the United States of America,” Speech, International Congress of Charities, Correction, and Philanthropy (1862) reprinted in Journal of Negro History 27:2 (April 1942).

http://www.jstor.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/stable/2714735?seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents

Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Compromise Speech,” September 18, 1895. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/

Carol Anderson, “The Policies of White Resentment,” New York Times, 8/5/2017.

Eric Foner, “Confederate Statutes and ‘Our’ History,” New York Times, 8/20/2017.

Sept. 11/13: Racial Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Beyond

Josephine J. Turpin Washington, “Anglo Saxon Supremacy,” New York Age 48 (August 23, 1890).

Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990), 95–118.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem,” in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard, 2010): 35-87.

Sept. 18/20: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy

of Political and Social Sciences 11 (1898).

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Writing Crime in Race: Racial Criminalization and the Dawn of Jim Crow,” in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard, 2010): 35-87.

William Darity, Jr., “Many Roads to Extinction: Early AEA Economists and the Black Disappearance Hypothesis,” History of Economics Review 21 (1994).

Mary Church Terrell, “Peonage in the United States: The Convict Lease System and the Chain Gangs,” The Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review 57 (July – December 1907).

Ida B. Wells- Barnett, “Our Country’s Lynching Record,” Survey (February 1, 1913): 573-574.

Damage Imagery in the Liberal Imagination

Oct. 2/4 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Incriminating Culture: Racial Criminalization in the Progressive Era” in The Condemnation of Blackness.

W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” The Independent 69 (August 10, 1910): 339–342, reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others, vol. 2, 1910–1934 (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1982).

Daryl Scott, “‘Matriarchies’ Without Damaged Personalities: The Black Family in Social Science Imagery, 1928-1945,” in Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Psyche, 1880-1996 (UNC, 1997).

Reconstructing Democracy

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Oct. 9/11: No Class on Monday (Holiday)

Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again (1935)

Nikhil Singh, “Introduction,” “Chapter 1: Rethinking Race and Nation,” “Chapter 2: Reconstructing Democracy,” in Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard, 2004).

Black Metropolis: Urban Policy and Peril

Oct. 16/18:

St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, “Advancing the Race,” in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945): 716-754.

St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, “Of Things to Come,” in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945): 760-767.

St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, “Appendix: Black Metropolis 1961,” “Postscript 1969,” in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1969): 807-836.”

Oct. 23/25: James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many

Thousands Gone,” in Notes of a Native Son (1955).

James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” in Nobody Knows My Name (1961).

James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” in The Fire Next Time (1963).

James Baldwin, “Introduction to Notes of a Native Son, 1984,” in Notes of a Native Son (1984).

Lerone Bennett, Jr., “The White Problem in America,” in The White Problem in America (Johnson Publishing, 1966).

Era Bell Thompson, “Some of My Best Friends are White,” in The White Problem in America (Johnson Publishing, 1966).

Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, “How New York City Became the Capital of the Jim Crow North,” Washington Post, August 23, 2017.

Social Movements and Backlash

Oct. 30/1: No Class on Monday

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Chapter 3: Racism and the White Backlash,” in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

Peniel E. Joseph, “Chapter 2: Malcolm X, Harlem and American Democracy,” in Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (Basic Books, 2009).

Barbara Ransby, “Chapter 8: Mentoring a New Generation of Activists: The Birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960-1961,” in Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (UNC, 2003).

Donna Murch, “Men With Guns,” “Survival Pending Revolution,” “A Chicken in Every Bag,” in Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA (UNC, 2010).

Economics

Nov. 6/8 TaNehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014).

Nell Painter, “Chapter 26: The Third Enlargement of American Whiteness,” in The History of White People (W.W. Norton, 2010)

Ira Katznelson, “Make Affirmative Action White Again,” New York Times Sunday Review, August 12, 2017.

Movement for Black Lives Policy Statement (excerpts)

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Education

Nov. 13/15: Kenneth Clarke, “Chapter 6: Ghetto Schools: Separate and Unequal,” Dark Ghetto:

Dilemmas of Social Power (Harper and Row Publishers, 1965): 111-153.

Daniel Maitlin, “Ghettos of the Mind: Kenneth B. Clark and the Psychology of the Urban Crisis,” in On the Corner: African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis (Harvard, 2013)

“White Teacher,” Urban Education: Issues and Solutions, host Dr. Jenice View, guest Amy A. Boccardi, Educator, D.C. Public Schools (George Mason University – TV, 2011).

Nikole Hannah Jones, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” New York Times Magazine, June 9, 2016.

Jason Riley, “Chapter 5: Educational Freedom,” and “Chapter 6: Affirmative Discrimination,” Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed (Encounter, 2014).

Noliwe Rooks, Chapters: 1- 4, Cutting School (New Press, 2017).

Politics

Nov. 20/22: No Class on Wednesday

Nikhil Singh, “Conclusion: Racial Justice Beyond Civil Rights,” Black is a Country.

Michael Dawson, “The Future of Black Politics,” Boston Review (January/February 2012).

http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR37.1/ndf_michael_dawson_black_politics.php

Ellis Cose, “Appendix: Top 10 Rules of Success,” in The End of Anger.

Frederick C. Harris, “Respectability as Public Philosophy,” in The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (Oxford University Press, 2012): 100-136.

Bill Cosby, “Pound Cake Speech,” NAACP Convention on 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, May 2004.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gh3_e3mDQ8#t=29.778813

Bill Clinton, “Speech in Memphis,” (transcript, November 13, 1993). http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/clinton/memphis.html

Criminal Justice

Nov. 27/29: Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Policing Racism in the Jim Crow North,” in The

Condemnation of Blackness.

Naomi Murakawa, “The First Civil Right: Protection from Lawless Racism,” in The First

Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford, 2014).

Elizabeth Hinton, “Crime Control as Urban Policy,” in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard, 2016).

James Forman, Jr., “What Would Martin Luther King, Jr. Say?: Stop and Search,” Locking Up Our Own.

Michelle Alexander, “Why Hillary Cinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote,” The Nation, February 10, 2016.

Dec. 4/6: Reading Period

Dec. 11: Final Assignment due

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